King’s Speech

Baroness Swinburne Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, on their roles. Although I speak late in the day, it is no less heartfelt for that. Indeed, I congratulate all noble Lords taking on new ministerial roles.

Cross-departmental working will be key to unlocking economic growth. As I and all the other former Ministers know, in government there are many conflicting agendas, and who wins and how issues get resolved inter- departmentally matters. The question will be: will economic growth be the ultimate litmus test? I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, suggest that the three-way tensions in energy for security, affordability and sustainability would be diminished by the green agenda, but I suggest that they have not gone away, and that those tensions in government will exist no matter what.

I could cite lots of examples, but I will mention just a few. Large-scale solar farms and energy security are up against food security in many instances. Housing need is up against nutrient neutrality. One tension that I have had to speak to in this House before is environmental and meeting-net-zero needs versus steel- workers’ employment in Port Talbot. Some 20% of Wales’s carbon emissions are produced by the steelworks in Port Talbot. Swapping to new arc steel production will be better for the climate and for health in Wales and it will support measures for steelworkers to retrain and benefit from what could be the largest offshore wind energy investment—in Swansea Bay.

These current versus future trade-offs will be really important. They will not be easy to resolve, but collaborative working, not siloed departmental decisions, will be needed to make sure these things can happen. As the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Parminter, said, there will be trade-offs, but the public need to understand the rationale behind the decisions so that they can support them. The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, suggested that a balance will need to be found. To sound a note of caution, perhaps, to the new Ministers: beware of judicial review.

The UK has halved emissions, while growing the economy by 80%. We were the first economy to legislate to be net zero by 2050, and achieved a record in recent years for energy generation in onshore and offshore wind. Offshore wind increased by 27% in 2022 alone and has reduced our reliance on coal as a fuel source by 86% since 2010. It is easy to forget what we have already achieved. Indeed, the new government green bond for UK savers has been launched, and we have secured over £300 billion of investment in low-carbon energy projects.

While trying to achieve some of these ambitions in climate, net zero and biodiversity, the previous Government tried to balance protecting family finances. Building on past achievements as a leading nation in carbon reduction, we support the Government in their aspirations on energy and many other matters. In line with the excellent contributions on sustainable energy by the noble Lords, Lord Roborough and Lord Lilley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and many others, the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo, gave a stark warning, which I found really interesting, about the future demand that AI expansion might put on the system and the energy instability and price volatility that might be ahead.

How will the Government ensure that GB Energy facilitates private capital investment in green infrastructure, rather than competing with private capital that is currently available for sustainable energy projects? Can the Minister reassure the House that this is not an unnecessary tier of bureaucracy or nationalisation but rather a way to incentivise private risk capital? Given the future energy demand shocks mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo, it is reassuring to hear the commitment not just to existing nuclear facilities but to support Sizewell C. As my noble friend Lady Bloomfield suggested, nuclear needs to be at the centre of a green, sustainable energy strategy.

I turn to housing and particularly the private rented sector. As many noble Lords know, I have spent many weeks and months looking at this topic. As shown by the progress of the previous Bill through both Houses before the Dissolution of Parliament, we on these Benches support a fairer private rented sector that, over time, will remove no-fault evictions and replace them with specific grounds for possession by a landlord. Giving tenants more security of tenure and empowering them to challenge poor conditions is appropriate. However, the vast majority of the 4.6 million households living in the private rented sector have good landlords, so, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, said, it will be important to deliver reform in a way that both protects tenants’ security and retains landlords’ confidence in the new system.

We support a private rented sector ombudsman, as has been suggested in the Chamber, and we support the creation of a private rented property portal, the application of the decent homes standard, and making it illegal for landlords and agents to have blanket bans that discriminate, as many have raised today. However, we also need a thriving private rented sector, where private landlords provide renters with high-quality housing and increased security in return for the ability to charge a fair market rent and reclaim their properties when circumstances need them to.

Now that I am no longer a Minister, I can express sympathy with the position of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, on fixed-term contracts being allowed when the tenant requests one. Sadly, I did not convince my department of the merits of this—as a tenant myself, I would certainly appreciate it—so I leave it to others to do so as we move forward.

We need to balance the needs of those living in private rented properties with a proportionate regime that does not deter our individual landlords from making their properties available. Some 43% of landlords own single rented properties, and a further 39% own only between two and four. Most of these are not bad landlords, and they care about their tenants—many are in this Chamber, as I heard during the lobbying over the last few weeks. But language matters. Many of these landlords are leaving the sector. We have no concrete data—only estimates from the annual English Housing Survey—but, anecdotally, they seem to be selling up. We therefore need to understand what we can do to make sure that the balance is right and what other things might come into the mix.

As mentioned by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, other countries’ rental stock is usually held by the financial sector, particularly pension funds, which take a long-term view of their investments and provide professional management. They do not need things such as Section 21 notices. Successive Governments have recognised this, and the profile has shifted over the last 20 years, with an increased participation of institutional investment, supported by a number of interventions, to support the Build to Rent sector. According to Savills, there are now over 100,000 Build to Rent homes, which is forecasted to rise to over 360,000 by 2033. Build to Rent boosts housing supply more quickly, diversifying the private rented sector and increasing quality and choice for renters, especially in areas of high demand in our big cities and towns across England. Will the Minister confirm, either today or as soon as she is able, whether the new Government will continue to support this investment in the sector?

Previous amendments were made to provide an independent assessment of the effectiveness of the new tenancy system and to deliver an annual parliamentary update on the state of the private rented sector, including the stock of properties. Will the Government commit to doing this? Of course, none of these measures improving tenants’ lot will actually work unless there is enforcement. Sadly, this is not currently happening in the majority of local authorities throughout the country. We need to find a way of prioritising this, as many have failed to use even their existing powers to deter bad landlords.

On new homes, I am proud that the previous Government met their target this month for building 1 million new homes in the last Parliament. Given the economic difficulties, it was not an easy ask. Although we did not manage our target of 300,000 new builds per year, we delivered more than 2.5 million additional homes since 2010—696,000 of them were affordable homes.

Building new homes at a faster rate has been a shared aspiration, but in many areas it is about where people need and want them. Housebuilding is nearly impossible due to outdated and inappropriate rules on nutrient neutrality derived originally from the EU. We know from listening to many noble friends and other noble Lords in this Chamber today that some 100,000 new homes need to be unlocked when we find a solution for that problem. Together with other planning difficulties, such as connectivity of new sustainable developments to the grid, some of the objections and conditions applied by statutory consultee bodies make building new homes at scale challenging and less economically viable. I look forward to seeing the detailed plans surrounding many of these challenges and wish the Government well in finding new methods of working across government to deliver a balanced and fairer system that genuinely accelerates housebuilding of a high calibre, providing families with quality homes in places where they want to live and work, including especially for our young people.

Cross-departmental working will also be needed to deliver GB Energy and better environmental outcomes—not just net zero—to provide food security as well as energy security while delivering economic growth. As we say in Welsh, pob lwc.