King’s Speech

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best. A wise political party would cut and paste his speech and put it in its next election manifesto under housing.

I warmly welcome three of the Bills relevant to today: the leasehold and freehold Bill, the Renters (Reform) Bill, and the tobacco and vapes Bill. The leasehold Bill will make progress towards phasing out a feudal system of tenure that exists nowhere else in the world and crystallises the tension between freeholder and leaseholder. But the Bill bans new leasehold only for houses, of which hardly any are built. Most of the new leaseholds are in blocks of flats. If we are to achieve the Secretary of State’s ambition of abolishing leasehold, we need to make commonhold the default tenure for all new developments of flats. I hope the Government will consider an amendment to that effect, which I might conceivably table.

There is also unfinished business on the Building Safety Act, which protects leaseholders against remediation costs for which they are wholly innocent. As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and I have consistently pointed out, that Act has crucial omissions. The leasehold Bill offers an opportunity to provide the protection that Ministers originally promised, but never delivered, to groups of people such as those living in buildings under 11 metres, those who have enfranchised and those who have invested in buy to let. All those—thousands of them—live in buildings that they cannot mortgage or sell, and they are exposed to high service charges. There is an opportunity to build on the BSA and make it a more comprehensive piece of legislation.

On housing, I welcome the Renters (Reform) Bill, but we need clarity on the timetable for implementation. I read the Secretary of State’s speech on Second Reading and he was pressed on this. This is what he said:

“The sooner the Bill is on the statute book, the sooner we can proceed. Alongside that, we of course need to ensure that the justice system … is in a position to implement it effectively”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/10/23; col. 638.]


Does this mean Section 21 will not be abolished until the court backlog has been cleared? In June, the mean time from claim to repossession in London was 40 weeks, and the backlog also disadvantages tenants who want to take action against their landlord. Can my noble friend put some timeframe on Section 21 abolition and also give an assurance that the MoJ has the necessary resources to tackle the backlog?

On the rental market, which the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to, we need to reduce our overreliance on the small private landlord and replace it with what happens nearly everywhere else, where rented accommodation is funded by long-term institutional finance with professional management, and where tenancies are not terminated simply because the owner wants to sell.

Finally on housing, we need to increase the local housing allowances, which have been frozen in cash terms since 2020, while rents have risen by up to a fifth. Low-income households are being forced to find, on average, £1,900 for a two-bedroom flat, out of the resources not covered by the LHA. These shortfalls are nearly double what they were a year ago. Many tenants cannot pay, leading to evictions for non-payment. Data published in July shows that more than 104,000 households were in temporary accommodation at the end of March 2023—the highest figures since records began in 1998. The Autumn Statement should increase the local housing allowances, along with the discretionary housing payments, as more and more local authorities have exhausted their budgets.

Along with others, I regret the Home Secretary’s remarks about rough sleepers. I launched the original rough sleepers initiative in 1990 as Housing Minister, and met many rough sleepers, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, whose work in this area I applaud. I never met anyone who was sleeping rough as a lifestyle choice, and I commend the letter which the noble Lord, Lord Bird, wrote in Tuesday’s Times.

If I may say a quick word on education, I welcome the commitment in the Speech to

“strengthen education for the long term”,

with steps to be taken to ensure young people have the necessary knowledge. But young people will only get this if they actually go to school—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. One of the adverse consequences of the pandemic was to weaken that contract between children and parents, on the one hand, and schools, on the other, with a quantum leap in non-attendance. Persistent absenteeism has more than doubled in the last four years to 22.5%. A recent report by the Children’s Commissioner found that just over a third of all pupils were either persistently or severely absent in either Year 10 or 11, with correspondingly poor GCSE results. So we do need to reset that relationship between families and schools, and build on the extension of attendance hubs, with perhaps more national training for national attendance officers.

I commend the commitment to introduce the tobacco and vapes Bill, as would the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, had she been able to be here. I hope that this short measure might be introduced very early in the Session. Its key recommendation of progressively raising the age at which it is legal to sell cigarettes was a recommendation in last year’s Khan report. It puts England, along with New Zealand, ahead of the pack in the campaign to phase out smoking over time and re-establishes our reputation as a pioneer in this particular field of public health. But its impact is essentially long-term. In the short term, if we are to hit the Government’s target of a smoke-free England by 2030, we need additional measures. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, has just said, the public health budget has been hit hard. Khan proposed a levy on tobacco company profits, ring-fenced for public health to give it the boost it needs. I hope the Treasury will reflect on that for the Autumn Statement.

Finally, I turn to social care. The gracious Speech said the

“priority is to make the difficult but necessary long-term decisions to change this country for the better”,

but there was no mention of social care. We need reform of how social care is funded and a workforce plan for social care to complement that for the NHS workforce. If this is now not going to happen in this Parliament, then the Autumn Statement should ensure that local authorities have the necessary resources to fund the current system adequately, while work goes on for fundamental reform in the next Parliament, ideally on an all-party basis.

To conclude, I welcome the measures I have spoken about, but I will seek to make them even better by tabling some amendments.