Home Owners and Home Ownership

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, on securing this debate. She set out very eloquently the benefits of home ownership, and I do not need to dwell on them again. We know what they are, and I am sure most of us agree with them: the stability it gives and the stake in society and in your local area that it provides—we all saw the socially transformative effects of the council house sales programme in the 1980s.

We can all agree on that. The problem is: how do you deliver home ownership in modern conditions? We need to achieve it. We need an effectively functioning housing market that is capable of providing housing where people want to live, at affordable prices. At the moment we simply do not have that in this country, and we have not had it for quite a long time.

Much government policy over the last 20, 40 or even 70 years—it depends where you start—has been going in the opposite direction. Obviously, this all began with the Town and Country Planning Act and the green-belt policy that first came in in the 1950s and has expanded since then. But a lot of the real damage was done in the 1990s and afterwards, with the huge rise in stamp duty that has persisted, and the constant green and environmental restrictions on what can be built, how it can be built, where you can build, the style in which you can build, and so on and so forth. To mitigate all this, successive Governments have engaged in price manipulation, such as the so-called affordable housing scheme—subsidised housing, really. Of course, we have had the latest wave of restrictions on tall buildings, specifically in London, that has brought housebuilding almost to zero. We have had the war on renters across successive Governments that has also destroyed rental stock.

This has taken us to a position in which we have a planning process where there are simply too many blockers in the process to get the job done. We have the absurd situation that the green belt now is actually bigger than the developed area of the country. It is quite an unusual belt that is bigger than the area it is trying to constrain, and it is certainly constraining the growth of our cities and towns pretty effectively. Prices are of course super high as a result of all this.

It is worth pausing for a moment to contrast the situation in this country with that of other European countries, which are of course our nearest comparators. It is true that the UK is a fairly small and dense country, and England even more so. However, there are European comparators, and the story is not particularly flattering. Belgium is a country I know well. It still has a lot of natural beauty of all kinds and is only slightly less dense in population than England is. Of course, the Netherlands is significantly more dense.

Here in England, we have 430 dwellings for every 1,000 in the population, in the Netherlands there are 490 and in Belgium there are 500. Our dwellings are also the smallest in Europe. If we want to give English people the same housing opportunities as those in Belgium and the Netherlands—and that is a reasonable aim—we will have to build 2.8 million houses just to catch up with just the Dutch, 3.6 million to catch up with the Belgians, and 4.5 million if we aim for the European average. That is simply to catch up, not to deal with any of the social changes or trends that are currently driving the problem.

We have to face up to this reality. Much of the current debate on this question—not just today but generally—is about trying to avoid this reality and the belief that we can somehow have more houses without changing any of these rules: the magical Tardis-like powers of the brownfield in cities that can supposedly accommodate everything we need. We have a policy that appears designed to maintain the economic geography of the 1950s and 1960s and never allow villages to merge or towns to grow. We have the belief that people can be made to live where the houses are, rather than the other way around, and we have an endless circular debate about social, council and affordable housing—we have one of the biggest sectors in Europe, of course—all of which is avoiding the problem.

The Government deserve a bit of credit for the planning Act and for the latest plan, but the solution is not driving the current system to work harder, and still less is it, as some have suggested, to allocate housing to favoured categories of workers. It is not about telling people they need to rightsize and that they are somehow occupying the wrong kind of house. It is about freeing up the system and trying to generate a real housing market with incentives to build, invest and grow, but we are simply not achieving that.

I fear we are heading to a social and economic crisis if we do not look this hard in the face and realise we have to do some things that many of us do not particularly like. We have to give opportunities to our young people to settle and to have houses, as we did. We need to get serious about this.

Renters (Reform) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend the Minister for her comprehensive opening statement and for the time that she has already devoted to discussing the provisions of this Bill privately.

I think that I am the first speaker in this debate not to have to declare a relevant interest. I do not have any institutional housing interests, social, private or any other. I own one house and I live in it. If I do have an interest—and it is the reason that I speak today in this debate—it is the interest in living in a country that one day has a minimally functioning housing market. Unfortunately, we do not have that in this country. That should be the starting point for discussing the Bill.

We have an utterly dysfunctional housing market. We have far too little supply, as has already been noted. We last met the 300,000 building target in 1977 and, if we had been building at the same rate as the French over the past few years, we would have 4 million more houses than we do now. It is therefore not surprising that house prices are at nine times incomes—a historic high. Most policy has focused on Help to Buy schemes rather than expanding the supply.

Ideally, we would want a policy approach that involved building more houses of all kinds by liberalising planning, expanding supply in the rental market and, meanwhile, trying to make the market that we have work better and reducing the dysfunction. In fact, we are seeing that housebuilding is falling further. Last year, we built only 189,000 houses and, in the first quarter of this year, we are building at a rate of only about 100,000. There has been an attack on private landlords through the tax regime and the rental sector is shrinking. That, plus anticipation of the measures in this Bill, is taking private rental property off the market. It is therefore no surprise that, while sale prices for houses are flat, we are seeing rental prices in the private sector accelerate by 9%.

