Election Law

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Brown of Silvertown

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I do understand the impatience that the noble Lord pushes. We did a recent review of electoral registration conduct to improve resilience, reduce risk and support administrators and voters alike. We are now taking the key priorities from that review and enacting them to make sure that our election system is as good as it can be without creating a long delay before we do anything.

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

My Lords, over 6 million eligible UK citizens are not signed up to vote. What steps are the Government taking towards automatic voter registration?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her question. As we set out in July’s strategy, the Government have committed to introducing more automated approaches to electoral registration. We are actively exploring some very innovative approaches to registration, including leveraging some of the public sector data and digital services to boost registration rates and improve the accuracy of electoral registers. Any new registration processes we bring in will be tested properly to make sure that they work well before we roll them out.

Social Housing

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Brown of Silvertown

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am pleased to be able to tell the noble Lord that we have a £600 million package for construction skills. We set up the Construction Skills Mission Board under the very able chairmanship of Mark Reynolds from Mace; I worked with Mark and Mace on the regeneration of Stevenage, so I am sure that he will do a fantastic job on that. That will create an extra 60,000 construction worker posts by 2029. There will be 10 new technical excellence colleges. Skills bootcamps have been extended with £100 million of funding, including short-term training for new entrants and upskilling for returners. The Construction Industry Training Board has really stepped up here with funding from industry to fund over 40,000 industry placements and to double the size of the new entrant support scheme to support SMEs to recruit, engage and retain apprentices.

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

My Lords, homelessness and housing costs are driving factors in both child poverty and ever-escalating costs of homelessness. My council alone is spending £60 million a year—a figure that is rising—to tackle homelessness. Newham and other councils have done their absolute best to provide affordable homes and thereby cut costs to themselves and their residents, but they need government help. Can my noble friend say what assessment she has made of the role of local government in the delivery of affordable and social homes?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. Of course I would say this, but local government is absolutely critical to delivering the new, generational change in the number of social homes being delivered. Our changes to reverse the set of supply-negative changes made by the previous Government introduce a wider set of growth-focused interventions that will help with this. The Secretary of State and I want this to be a plan-led system. When the new National Planning Policy Framework was published in December last year, I was delighted to see that we have, for the first time, encouraged local authorities to assess their social housing need separately from affordable housing, which I am sure will help. Later this year, we will introduce reforms to accelerate local plan preparation. As my noble friend said, this is not just a great cost to the people who are homeless and in temporary emergency accommodation but an enormous cost to the public purse and for our councils, so we need to solve the problem quickly.