Representation of the People Bill

Baroness Paul of Shepherd's Bush Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush (Lab)]

My Lords, like others in this Chamber, I have had the honour of acting as an agent in both local and parliamentary elections. Anyone who has had the opportunity to carry out this task will know that it leaves you with a lifelong and slightly nervous interest in how to run elections.

I will do something unfashionable and speak in favour of our system, not because I am some kind of parliamentary Pollyanna, but because talking it down plays into the hands of those who seek to undermine political trust in our country—those who say that the system is corrupt, that we are all the same, that voting does not change anything and that the system is rigged for one particular outcome or another. This is the kind of talk that is a prerequisite for breeding unrest and for undermining our way of life. It is dangerous, it is not true and we should make it very difficult for others to say so.

I seek to draw attention, indeed praise, how almost every Thursday, somewhere across the United Kingdom, small but significant elections take place. They are professionally administered, supported by dedicated officials and fuelled by party activists who care deeply about the places they live in and the direction of travel for our country. It is a system that works quietly, reliably and with an ease that is too easy to overlook precisely because it functions so well. We enjoy a level of public trust that we should seek to build upon, not diminish, in our conversations and our actions.

Of course, change is important, and we need to keep abreast of change and, in particular, those who seek to undermine us. We must also defend what is good about our system, so I approach the Bill with open questions: do the measures before us strengthen and build on trust, and are they fit for the challenges of our modern age? It is a large Bill, so I will focus on the measures that are intended to increase participation and bring people into democratic processes, because this is the key to democratic confidence.

I note the commitment to the vote at 16 and that this has been accompanied by an amplified emphasis on citizenship and democratic education. Intergenerational fairness is an issue for our times, so this is important.

I welcome the introduction of automated registration updates. This is an important and sensible reform. Public expectations have changed, and people rightly expect government bodies to make better use of information that they share with us, rather than repeatedly requiring the same information to be provided over and over again. This is particularly important for those who experience the greatest churn in their personal circumstances. Anything that helps people connected to the democratic process should be welcomed, but let us make it clear that making it on to an electoral register does not mean that all other rules and eligibility criteria have been ignored; it is that we have worked smartly to improve participation.

The same principle can be applied to the expansion of acceptable forms of voter ID, including the use of bank cards. The purpose of this change is straightforward. The current list of accepted identification excludes some voters who do not hold passports or a driving licence. We know that those affected are disproportionately younger, disabled and those whose circumstances are less secure. From my experience, and to my surprise, on the doorstep I have come across many older voters who do not have access to these forms of ID and who are rightly distressed that they have been excluded from elections. When you think about where they are in their time of life, this makes sense. I therefore support the decision to add bank cards to the list of acceptable voter ID, as a way of seriously widening participation. With appropriate safeguards and clear guidance for polling staff, this is a practical and proportionate way of reducing barriers to voting.

The introduction of voter identification requirements by the previous Government was, in my view, a heavy-handed response to a problem that was never shown to be significant or widespread. Where that does exist, it is illegal, and there are measures in place to deal with it. This very idea was borrowed from America, and the Americanisation of our politics is something that we must resist, particularly in the way our elections are governed. Electoral integrity matters enormously, but we must be careful that measures introduced in its name do not have the unintended consequence of excluding legitimate voters from the democratic process.

We should also be very clear about where some of the more serious challenges to our democracy now lie. They come not from ordinary voters turning up at polling stations to exercise their democratic rights but from deliberate foreign interference, disinformation, deepfakes, inappropriate candidate selection, lack of compliance or intentional disregard by some of electoral law and practice and, of course, the very real potential for the exercise of undue influence through large or foreign-linked political donations.

This is the challenge of the Bill: to take on the vested and foreign interests that seek to undermine our democracy and the voices that want to amplify that, while increasing the participation of our everyday citizens who have the right to take part. Together, we have the capacity to make the changes that are required, as the Bill moves through the House, to balance those two requirements.

Home Owners and Home Ownership

Baroness Paul of Shepherd's Bush Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, for having brought before the House. Home ownership matters, and the decline in the number of people who are able to buy a home should be of concern to all of us. On that point, I suspect that there is more agreement than disagreement.

