Social Housing Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness O'Neill of Bexley and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am very disappointed that a Bill that purports to protect the supply of new affordable homes fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of homes, particularly adapted homes. We are an ageing nation, we are getting fatter and nowadays many more premature babies survive into adulthood with life-limiting conditions. As a council leader, I spend about £1.5 million a year adapting homes for this ageing and impaired population. I remember that, when devising our local plan, there was a need for 3,500 adapted homes and supported living units; it was about 10% of the total housing need. It is an important issue, but not one you would gather from this Bill. At Second Reading, I explained how councils might install an adaptation so that a resident with an impairment could live comfortably. I explained that it might be a grab rail or a ramp. In one case, in my council, we spent £75,000 on a complete extension that was required to enable that family to live decently.

In preparation for this debate, and in pursuance of that simple truth, I sat down with Kevin Philcox, the officer responsible for housing standards at South Norfolk Council. He tells me that about half the improvements relate to wet rooms. That is important, because poor personal hygiene is a leading cause of infection and hospital admission among the elderly. Keeping yourself clean down there is not just about dignity; it keeps our hospital wards clean. Half the wet room adaptations are combined with wider doors so that someone in a wheelchair can shower hygienically. Together, cleaning and better access represent half the improvements for disabled facilities, grants and aids and adaptations.

Other examples might be a kitchen with low-level worktops—again, suitable for wheelchair use. Typically, it takes between six and nine months to deliver an adaptation: directionally two to three months for the assessment and the report by the occupational therapist, then a couple of months for the specification contracting and then the construction itself. In my experience, our district council delivered about 150 such projects a year at an average cost of about £10,000 each. I would say that one of my best interventions as a councillor was to ensure that a widow who lived in Mill Road in Seething was able to keep herself clean, by expediting the process of creating a wet room in her social home.

I feel that I have laboured the point, but I tell that story with pride because the simple truth is that we just do not have enough of these adapted homes, and that is why the state invests in them. MHCLG distributes yearly funding of over £720 million to local authorities, and some councils, such as my own, and other RSLs top up that allocation still further. I ensured that we reinvested all the profits from our trading activities to top up that money. So, in total, it adds up to about £1 billion a year. That is a large chunk of change, ensuring that people of all abilities can have a home that they can get into and on with, maintaining personal pride and hygiene.

Here is the problem that my amendment seeks to remedy. When, as so often happens, the tenant passes away and the home is re-advertised, no credit can be given for those expensive and hard-won adaptations when a new family moves in. A new tenant can ask for them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy. It is a waste of money, it reduces the pool of adapted homes, and it is bad for everyone, especially the taxpayer, who funds the work twice: once to put it in and once to take it out. I recall one example where we had built a brand new accessible home with wide doors and low kitchen units, perfect for a wheelchair-bound resident. As it happened, the first tenant was really tall, and by and by he tired of bending down to move the pots and pans around the hob, so the council was obliged by law to rip out that kitchen and put in a normal one—oh dear. That is absurd. It should have been let to a wheelchair user in the first place. So I ask the Minister directly: where are the provisions in the Bill to protect the supply of and investments in adapted homes for the ageing population? Why can we not offer rights of first refusal to those who need help to keep themselves clean down there?

I have heard it said, “Well, this is an allocations issue and we’re not going there in this limited Bill”. I profoundly disagree with that. That is why I asked for this debate to be de-grouped so it could have the importance it deserves without being clouded by other issues. My amendment is about protecting the adapted stock. It is about protecting a £1 billion investment— a significant sum that should not be lightly discarded— and it is about dignity for the most vulnerable in society. So I do not see this as an allocations issue, in the sense that preference should be given to an individual veteran or a certain type of local person. This is about protecting the pool of adapted homes, not least because we are all getting older. It is about ensuring that the wider cohort who carry an impairment have sufficient protected stock for them to have a go at, where they get preference, to make the best of their lives and to make their disabilities more bearable. If the state cannot recognise that, what is it for? Casually dismissing this as an allocations issue is wilful misdirection.

We must grab this sufficiency issue now. We are in Committee. I want to probe the matter more deeply between now and Report. Unless we make some progress, I anticipate that this is an issue on which I will seek to divide the House on Report, on the grounds that the Bill aims to protect the social stock for those in need, and my amendment seeks to achieve precisely that.

I have nearly said enough but I want to give Kevin Philcox, my expert on the ground, who has been around a long time in this space, the final word. He told me that, among the dedicated housing standards professionals, protecting the adapted stock in the way that I propose is both the Shangri-La and the holy grail of social housing policy in this country—it is number one on the wish list. That is quite a statement.

The opportunity to protect that £1 billion a year investment and look after some of the most vulnerable people in our society is before us here and now. If we fail to take it, there is no one else to do it in our place. As it is, there are no powers to protect those adaptations or to give those in need first refusal, but there should be. I beg to move.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Fuller for raising the important subject of adapted social housing. As we have argued throughout this day of Committee, we must improve how we manage the existing stock of social housing by making better use of what we have and what is being built. It strikes us as entirely sensible that, where possible and appropriate, homes that have been adapted are then given to applicants who would also benefit from those adaptations. That would save social housing providers money and ensure that we made the best use of resources and housing stock. I look forward to the Minister’s response and any details that she might be able to give us on how it might be implemented.