Social Housing Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Stoneham of Droxford and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

As part of my ward work last month, I was surprised that a home in Brooke, in my ward where I live, under the Victory Housing banner, is actually owned by part of a much larger RSL headquartered in Gloucestershire. I mentioned it at Second Reading, and since then it has reached out to me to explain that it actually has a local team to manage these properties. That is reassuring, but the truth remains that the shots are called from miles away. It is a close-to-home example of the way in which the RSL landscape has consolidated, as small RSLs have bought up others and then in turn been taken over still further in the name of economies of scale.

I can understand why this has happened, but scale has not been good for tenants. Tenant reps have been excised from the landscape. There is a lack of local accountability, with national RSLs populating their boards with the great and good from out of town, the consequences being that a focus on local matters such as anti-social behaviour has been relegated to the subs’ bench—and I am conscious that the football starts in a minute.

At Second Reading, I suggested that the Bill could be stronger on anti-social behaviour to demonstrate that the Government are on the side of law-abiding residents, but it is not. That is one of the reasons that have prompted me to introduce Amendment 90 to mandate that and other desirable traits so that the social purpose of social providers is enshrined in law.

I explained how there has been a consolidation of actors in this space, but one of the reasons for liberalising certain financial powers in the Bill—which I do not oppose—is that it will drive financial engineering to new heights. It is the intended consequence of the Bill, but the liberalisation must come with strings attached. It should not be necessary, but it now has become so, to state what the social purpose of RSLs is, not least because there is £35 billion burning a hole in the Government’s pocket. Our job, it seems to me, is to ensure that there is conditionality attached to that largesse if RSLs are to be favoured with cheap money and government underwriting in a way that Berkeley, Norfolk Homes or Redrow—others are available—are not.

In too many cases, RSLs just do not grip the anti-social behaviour that blights the lives of neighbours. I know, because I have seen it myself, that others look away when the criminality is committed. We have the nonsense of community gardens left ungrown and untidy in the name of “No Mow May”, which lasts all year. It is lazy and slovenly, and impacts families miles away from the out-of-towners who sit on these boards.

It is telling that in a briefing on the Bill by the National Housing Federation, which explained that it runs more than 2.5 million homes, supporting 6 million people living in 62% of all the social homes in England, there was not a single mention of social purpose, save to say that the federation was driven by it without explaining what it means. Front and centre it certainly was not.

I know why this has happened. Candidly, among RSLs in particular, there has been far too great a focus on development. That has led to the loss of social purpose. The truth is that as RSLs have become overleveraged, they have been caught out by increases in build, finance and land costs, and there is no financial space for the social purpose—an omission the Bill should correct.

We are in Committee, so I have had a stab at defining what the social purpose could be. It is duplicated in Amendment 110. For those organisations that want to take the Government’s shilling in a way that is not available to other private developers, we need to look at the strings attached. My amendment would enshrine six key principles—I will not list them, in the interests of time, but they are there in the amendment—and regulations to codify them, along with success factors, would follow.

Too many RSLs have taken the wrong path. They have strayed from their original purpose. They have lost sight of the social purpose. Instead, they have been hooked on speculation and property development, on the back of cheap government finance, so we need to bring them back on track. If you take the money, my amendment would provide the hair on the deal. It is not too much to ask. If they want to take the cash in a way that is not available to private operators, they need to take their social responsibilities seriously—and if they cannot, they can go to Barclays, NatWest or Lloyds, or any other bank, just like the others. I beg to move.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

I am going to speak very briefly—there are matters of life and death about to start in 10 minutes, and I am not going to stand in the way of that—but I am surprised by these amendments. They have been tabled by Conservative Peers going for centralisation and more regulation. We want better people running housing associations; we want good chairs, good chief executives and effective boards. I have to ask: do you want social entrepreneurial spirit, creative drive and a commitment to efficiency in customer services to be suffocated by overregulation, interference and process? We need a balance. I do not believe these probing amendments aim to provide a balance.

Local Authorities (Changes to Years of Ordinary Elections) (England) Order 2025

Debate between Lord Stoneham of Droxford and Lord Fuller

Monday 24th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, but let me just point out to him that politicians do not want elections when they know they are going to lose, and they like elections when they know they are going to win. The fact behind this decision is that, despite the Conservatives’ regret Motion, most of the councils that are postponing their elections are Conservative-controlled. They know that they had a very good year in 2021—an exceptional year—and that they were going to lose control of most of the councils that had elections this year. Sadly, with Labour in government, it knows that its vote is going to be difficult to get out and it has concerns about how well it is going to do. We know we did quite well and have to accept that.

The top-down model that the Conservatives were talking about—in respect of the reorganisation of local government—is actually pretty much the model they had in government, for what they were going for. Their main motivation is that they would lose against the results in 2021. In my area, there are no elections in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire. I understand that the Government want their reorganisation, but I think they could have either postponed the consultation a little bit by a month or two, or, indeed, arranged that the elections should be held in June, a month or two later, after the consultation.

I will give you the example of my own patch of Hampshire. We have big financial problems in Hampshire. The Conservative-run county council has a deficit coming up of £183 million next year. It wanted to put council tax up by 15% and asked the Government to put council tax up by that much. A lot of the problems go back to their Government, because they did not provide the money, but that is the reality in Hampshire. We are going to end up, in Hampshire, as a result of having no elections, with a fag-end county council, which I would say is unrepresentative, having to impose pretty severe cuts on services when it knows it probably will not exist in three or four years’ time. Probably, in our patch, we will have no elections until 2027 or 2028, unless the Government promise we will have county elections next year. If we are going to have county elections next year, we might as well have had them this year.