I begin with a personal matter and a personal perspective. I grew up in a high-rise council flat, my grandparents lived in a council house, my uncles and aunts lived in council houses, and, in the community where I grew up, that was entirely normal. Owning your own home felt like an unattainable dream. Then, in the early 1990s, after a lifetime of hard work—and I really do mean hard work, with multiple jobs and lots of saving—my mum was able to buy our family home through the right to buy scheme. Whatever view noble Lords take of this policy, and I am sure there are differing views across the House, it was transformative for working people.

The shame, of course, was that some of the receipts were not able to be reinvested into other homes. I just want to put on record that it did not turn all of us into Tory voters, as was an ambition of the programme. But it was transformative: it gave us our own front door, security and the feeling that we were finally set up for life. It also—I do not think we understood this at the time—turned out to be a defining moment for the generations that followed.

It turns out that home ownership, as has already been discussed, is not simply about having a property; it is a way of passing security and opportunity from one generation to the next. It also showed that it was possible to work hard and, because of your own efforts and a helping hand from the state, change the trajectory of your life. That is why some recent research from Cambridge University was so sobering and spoke so loudly to me. It found—this is hardening and lengthening and has taken place over the last decades—that housing wealth and home ownership are increasingly linked to parental home ownership and parental education, even after taking into account an individual’s own work and achievements. However hard you work, or save, or educate yourself, the thing that is most likely to determine whether you will go on to own your own home is whether your mum or dad did. This cannot be right. This is not about the bank of mum and dad; it is evidence that the housing ladder is increasingly becoming an inherited ladder.

We know the importance of firsts in working-class families: the first to travel abroad, to go to university, to own your own home. These milestones change horizons and expectations for those who follow. The danger is that, if fewer people become first-generation home owners, these advantages are increasingly concentrated within the same families over time, and that should trouble us. Home ownership should not be hereditary. As noble Lords know, on this side of this House we are not general enthusiasts for hereditary principles.

I am therefore delighted that Labour, after many years of policy neglect, has decided that it needs to tackle the issue of supply and build more homes. That is why Labour’s ambitious housing programme matters so much. Delivering 1.5 million homes is significant, but it is a difficult target, which can be achieved only through a pragmatic, partnership-based approach to removing barriers. The Government have already shown a willingness to confront some of the difficult decisions and vested interests that previous Administrations have too often avoided, such as the grey-belt reforms, revised planning guidance, and measures to bring forward land around transport hubs for new developments that will help accelerate delivery. We know that progress will be hard and incremental and will probably involve setbacks, but I am proud of our ambition, purpose and desire to do this, because it is the most difficult thing.

Alongside supply, however, there are other practical routes into ownership that matter too. Housing associations, at their best, are not simply landlords. Through shared ownership, which has already been mentioned, and other affordable ownership projects, they help thousands of families take their first steps onto the housing ladder. Organisations such as Clarion demonstrate the important role housing associations can play in supporting aspiration and widening access to ownership. They can be transformative, but they need a review to make sure that they are opening access in the way that was intended, and that these are schemes to be proud of, not a burden to those who take them up. Housing associations have highlighted many challenges with the schemes, including thresholds to participation that have not kept pace with the challenges of rents and wages, and are keeping out the people who they were designed to help.

In addition, pressure needs to be applied and incentives developed to encourage innovation among mortgage lenders, helping them to develop new products and new ways of assessing risks that reflect the realities of how we live. I want to call out some of the great new products and some of the companies that are doing just that, such as Nationwide’s “helping hand” mortgage and Skipton Building Society’s “track record” mortgage. That means that if you have a track record of paying your rent on time, you are likely to pay your mortgage as well, and on the basis of that, it will lend you money. This is great, and is rooted in common sense. These are practical solutions that help creditworthy households overcome barriers to ownership, and they should be applauded.

The Opposition have brought this debate because they believe home ownership matters, and I agree with them. We should also agree that hard work should be the gateway to improvement, and that is not always the case right now. These things need to change, but that will not happen simply because we talk about it. It means planning reform. It means supporting development in places where too often it has been resisted. It means saying yes as well as no. It means welcoming developments and the people who live in them.

Although I welcome this debate, I ask the noble Lord opposite whether they will go beyond diagnosis and commentary, and help to support the remedies as well. The test is not whether we can agree that home ownership matters, but whether we will make the difficult decisions to make it happen. That is the challenge that this House faces, and I hope that we will find common cause in it.