Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, and to hear his contribution on the housing problems in his area.

I endorse our Front Bench particularly and the opening speech we heard on some of the problems with this Bill. In passing, I will take up my noble friend’s reference to veterans and the importance of helping them. Some time ago at King’s Cross station, I was sitting on a bench waiting for my train. A man came up and sat beside me, and we got chatting. He was a veteran. He had served in the Royal Marines for more than 11 years, including in Afghanistan, and had been shot in the back. He lived in social housing with his daughter. Shortly afterwards, before we spoke, his daughter had been killed in a taxi accident; the driver was found guilty of reckless driving and sent to prison. The man lost not only his daughter but his home and never knew where he was going to spend the night, at which station, but I have not seen him since at King’s Cross. I feel that this is a very important priority and should be given the same protection in law as the other categories that this Bill addresses.

One of the central premises of the Bill is that there should be more state housing and that the more social housing there is, the better. This is to be promoted by restricting the right to buy and putting more obstacles in the way of tenants trying to buy their own homes. These obstacles include increasing the number of years, as we have heard, from three to 10 and making it expensive, as we have also heard, for tenants to buy by amending the percentage discounts, so cutting the value of the tenant’s stake in the home they may have lived in over decades. They include reducing the stock of right to buy homes as a proportion of overall council housing; for instance, no newly built homes will be available to buy for the first 35 years, so you may, if you are a tenant there, in your working life, never be able to aspire to buy that home if you settle in that area. Another obstacle is creating delay and uncertainty for applicants by increasing the time landlords can take to respond to them, both on eligibility—from four to eight weeks or from eight to 12, depending on the sort of tenancy they have—and on giving information on the price and details: from eight to 12 weeks for freehold or from 12 to 16 for leasehold. In the light of these changes, can the Minister please let us know whether the Government consider that the increase we have seen in right to buy sales will continue or decline as a result of this measure, and what the estimated figures are over the first five years after the Bill becomes law?

The Bill will have further damaging effects. First, in terms of cost, it will increase the stock of housing owned, managed and run by local councils or those registered by them, thus augmenting the power of the state over men, women and their families and augmenting the costs for taxpayers. The DWP estimates that this year, the housing bill will be almost £39 billion, a rise of £913 million on last year—the highest, in today’s prices, since 1970, measured on similar data. By contrast, the taxpayer receives a significant, as things stand, return from social housing sales receipts. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham what is done with these housing receipts, which can alleviate the tax burden on taxpayers, who might have to meet other needs, or perhaps they might even help to lower taxes. In the financial year ending March 2025 alone, local authorities received £798 million from a reported 7,494 eligible sales, an increase of 7% compared to 2023-24. I ask the Minister, on a per annum basis for the first five years of the operation of this Bill, in respect of the decline in sales and the maintenance and overheads that must now be borne by councils and taxpayers, what is the estimated additional cost?

Secondly—this is a very serious problem, and we have heard about it today from noble Lords— the Bill will undermine the incentive for working people to be independent and support themselves and their family, preventing dependency on benefits not only during working life but well into old age and retirement. As we have heard, already in 2026, across England, Wales and Scotland, almost 6 million people—a record 5.95 million people—will receive housing support from the taxpayer this year. That is 1.2 million more than in 2019-20. In Cambridge, where I live, around 65% of tenants receive some form of benefit, with 55% on maximum housing benefit or universal credit.

Thirdly, the Bill will undermine overall economic growth and increase overall the ever-growing burden of taxation. This is an attack on property rights by taxing the earnings of working men and women to subsidise the unproductive public sector and a benefits culture. I therefore do not share the Government’s enthusiasm for increasing the size and power of the state over people’s lives, turning individual men and women into supplicants dependent on the state, potentially for the rest of their lives, without the incentive—

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I must ask the noble Baroness to draw her remarks to a close.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

—to earn enough to pay a market rent and take responsibility for themselves and their families. State housing, subsidised by the taxpayer and owned and managed by the state, is not home ownership. It is state dependency.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

These are sensible amendments. Of course, it would be naive to assume that Amendment 69 is not controversial, because it is. There is a big political debate about citizenship, identity, culture and the provision of public services, and I accept all that. However, the Government certainly need to look at the two amendments. On that basis, can the Minister provide a reason why Amendment 68 would not be adopted, and why Amendment 69, in the name of my noble friend, would also not be looked upon favourably by the Labour Government?

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and I support all the amendments in this group, particularly those from the noble Baronesses, Lady Teather and Lady Bakewell, my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lord Jackson, and those on the Front Bench, which support a review of policy and better information for making policy on politically sensitive matters such as immigration and narrowing the eligibility clause.

