Social Housing Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Teather

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am disappointed that a Bill that purports to protect the supply of new homes fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of adapted homes. We are an ageing nation and nowadays, many more premature babies survive into adulthood with life-limiting conditions. In Committee, I explained how councils might install housing adaptations so that a resident with an impairment can live more comfortably. I explained that it might be as simple as a grab rail or ramp. Half of such adaptations include a wet room, many with wider doors to accommodate wheelchairs.

In preparation for Report, I sat down with Kevin Philcox, the officer responsible for housing standards at South Norfolk Council. He told me that wet rooms are important because poor personal hygiene is a leading cause of infection and hospital admission among the elderly. Keeping yourself clean down there is not just about dignity; it helps keep our hospital wards clear. It typically takes between six and nine months to deliver an adaptation. I will not go into the reasons why, but in my council, we deliver about 150 such projects per year at an average of about £10,000 each.

I feel I have laboured the point, but the simple truth is that we do not have a large enough pool of adapted and improved homes to meet the demand. That is why the state invests in them. The local government department distributes yearly funding of over £720 million to local authorities for the purpose of improving homes and making them suitable for people with limitations. Some councils, such as my own, and other RSLs, top that money up. I suppose that making these improvements adds up to about £1 billion a year.

My amendment is about protecting the adapted stock—protecting that £1 billion per year investment—and about dignity for the most vulnerable in society. I have heard it said that this is an allocations issue and that this Bill is not going there, but I do not see it as an allocations issue in the sense that we are going to give preference to a particular veteran or a certain local person. This is about protecting the generality of the pool of adapted homes as society gets older, fatter and lives longer with debilitating impairments, so that there is a stock of homes where people can make the best of their lives and make their disabilities more bearable. If the state cannot recognise that simple truth, what is it for? Casually dismissing it as an allocations issue is wilful misdirection. We must grab this sufficiency issue now.

I have softened the text of my amendment so that the Minister can define the scope of what counts as a relevant adaptation. I have not been overly prescriptive, as I was in Committee. But it is really important that we protect that £1 billion a year investment, so that people of all abilities can have a home that they can get into and get on with.

Here is the problem my amendment seeks to remedy. When, as so often happens, a tenant passes away or moves on and the home is readvertised, with the exception of certain specialised sheltered accommodation, no credit can be given for those expensive and hard-won adaptations when a new family moves in. Tenants can ask them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy; it is a waste of money. It reduces the pool of adapted homes and is bad for everybody, especially the taxpayer, who funds the work twice—once to put it in, and again to take it out.

I will repeat the story I told in Committee of the brand new accessible home built with wide doors and low kitchen units, perfect for the wheelchair-bound resident. The first resident turned out to be exceptionally tall and, by and by, he tired of bending down to move the saucepans around the low-level hob. So, the council was obliged to replace the kitchen with a normal one. That is crazy—it should have been reserved for a wheelchair-bound resident in the first place.

The Bill purports to protect the supply of social homes. My council expert, Kevin Philcox—that man again —told me that, among housing standards professionals, protecting the adapted stock in the way I propose is both the Shangri-La and the holy grail of social housing policy in this country. That is quite a statement.

We have a new Prime Minister. He wants to make social housing a talismanic issue; this is du jour. I am suggesting something that would not cost anything, yet it would make huge strides in helping some of the most vulnerable people. It is here and now. I will not press this to a Division this evening, but I hope the Minister will take this to the department, and in turn to No. 10, which wants low-cost quick wins and can have them at Third Reading. I am serving this one up out of the goodness of my heart as a house-warming present for the new Prime Minister and the Secretary of State on their first day in charge. I beg to move.

[Baroness Teather (LD)]

My Lords, my Amendment 80 is a retabling of an amendment I tabled in Committee. I will say a few words at the end in support of the amendment to which the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, has just spoken.

My Amendment 80 would require the Secretary of State to review and report to Parliament on the extent to which former members of the Armed Forces are able to access social housing. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss this issue and for making clear her commitment to achieving progress on this. I also thank her hard-working officials for sending me a very helpful note about the data that is collected, which I note was sent extremely late in the evening, so I am sure they were working hard in advance of the Bill returning to the Lords today.

The Minister responded to my amendment in Committee and in more detail when we had the chance to meet. She explained that she sees the way of making progress on this as being incorporating it partly within the wider review of social housing allocation. I broadly support that proposal, which I think is a sensible way forward, but I have some questions that I would be grateful if she would respond to. The information that her officials sent me was about data. I was really asking for a lot more information so that we are able to scrutinise how the Government are getting on. The Government say they are making progress on this issue. We need to be able to see the impact of that. Are more of the Armed Forces community able to access social housing or is it having no impact whatever?

The data that was sent to me on local authority housing statistics reported that 2,649 households on housing registers are members of the Armed Forces community and have been given additional preference under local authorities’ allocation schemes and that this equated to around 0.2% of the 1.34 million households on housing registers in England. Do we really think that is picking up everybody who ought to be benefiting from being given an additional preference? How do the Government intend to ensure that all those in need report their need? How are they encouraged to report their need? Is the review being conducted going to meet the gap between the figure that we currently have and the almost certainly many others who are not benefiting from the measures that the Government have already brought forward? How are we going to monitor the progress that is made? How do we know that what gets delivered is going to be successful? How we measure success is an important question here.

My other point is about injured veterans who have a disability and require specialist or adapted accommodation, which relates to the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, just moved. We spoke about this in private, so the Minister is aware that this is an issue very dear to my heart as my husband is a wheelchair user and other members of my family who have complex disabilities have struggled to access housing. One of them remained in hospital for a very long time waiting for accommodation that would meet his needs. This is a question about not just the waste of taxpayers’ money of taking out adaptions that are done but the extreme waste of taxpayers’ money of keeping people in hospital waiting for an appropriate property that would meet their needs.

I know the Minister has said—and I accept this—that not every disability is the same, and people will often require something that is personally adapted to meet their needs. However, there are certain aspects of adaptation that are likely to meet many people’s needs, including wider doorways and wet rooms, so stripping everything out does not make any sense whatever. I really hope the Minister will respond to that. It dovetails neatly with my point about making sure we are meeting the needs of veterans as well as others.

I do not intend to push my amendment to a vote, but I would be pleased to hear the Minister explain how the Government are going to respond to the point about the gap between what we currently know about and the people who are facing the changes that the Government have made, and how we are going to reach them and make progress on those aspects.