Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I hope the House will not agree with Amendment 1. I feel a little bit personal about this because the amendment knocks out huge chunks of the Housing Act 1985, which I put on the statute book 40 years ago.

The noble Baroness talked about the erosion of the social housing stock. However, 17% of the housing stock in this country is social housing. That is roughly double the EU average of 9.3%, so already we are way out of line with our European neighbours in our provision of social housing. But I oppose this amendment because if one looks at Clause 9, it makes it clear that 100% of capital receipts from the right to buy will be ploughed back into social housing. So it is exactly the opposite of what the noble Baroness said, that the right to buy would increase the waiting time. What would increase the waiting time is acceptance of this amendment, because it would deny local authorities the capital receipts which would still accrue to them, so I disagree with her fundamentally.

There are other reasons for disagreeing with Amendment 1. For millions of people—1.8 million people—it was a foot on the property ladder for those who simply could not otherwise afford it, and many of those against the right to buy are people who own their own home. It gave people financial security which they would not otherwise have had. It became no longer the preserve of those on middle or higher incomes, and it gave something back after paying years of rent. Also, in the long term, it can reduce dependency, because those who bought their home now have an asset that can be taken into account if and when they move into care. There are wider benefits that we touched on at Second Reading, which I will not repeat. The right to buy helped break down the monolithic nature of some of our local authority estates. I very much hope that the Government, and indeed others in the House, will resist Amendment 1.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to take part in this debate in Committee. I will not reiterate the comments I made at Second Reading, because I talked then about family provision in social housing and we will discuss that specific issue in later groups. I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lady O’Neill of Bexley on her promotion to the Front Bench, and it would be remiss not to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, on her promotion. I think it is a promotion—anyway, she is back on the Front Bench.

As has already been said by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, right to buy was one of the most transformative policies in British political history. It resulted in 58% of people owning their homes in 1981, being boosted to 69% by 2001, although that figure has now fallen back to 63%. Boosting home ownership boosts self-reliance, and 81% of people in most recent polls support the concept of owning their own home and being part of a property-owning democracy. In fact, 1.9 million homes were sold following the Housing Act 1980 to date, affecting 4.5 million social tenants. As we heard at Second Reading, right to buy improves social mobility, especially for those working people on low or modest incomes. We also heard demonstrable, empirical evidence from the London School of Economics about the impact being in homes that were bought under right to buy had on the educational attainment of children and young people. That was a longitudinal study, as noble Lords will remember.

I must say in passing that the views of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, are always sincere and well-resourced with research, but on this occasion I cannot agree with her for the reasons that my noble friend made clear. Capital receipts from right to buy were £51 billion, of which £47 billion was retained and remitted to His Majesty’s Treasury. The most recent sales in England in 2024-25 raised almost £800 million from 7,494 sales.

The important point to remember is that between 2012 and 2025, 48,000 units were replaced directly from recycled right to buy receipts back into the social housing stock. It is also important to nuance the arguments and remember that we had the renaissance of housing associations and alternative housing providers in that period, so it is not altogether correct to look at council housing and social housing just within the context of local authority housing.

There are a number of myths about right to buy, which is one of the reasons why I oppose the noble Baroness’s amendment. As my noble friend said, the level of social housing that we have is still high by international standards. I think we are fourth in Europe out of about 25 countries—significantly more than France, Italy, Germany and other large countries.

The fall in public sector housing construction began well before the advent of right to buy in 1980. Social housing waiting lists were, in fact, bizarrely stable when right to buy was at its most popular in the 1980s. There is a reason for that: social housing waiting lists were derived as a function of demand, not supply. So, in the period between 1981 and 1997, social housing waiting lists fell from 1.2 million to 1 million, in a period when we were selling off 100,000 council homes under right to buy. The problem, of course, was that the wider housing market was overheating, with a rise in real housing prices of 108% between 1997 and 2009.

The final myth is about discounts. Yes, you can say that discounted money is dead money to the taxpayer, but that criticism has to be misplaced. If one looks at the cost of, for instance, significant maintenance by local authorities and the payment of housing benefit then those alleged costs are significantly lower than claimed by those who oppose right to buy.

As my noble friend said, by abolishing right to buy we would remove the revenue and income stream for building more social homes, and that cannot be right. We would need to have an alternative if we were going to get rid of right to buy. Although I might not wholly agree with this Government’s objectives as outlined in the Bill, the noble Baroness’s proposal does not make sense because it would mean fewer homes for people who needed them, and that cannot be good. On that basis, I oppose the amendment.