Now we have this Bill. I have philosophical concerns—that I think it is fundamentally unconservative, speaking as a Conservative politician—and I have practical concerns; namely, that it ties up and restricts the market still further and the practical effect will be to make things worse, not better. I regret that I must speak in these terms of a Bill that my own Government are bringing forward, but I think it is extremely problematic. If we want to help people—as has been said—into safe, secure, sound housing and reliable tenancies, we need to produce a better housing market and not distort it still further.

I have four specific concerns that I will briefly outline: first, the nature of the Government’s manifesto commitment and, secondly, its extent; thirdly, the restrictions that the Bill brings in on the use of property; and, fourthly, its developing complexity.

First, on the nature of the manifesto commitment that the Conservative Party and this Government made, I entirely accept that we committed to abolishing no-fault evictions—Section 21 evictions—but we also set in the manifesto a

“target of 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s”,

which has not been met, and promised to

“make the planning system simpler for the public and small builders”,

which also has not been met. We made an effort in the early years of this Government; it got blocked and, since then, we have given up the attempt.

These two things go together: one liberalises supply; the other constrains the market. I wish we had focused only on building houses and reforming the planning system, but at least together, there is some sort of balance. Now, we have dropped the commitment to build more houses and liberalise the system, but we are pushing though the provisions that tie up the market still further. This will only damage housing affordability further.

My second point concerns the extent of the manifesto commitment. As I said, we committed to abolish no-fault evictions. We did not commit to end fixed-term tenancies, and they are not the same thing. Section 21 is a way, among other things, of ensuring that landlords can reliably get possession, after the first 12 months in an AST, at two months’ notice. If we abolish Section 21, another way of providing some certainty for landlords that they could get their property back would be to leave open the option of agreeing another fixed-term tenancy, for another year or whatever. The Bill removes that option. It scraps fixed-term tenancies entirely and makes every tenancy rolling, bringing in the possibility that landlords will have to go to court much more often to recover their property. I repeat: one commitment is in the manifesto and another is not. That is why my honourable friend Anthony Mangnall MP tabled Amendment 10 in the Commons providing for the maintenance of fixed-term tenancies, and I am ready to table it again to ensure that we can have some debate on the subject and so that the Government can explain why they have expanded their commitment to take in fixed-term tenancies.

My third concern is philosophical. The Bill takes another step away from normally understood property rights. Even if both parties want to, they cannot agree a fixed-term tenancy; it is illegal. A landlord may no longer choose who they want to rent to. Landlords must accept pets. They cannot simply recover their own property but must persuade the courts—the state—that they have a justifiable reason for doing so. We are already too far down the road, as a Government and as a country, of accepting that people enjoy property rights only at state whim, and only in line with the purposes of the state. I am afraid that the Bill takes us a step further down that road.

My final concern is practical. Looking at the way the Bill has evolved in the Commons, I cannot avoid the impression that, in their heart, the Government know it is a bad Bill and are trying to mitigate it, under pressure. They have realised, for example, that the redress schemes, the decent homes standard and the PRS database, all of which may be good things in themselves, will reduce flexibility and push up costs. The Government have realised the risk that restrictions on long-term lets might bring in a shift to short-term ones, so they have brought in some rules to cover that situation too—though I note that these too will now require further mitigations to deal with special circumstances.

Of course, as has been noted, the Government have had to accept that the court system is not ready to deal with the abolition of Section 21 in full, and they have had to delay its introduction, so we are not even getting credit from our political opponents for the one thing that was supposed to be the purpose of the Bill in the first place. Everything that has happened in the Commons has brought in complexity, cost and delay to the system, and these are the very things that will drive more landlords out of the market, push up prices further and make the market even more dysfunctional than it is now.

To conclude, and I am sorry to conclude in this way —noble Lords will know that it is with great reluctance that I criticise the policy of my own Government—it is a poor Bill and I do not think it is getting any better as it proceeds through the Commons and through this House. It is inevitably going to make the private rented sector smaller and more expensive. It is pursued from the best of motives, but its consequences will be that housing supply shrinks and the cost of housing goes up. It will generate more social problems rather than mitigate them. I am sorry that the Government are pursuing it, but I hope that it will still be possible in Committee to improve on some of the fundamental points that I have mentioned, and in particular to retain fixed-term tenancies as an option. I hope some noble Lords will join me in that effort.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

As I said, there will be an annual report, which will monitor in detail the impact of the Bill, and going forward we will have the data in granular detail as a result of the private rented property portal, once it is established.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I apologise. I too do not want to prolong this, but I and a number of noble Lords mentioned concern about the abolition of fixed-term tenancies. The Minister mentioned that briefly at the start of her summing up. Will she undertake to set out in a little more detail—not now, but on a future occasion or in writing—the Government’s reasoning as to why it is necessary to abolish fixed-term tenancies, as well as Section 21, as an option?

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I undertake to do that. I invite all Peers who would like to do so to come to discuss these things in detail over the course of the passage of the Bill. I will put further dates forward ahead of Committee, so please make use of them. I am available to have those discussions throughout.

I believe the Renters (Reform) Bill honours the Government’s 2019 manifesto commitment to create a private rented sector that works for everyone and to level up housing policy in this country. The reforms in the Bill will give tenants greater security in their homes for generations to come. The Bill will also support landlords, ensuring that they have the confidence to invest—to invest more, we hope—in the private rented sector in England. I look forward to working with noble Lords during the passage of this important Bill.