There are three conclusions I draw. One is that it is better to have elections this year than wait for possible elections in 2027 or 2028. I think the Government should declare whether we are going to have elections next year or, if there is a reorganisation, whether we are going to have a further extension of councillors’ remit, so that they will have been in power in the county council for seven or eight years by the time we get around to having elections.

The second thing that is really important is that, for God’s sake, we must sort out the finances of these councils. Southampton is Labour-controlled and Hampshire is Conservative-controlled, and they are frankly in deep, deep trouble. If those problems are handed over to a reorganised Hampshire local government organisation, it will not succeed. That is why we need reform, but we do not benefit that reform by getting a postponement of the elections. Unless the financial situation is sorted, reorganisation in my county of Hampshire will not get off on the right foot. We will have all the local authorities in that area blaming each other for the fact that it is not going well, and trying to push the financial deficits on to each other. It will be a disaster.

Let me just give your Lordships a bit of hope, which I hope, by having elections, we might see. Southampton, Hampshire and Farnborough in the 1930s were the Silicon Valley of the United Kingdom. We had a very successful aviation industry, with the invention of the Spitfire; Farnborough was also a big centre of research and Southampton was one of the main ports to America. The Blitz and the war led to a lot of those industries moving north or to the south. What we need in our county is a well-funded series of unitary authorities and a mayor who will lead us back to that growth that we want and which the Government want.

However, we are not going to do it if we start off with unrepresentative councils as a result of elections being suspended. The county council is hugely unrepresentative now, because it had an exceptionally good year in 2021 and will probably be in power for six or seven years through this period. The county council is going to be leading some of the discussions on reorganisation in Hampshire, and that is the problem. We want to start with representative councils and do not want to postpone the elections.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it is a funny thing when the unelected House of Lords has to regret the cancellation of elections. Democracy is the foundation stone on which the fabric of our nation is built. It is not to be carelessly discarded and requires the most careful consideration. I accept that general elections are far more important than most, but local elections are not any less valuable in shaping the local doorstep issues that people value the most in their towns, villages and cities. I am a councillor, and a veteran of many local elections, so I know more than most how they keep councillors on their toes, and refresh and reinvigorate those councils.

I accept that elections have been cancelled before—under the Local Government Act 2000 and in special circumstances such as Covid or foot-and-mouth. Those are truly exceptional circumstances, mostly in cases of national emergency where all elections in all areas are cancelled, but that is not the case here. We are not cancelling elections in an emergency, where Section 87 of the Local Government Act 2000 is engaged. No, this is a case of devolution and local government reorganisation, where, last week, the Minister in the other place could give no assurance that the process would be complete even in this Parliament, by 2029. Time is clearly not of the essence, so what is the rush today?

When the Secretary of State wishes to move the local government deckchairs around the deck, Parliament has determined the process to be followed in bespoke legislation: Section 7 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. It lays out in excruciating detail the particular processes, statutory tests and consultation requirements that must be engaged before elections can be cancelled in local government reorganisations. I am grateful to the Library for all the research it has done on this.

The Government say that they are following the precedent set in 2021, when Somerset, Cumbria and Yorkshire were reorganised, but they are wrong, and I will explain why. Back in 2021, the process started in October—fully seven months out from the proposed elections. Back then, all principal authorities and other interested parties were invited to make proposals. Those proposals resulted in the number that came forward, and Members of Parliament and the public were fully engaged. Later that February, the Government expressed a preference in a well-defined timetable and laid orders and cancelled the elections, following the process established by the Labour Government in 2007.

Let us contrast that with this time. This time, the majority of the cohort of principal authorities were excluded from the discussions, as the Minister will know. Only about 30 of the 200 or so principal councils affected by the proposals were engaged before the Secretary of State made her decisions. How does she justify that? Invitations were circulated to those 30 or so councils, mostly the county councils, to endorse the concept of a mayoral devolution, with carrots—nods and winks—to agree that they would cancel their elections. There was no public consultation. Consider for a moment the conflict of interest in asking the councils facing elections whether they would like to cancel those elections without asking the other principal authorities what they thought of the idea, to say nothing of asking the public what they felt. In January, 18 of the councils wrote to say that they would quite like to dispense with those elections in exchange for a connivance on the mayoralty and, oh yes, early LGR.

I am reminded of my noble friend Lord Pickles, who is no longer in his place. He told me, as a young council leader, “If you don’t trust the folks, don’t go into politics”. So in February, when the Secretary of State said that nine of them had got lucky, if that is an appropriate phrase for denying electors their democratic right, it was announced that their elections would be cancelled. You have to feel for the 10 that were suckered into asking for cancellation but got the mayor anyway.

The Government have wilfully conflated two separate, albeit linked, ideas: devolution and the creation of a mayor; and LGR and the abolition of councils. We were told that the population size for the new councils would be at least 500,000, with no upper limit. We now learn from the Minister that the figure is between 350,000 and 500,000, with the possibility that 500,000 may just be the average within a territory. The 30 councils that connived were misled and entered into the process on a false prospectus. They were suckered. Councils and mayoralties are different. You do not speed the creation of one by cancelling elections to the other. That exposes the dishonesty of the Government’s approach and is why we are right to regret their actions.