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.