In seeking information on accessing social housing and the demand for it, such as that arising from net migration and temporary asylum, we should not forget the context in which these demands are made. It is a question at the centre of our national debate, one which has too often eroded trust in politics and democracies. That is not limited to the UK. Right across stable western systems such as France, Germany and Italy, this question is at the heart of the erosion of trust and the changing shape of democratic stability, which many are worried about. That is the wider context for the immigration amendments. We should not brush this issue, and the pressure it puts on the demand for social housing, under the carpet.

In considering immigration and asylum, we are looking at particularly significant demands, which might, in time, come to outweigh current pressures, if the figures we see today are to lead in any way to a demand for social housing. In the year ending September 2025, 58,148 people were granted protection and leave to remain at the initial decision. Where will they live? Will they add to the pressures and burdens on social housing? We need to know the evidence and the figures and not brush this question under the carpet. In addition, 46,497 illegal migrants were known to have arrived in the year ending December 2025. They may end up being granted leave to remain, given that the Government are trying to process many of them as asylum claims, which will pose additional demands.

Then we have the student visa question. Some 443,000 visas were granted last year. Analysis by a Sky journalist recently showed that, in the latest year for which figures are available, the number of asylum claims by people who had originally come on student visas was 14,800 out of a total of 111,000, meaning that student visa holders have been switching to being asylum seekers. For some, there may be good reason. They may have come from countries in which they would be persecuted and seek asylum when they get here. Having a student visa is the only way to get out. However, for others, such as the Indian nationals this report particularly mentions, a scam operated. In one case, the papers were filled in fraudulently for one member of the family—the lady—and she and her husband came on student visas. However, she had no intention of studying. As a family, they had no money—certainly not the bank account figures that were in the papers. The local authority discussed their case and awarded benefits because they simply could not afford to live, and they have now made their asylum claim.

These kinds of hard-luck stories—and nobody denies that they are hard-luck stories—are pushing up the claims and the demand for social housing. We need evidence so that we can have an open and fair debate. For these reasons, I support the proposed prohibition on granting social housing to anybody but UK citizens, as my noble friends’ various amendments propose.

Before closing, I want to comment on the amendments that seek better information on social housing access for veterans, the case for which was very well argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Teather. I referred on Second Reading to the case of a homeless person at King’s Cross Station who lived hand to mouth and day to day because he was evicted from his council house when his daughter was run over by a cab driver, who was accused and convicted of dangerous driving. She was his sole carer. He had served in the Royal Marines for well over a decade, including in Afghanistan, and because of injuries sustained in serving, he had to be looked after all his life. They were in council housing, and he was evicted after his daughter died because she held the tenancy.

I support the amendments on greater information on offenders, who are some of the saddest cases we have. The literacy levels of as many as 56% of prisoners are less than the reading age of seven, meaning that they are excluded from any kind of literate society. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Farmer’s excellent work for offenders, but I also agree that unless we insist that they be given housing priority, they will go back to a life of crime. As much of the evidence shows, they will go back to crime, as the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, explained, or to the people who were part of their previous crime network. They have been abandoned by their families—their husbands, wives, children—and others who looked after them. These are very good amendments and I support them.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My noble friends have outlined their cases themselves, so I will just clutch my pearls and resist having a ding-dong with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—which I could, for reasons that will become apparent in my speech.

I will speak carefully on this group, because I have real concerns. I am not going to go into the detail of the individual amendments, but my concerns are the direction and tone that they take when looked at together. Looked at as a whole, they approach access to social housing primarily through restriction and exclusion, with a strong emphasis on immigration status and migration pressures. I understand the political context in which these amendments are being brought forward, but I do not believe this is a helpful or responsible way to address the housing crisis or solve immigration matters. The fundamental driver of pressure on social housing is not who is applying for it; it is the chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes. Framing access as a competition between groups risks obscuring that reality and diverting attention away from the real task of increasing supply.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Again, I place great trust in our local housing authorities; they regularly assess their applicants. That has been even more the case as the availability of social housing has become more and more scarce. Local authorities take these responsibilities very seriously. If there were a change to a circumstance that had not been recorded, that would certainly appear at the time of the allocation.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

Can the Minister say whether there is official evidence of when an application is made, and whether the authorities assess official documents supporting a request for housing? Just as a clarification, I certainly did not seek to stigmatise people who were seeking social housing. I asked for further evidence so that we could review the whole question in the round, but not stigmatise anyone.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Local authorities take a great deal of care when people apply for the social housing register, because they need to make sure that they meet their local provisions. That includes local connections, whether they have income eligibility and so on. They take great care in that respect. Most local authorities conduct regular reviews of the information they have—I will not say “all local authorities”, because I do not have the evidence in front of me to suggest that, but I think that nearly all of them do so.