Council Housing

Alice Macdonald Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Alice Macdonald (Norwich North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) for securing this debate.

Norwich was at the birth of social housing, building its first council house on Angel Road 100 years ago. Shortly after, came the Mile Cross estate, one of the first of its kind. By the 1970s, our city had a higher proportion of council housing than any other in the country. Labour in Norwich continued that delivery. We delivered Goldsmith Street—105 council homes built to Passivhaus standards and the first council housing project to win the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling prize. At the old Mile Cross depot in my constituency, a Labour council planned and funded 67 new council homes for rent, with more on the full site. Anglia Square stood undeveloped for years, then a Labour Government gave a Labour city council the funding to unlock the site and get building, delivering 1,100 homes, with a commitment that at least 50% will be affordable, many at social rent.

I pay tribute to the former Labour council leaders, including Mike Stonard, Alan Waters, Brenda Horner and Steve Morphew, for their work driving that vision forward, and Carli Harper, who has put housing at the centre of her campaign to be Mayor of Norfolk and Suffolk.

That is what delivery looks like, but it is not finished. We have to do much more to ensure that the council homes my constituents need are delivered. Since May, the Green party has run Norwich city council. I want them to succeed and not squander Labour’s legacy on housing. My message is simple: see those schemes through; do not let them slip and do not dilute them. The need is real, with almost 4,000 households in Norwich waiting for a home. Those are not statistics; they are people who have done everything right and are still waiting.

What needs to happen? First, we need investment, so I welcome the Government’s £39 billion programme for social and affordable homes. I declare an interest as the chair of the East of England housing delivery group. The region is expected to deliver 227,000 homes to support the Government’s targets over the course of this Parliament. If we are to do that, we must get our fair share of investment. Houses do not build themselves, so we need to ensure we have the skills in the pipeline to accelerate construction and deliver them. Our need for homes must be recognised as urgent.

Secondly, with others, I welcome the decision to let councils keep their right-to-buy receipts, which will make a huge difference. Thirdly, it is not enough to build homes; they have to be of good quality. People in council housing deserve high-quality homes, such as the ones Norwich Labour built on Goldsmith Street. Too many constituents still contact me with concerns about the quality of housing. Fourthly, homes must be eco-friendly. Goldsmith Street proves that warm, low-energy homes with bills tenants can afford are not a luxury; they are what council housing should be. Every new council home we build, should be built to the same ambition.

Fifthly, community is important. Mile Cross worked a century ago because it was never just about housing; it was also a community. Its centenary in 2023 was beautifully celebrated by The Common Lot. A home is only as good as what surrounds it: the bus that turns up, the GP we can book, the school within walking distance, the park, and the shop on the corner. When we build homes, we must build that community, too. The Norwich Labour party still believes that, and I know Labour in government believes that, so we must keep building to deliver the council homes that so many people still desperately need.

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[Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy, and to take part in this debate about the delivery of council housing. It is a debate on a very important topic and I thank the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) for securing it.

Building more homes is a critical mission for anyone governing England and Wales today, in order to make the dream of home ownership a reality for even more hard-working families. With a record number of people homeless, and with 177,530 children and 49,120 adult households in temporary accommodation, clearly the priority must be to build more council homes. That is what the Opposition want to happen, but that is what the Government are currently failing to do.

Let us take a look at the Government’s own data. Just 208,600 net additional dwellings were added in England in Labour’s first year of power. That was a 6% drop from 2023-24, which was the last Conservative Government’s final year in office. Of these, 190,600 were new homes, a fall of 8,000, around 4%, on 2023-24. Taken together, the Government are on track to build around 400,000 fewer homes than they promised at the election, meaning yet another broken promise made to the British people. The Government know that—the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), admitted this on national media.

That poor showing on homes directly impacts the pressing issue we are debating today, which is the delivery of council housing. We heard the Prime Minister proudly making his summer promise of the comeback of the council house, but what little details we do know on that policy show that the money he has earmarked would equal just 15,494 homes a year, barely 5% of the Government’s annual housing target. That is in exchange for another £79 billion added to the housing subsidy bill, despite the fact that the UK already spends the most on housing allowances as a percentage of GDP of any OECD country.

One might have been forgiven for thinking that the aptly-titled Social Housing Bill introduced earlier this year might have been the answer to get local authorities, the Government, industry, and the nation building again. However, as is becoming a theme in this Government, we are left severely disappointed by the reality. The Government have presented a Bill to the House that fails to build a single new council house. Instead of making social and affordable housing sites viable and pushing developments through the pipeline at pace—the Government love to use that phrase—to get people off the street and help children into permanent homes, they have chosen to use up parliamentary, Government and civil service time on an ideological assault on right-to-buy. It is a shameful course of action, and far from what the 1.34 million people on the social housing wait list need.

Even worse is that the Government know this Social Housing Bill will not deliver new homes. According tousb data from the Minister’s own impact assessment, in 2026-27 the pre-November 2024 baseline was 8,050 right-to-buy sales, leading to 5,450 replacement homes. The document goes on to show that if this Bill were to pass and the legacy impacts were to wind down in the period of 2031-35, annual right-to-buy sales would fall to around 1,100 a year, with around 1,450 replacement homes. That means that by their own analysis and admission, the Government will be overseeing a housing system in which there would be 4,000 fewer new social homes funded every year. Moreover, research conducted by the House of Lords Library shows that only a net 3% of social homes become available each year to new tenancies. That means that around 90 additional homes will be available for a new tenant each year instead of 5,000.

The Bill would not only mean no new homes built, but would actively prevent them from being delivered. The Government really must refocus their efforts on building more council housing, and that requires serious reforms to the viability of sites for social and affordable homes. We are halfway through a Parliament in which we have spent much time debating the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, various updates to the national planning policy framework and the aforementioned Bill, yet after all of that we are still left without a clear route to building more homes. Projections from the Government show they will have managed to build just 26% of their target in 50% of the time.

[Alice Macdonald]

Obviously we are in government now, but will the hon. Lady reflect on her party’s policies in terms of not letting councils keep right-to-buy receipts or the fact that nearly 200,000 homes were lost in one decade under the Conservatives?

[Sarah Bool]

Of course, it is always important to reflect on any of the legacies but we have to talk about the here and now. It has rightly been said that this Government are in control; the Social Housing Bill is supposed to unlock the system and yet it will not do that. Our questions should be directly to the Minister about how the Government will unlock the potential that everyone in this room wants to see. That is why the Conservative party proposes taking £50,000 off the cost of building a new home in England and Wales by cutting back on regulations and taxes; backing a genuinely brownfield-first approach to see new homes built on the existing 1.41 million sites viable for development; building, not blocking; a genuine council house comeback; and supporting aspiration.