Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I will be following along with her arguments but will speak to my Amendment 94. I start by thanking the Minister for the helpful meeting I had yesterday with her officials.

Amendment 94 does not require local authorities to house ex-prisoners but aims to improve their rehabilitation by prisons and local authorities working better together to prevent post-release homelessness. This is the point of the amendment. About 10 years ago, I started working with the Ministry of Justice on prison reform, specifically conducting two reviews on how prisoners could maintain family and other key relational ties to prevent their reoffending. I am still involved in the implementation of the recommendations of those reviews, but I am beginning to feel a little like an IPP prisoner with no set date for release.

My amendment would contribute to a collective refocus on offender rehabilitation, which is much needed if we are to have any hope of reducing our prison population and the criminal justice budget. Reoffending costs this country £18 billion a year. Releasing prisoners into homelessness, and especially rough sleeping, single-handedly undermines any rehabilitation activity they have ever undertaken. Their proven reoffending rate, 76%, is more than twice that for those released from custody into settled accommodation, at 36.4%.

I have been told that existing legislation to prevent homelessness is adequate. However, there appears to be very little accountability regarding local housing authorities’ compliance with that law, which I will touch on briefly. Some are far more effective than others at finding accommodation for ex-prisoners. This is not simply about available housing stock, but the processes they follow and how well they work in partnership with prison and probation. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reports, for example, that several London boroughs are frequently problematic, while others with very pressured housing markets are not. Similarly, in 2025, the London Assembly Housing Committee reported inconsistent practice across London boroughs with weak co-ordination between prisons, probation and borough housing teams.

My amendment seeks to tighten up the rather loose legal framework, which is not delivering as it should. Ministry of Justice data says that almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025—a 39% rise from the previous year. My amendment’s reporting requirements would reveal how local authorities compare with their statistical neighbours. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 introduced a duty on public authorities, including prison and probation, to refer those at threat of homelessness to local authority housing teams, because they would be released within about two months and have nowhere to go. Looking briefly at how that should work, statutory guidance says, rather weakly, that

“Housing authorities are encouraged to … acknowledge receipt of any referral”,


which

“may be in the form of an automatic email reply”.

If that is all the prison is getting and there is no feedback loop, the referral may have simply entered a bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle. Non-statutory guidance says:

“The duty to refer will help to ensure that services are working together effectively to prevent homelessness … It is also anticipated”—


which, again, sounds a little weak—

“that it will encourage local housing authorities and other public authorities to build strong partnerships which enable them to work together to intervene earlier to prevent homelessness through increasingly integrated services”.

However, the local housing authority is merely required to contact the prisoner being referred. The guidance also states merely:

“It is good practice for local housing authorities to go beyond referral procedures and work with other public authorities to prepare a comprehensive assessment of need”


for the prisoner. Where is the grip on local authorities? They are paid from the public purse to obey the law. They are, or should be, accountable for spending and saving public money. Reducing reoffending by just 1% would save £180 million.

My amendment would enable regulations to specify how local housing authorities must respond to referrals. Regulations would specify response times they would need to work to, including when they would need to notify a final decision, and require them to inform the prison or the Probation Service as well as the prisoner. Prisons have a strong legal duty of care towards prisoners and are responsible for pre-release planning. They also need this information and cannot rely on prisoners passing it on to them. The London Assembly Housing Committee found that prisons are not consistently complying with the duty to refer, with late referrals from prison contributing greatly to uncertainty; hence, the regulations are tightening the process at their end as well.

To conclude, currently there are many gaps in the system that we need to close so that soon-to-be-released individuals no longer fall through them. Without accommodation, as we have heard from other noble Lords, they cannot seek work, restructure their lives or take ownership of their rehabilitation. It can be a matter of life or death. Just last month, a Guardian investigation reported record numbers of deaths within two weeks of release in 2025, a 28% rise since 2021. The primary driver, according to experts, is a rise in prisoners being released into homelessness and falling through “trapdoors to crisis”. The duty to refer was designed to prevent this wherever possible. Almost 10 years on from the Act that introduced it, we must acknowledge that it is not working as it should be for ex-prisoners. The Bill provides the perfect opportunity to fix it.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to these amendments, and it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Farmer: he is one of the most indefatigable and persistent champions of the family and of the education and rehabilitation of prisoners, and I commend the work he has done over many years.

As a constituency MP, I had a prison in my constituency. I was once critical of what I thought was the cushy lifestyle of the women’s wing of the prison—it was a coterminous prison, men and women—because it provided aromatherapy in the gym. I criticised this, as the local MP, and of course the Sun put it on the front page, with the immortal headline, “In for a stretch”, which was quite amusing. The serious point is that we can spend very significant amounts of money to make sure that prisoners can read and write, understand civic engagement and have meaningful work, but that is all completely wasted if, when they leave prison, they go back into the clutches of the nefarious and criminal classes, particularly drug dealers.

I commend both noble Baronesses on the Liberal Democrat Benches. The noble Baroness, Lady Teather, will not remember, but we worked together, many moons ago when she was Children’s Minister in the other place, on the rather niche subject of children with Tourette’s syndrome—she did a great job in that role in the coalition Government. Both noble Baronesses are absolutely right that we need to focus. These are permissive amendments to focus on collecting and collating as much data as possible on both ex-offenders and Armed Forces personnel. That is all that these amendments ask for and I heartily concur with all the later amendments in this group.