Private Rented Sector: Affordable Rents

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question and for all his expertise on this subject. A few weeks ago, I attended an investors’ summit in the City of London where there was great enthusiasm about investment in the housing market. We welcome those institutional investors and recognise the crucial role that the build-to-rent sector in particular is playing in building those 1.5 million homes. Last year, we announced a £700 million extension to the home building fund to support housebuilders and to catalyse that institutional investment. This should support the construction of 12,000 more homes, including build-to-rent. We also announced a £3 billion guarantee for SME and build-to-rent housebuilders through the reopening of guarantee schemes, which should deliver the construction of around 20,000 new homes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, could the Government also turbocharge getting rid of Section 21, which legalises insecurity in the lives of people paying rent?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I absolutely agree with the noble Lord about the insecurity that Section 21 presents. It is also a huge economic burden on local councils as they pick up the tab for emergency accommodation coming out of Section 21 evictions. That is why our Renters’ Rights Bill contains clear proposals to get rid of Section 21 once and for all.

Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government going to address the fact that we have never learned to turn the tap off? We have more and more people falling into homelessness from different sectors of society—people are having problems all over the place, as the noble Baroness said. My concern is this: we are always going on about the emergency, but where in the background are this Government or the next working on reducing homelessness by turning the tap off and getting rid of the inheritance of poverty, which is what produces most homelessness?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right in what he says. He will know that we have set a target of building 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament, which in the long term is the answer to tackling this issue. In the short term, we need to tackle the issue of many children spending years in temporary accommodation, when they need space to play and develop, at the same time increasing the funding to tackle the long-term causes of homelessness and poverty, which, as he rightly says, sit at the heart of this. The Renters’ Rights Bill, which is coming before this House very shortly, will tackle some of the causes of homelessness.

National Insurance: Employer Contributions

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I have seen the figures from the Nuffield Trust. The Government have provided additional funding for local government, as the noble Lord is aware. I have cited the figure before but will do so again: there is £3.7 billion of additional funding for local government. As I have said several times in this debate, we wanted to do more. Unfortunately, we have to be fiscally responsible, and this Government will continue to be so.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I must just point out a difference between business and charities, and the help for both. I am an employer of a little social enterprise group. We pay tax. We do not get the breaks or all sorts of other things that charities get. It is hitting us, so we will have to review whether we can employ so many people because of this new employment tax. Can the Minister encourage and include social enterprises—social businesses—in her mix to support them?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point about social enterprise. I am a great champion of social enterprises. They do magnificent work in our country. I set out the basis on which the Government are providing support to SMEs under this regime. Those organisations will benefit from the way we have completely exempted many businesses from having to pay NICs and many others will remain the same as they were before. I hope that will help social enterprises but I am happy to discuss that further with him if he wishes to.

Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord very much for that wonderful introduction. My family are Irish, and I think they are even more verbose than the Welsh, but we will not have an argument over that.

I should explain why I am not going to bamboozle your Lordships with loads of statistics and why I can probably make very little contribution to what we have been talking about. Ten years after I started the Big Issue, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do for the next 10 or 20 years. I said, “For the last 10 years I’ve been mending broken clocks, and for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to try to prevent the clocks breaking”.

In 1991 when we started the Big Issue, 501 homeless organisations were with us. They supplied every conceivable thing for a homeless person, from a condom—not a girlfriend, a condom—all the way through to a place where you could clean yourself, sleep and all that. But not one of those organisations ever asked the question that I wanted to ask: when is somebody going to turn the tap off?

Why do we often see homeless people as homeless? I have never met a homeless person whose problem was homelessness. I met someone who, like a social iceberg, had homelessness just above the water where you could see it, but underneath I could see all sorts of things—abuse, social isolation, mental health problems. I saw 90% of the people I have worked with, who I come from, inheriting poverty.

I was with Prince Charles once, as he then was, at a meeting in our building. He said that anybody could fall homeless. I thought to myself, “That’s not quite right”; I could not imagine him homeless. He was trying to create the idea, as so many people do, that anybody can fall homeless. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned a PhD student who could read Hungarian. Brilliant—I could bring you dozens of them, but I could bring you thousands upon thousands of people who have inherited poverty. Because those people inherited poverty, there is a predictability of failure that none of us has ever really addressed.

We tried to address it 75 years ago when we created the welfare state. We tried to address the fact that there were people who were unwell, ill educated, doing jobs that destroyed their bodies and caught in poverty. But did we ever really put the effort, the energy, the drive and the wonderfulness of our intellectual ability into saying, “Why is there no science for breaking people from poverty or a government department especially looking to prevent poverty”, so that we do not have a situation where the only inheritance people get is that they are poor? I believe we live in an age of dunces. Unfortunately, the dunces are the people making the decisions.

I am astonished that poverty costs us so much. I reckon that, of every £1 paid by the taxpayer, about 40p goes into poverty. We, in a sense, leave poverty. The Conservatives are great believers in leaving poverty to work itself out because there are so many examples of people two or three generations away from the coalface, or even one generation, so they think poverty should just be sorted out by leaving the system. Then Labour believed in inventing a methodology that created social housing but did not answer the problem. Only 2% of people whose children are brought up in social housing ever get out of poverty. Only 2% ever get to university or even finish their A-levels. In my opinion, we have these big contradictions. Until this House and that House embrace the idea of finding a way of turning the tap off, we will just have a lack of social housing as a forerunner for getting out of poverty.

Social Housing: Awaab’s Law

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

The consultation received over 1,000 responses. It is important that we consider these responses in full before confirming the requirements of Awaab’s law. We intend to publish the Government’s response to the consultation and lay the statutory instrument for Awaab’s law in Parliament this autumn. Alongside it, the Renters’ Rights Bill will ensure that we have similar legislation for the private rented sector. The noble Baroness is right that we want to get this done as fast as possible. No one should ever have to lose a child because of the condition of their home. No one should have to suffer appalling living conditions. Nor should anyone feel powerless in the face of landlords who will not listen to them or who make them feel like they are the problem when they ask for help.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Do the Government agree with me that one of the problems we have now is that many social housing associations are behaving like private landlords? Many of the problems that happen for tenants, including mould, are happening in the public housing sector. Maybe we need to think again about whether we need more council houses and fewer housing associations.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

On enforcement, seeking redress is important and tenants should challenge their landlords, whether it is a private landlord or the social housing sector. There are important ways to address this through the courts, but there is also the Housing Ombudsman. Tenants can challenge their landlord and if they do not get a satisfactory response, the Housing Ombudsman can address the issue, whether it is in the private or social sector. The noble Lord makes a valid point about the problems being widespread and not just in the private rented sector.

Social Housing: Right-to-buy Sales

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend’s comments. We are genuinely committed to supporting home ownership, especially for first-time buyers, no matter how they get on the housing ladder.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Surely the point is that a Labour Government created the right to buy, and all the work was done under a Labour Government, and then it was implemented by the Tories, but they cut it in half and did not allow the replacement of social housing, meaning that we have the present crisis that we have.

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I am afraid that is not my understanding of what has happened historically, and I understand that some Members of this House may have been involved in setting up the original scheme.

Local Authority Finances

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, in recent years we have tried to give more clarity around elements of the settlement on a multi-year basis. We will continue to do this for the next spending review and beyond.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, one of the big problems that local authorities have is dealing with more and more homeless people. Section 21 on no-fault evictions is still on the statute book and causing more problems for the local authorities that have to deal with a mass increase in homelessness.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that the Government are committed to abolishing Section 21 evictions. That is what the Renters (Reform) Bill, currently being considered by the House of Commons, will do. Additionally, we have put wider support in place to tackle housing pressures, through building more affordable homes and, for example, increasing the level of the local housing allowance.

Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Does my noble friend—

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government aware—

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, there is plenty of time. Can we have the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and then my noble friend Lord Naseby?

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government aware that for every person who falls homeless—they are not all out on the streets—the cost of running that homeless family or individual is two or three times higher than if you keep them in their homes? Has the Treasury done any serious work looking at how to keep the costs of homelessness down by keeping people in their homes?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. That is why we passed the Homelessness Reduction Act and why more than half the support we have put directly into tackling homelessness is around prevention. That is funding to local authorities to work with landlords to prevent evictions, for example, before people find themselves in the position of needing to seek out temporary accommodation.

Levelling Up: North-east England

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I believe that the north-east devolution deal will help deliver that overall approach but put its delivery in the hands of local leaders and an elected mayor. When it comes to competitive bids, we have heard feedback from many local areas and that is why the third round of the levelling up fund was not allocated using competitive bids. We have also set out principles, going forward, in our local government funding simplification plan. Finally, on which areas have benefited from funding from this Government, under the levelling up funds the north-east has received the highest allocation per capita—quite rightly, as it reflects the need in the north-east.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is the Minister aware that, in spite of all the Government’s levelling-up efforts, over Christmas there will be 140,000 children and 300,000 people in temporary accommodation? This has gone up by 14% in the last year, according to Shelter and the Big Issue. What can the Minister say about that?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am aware of the figures that the noble Lord cites, and I think it is a tragedy. The Government are committed to doing all we can to address it. We have seen a real increase in pressure on the private rented sector over the past year, which leads to increases in people in temporary accommodation. At the Autumn Statement, we announced further funding towards tackling homelessness to help address this. We also announced that the local housing allowance will be increased to the 30th percentile, which will help address those cost pressures in the private rented sector, so we are doing a lot to try to address this issue.

Homelessness: Vagrancy Act 1824

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

That is exactly what I have just said—the right time is now, and we are making our final consultations and will look for the right piece of legislation as soon as possible. My department will work very closely with the Home Office so that this new legislation ensures that vulnerable individuals are always directed to the most appropriate support. It is not just about getting rid of an old-fashioned law.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

While we are at it, can we do something about no-fault evictions at the same time? They are driving people into homelessness on the streets—including my brother.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Lord should know that we have the private renters’ Bill starting in the Commons shortly, which will include the repeal of Section 21.