Council Housing

Caroline Voaden Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the chair, Sir Jeremy.

South Devon is a beautiful part of the world, with its stunning coastline and idyllic rural villages, but scratch the surface and you will find a severe housing crisis, which is eating away at the viability of our rural and coastal communities, threatening the very fabric of village life and turning parts of it into a theme park for the rich. Wages have fallen so far out of step with housing costs that local people are just being priced out of the communities they grew up in. I welcome aspects of the Bill, but it simply does not address the mechanics driving this crisis.

Housing associations exist to provide homes for people who cannot afford to buy or rent on the open market, yet a growing number of those homes are leaving the sector altogether. Since 2018-19, English housing associations have sold more than 25,000 social and affordable homes to private buyers, and the pace is quickening. Last year’s sales were the highest on record, having risen 89% in just two years.

Towns such as Salcombe and Dartmouth in South Devon are among the most expensive places to live in the country. Yes, they are full of second homes and short-term lets, but they are not just holiday destinations. Real people live there. These are people who grew up there, people who work there and people who keep essential local services running, but they are being priced out. One local housing association has sold 49 social homes since 2022, with the biggest losses in those high-cost areas. In Kingswear, another beautiful village by the sea, more than a third of the social housing stock has vanished in just three years; the primary school has closed down and with so few affordable homes left, there is nothing to draw young families back to the area. When challenged, the housing association points to replacement homes that it has bought in Sherford, a new town on the edge of Plymouth that is 30 miles away. That is no comfort to a family forced out of Kingswear.

Let us set that against demand. Across the South Hams and Torbay, 3,600 homes have been built in five years, but more than 2,500 households remain in formal housing need. That is because most of the new homes are sold at full market price, far beyond the reach of those who need them. When a social rented home does come up, the competition is extreme: there were 119 bids for one home in Malborough, 113 for one in Salcombe and 190 for one in Brixham.

The council has no say when a housing association decides to sell. The Social Housing Bill introduces a new disposal notification requirement intended to give local authorities a better chance of acquiring homes that would otherwise leave the sector. That is a step in the right direction and I welcome it, but it is not going to work, because being told that a home is about to be sold is not the same as being able to do anything about it. The Bill gives the council no first refusal, no priority and no right to step in ahead of a private buyer.

I would like to give a shout-out to Clay Park in Dartington, where a community land trust is delivering 39 energy-efficient homes, all for social rent, for people with local connections. We need to see this in all our villages: a few social homes in every village to keep it viable, keep young families there and allow older people to downsize. Community land trusts need to be able to build more easily. What provisions have been made in the Bill to support the work of these much-valued bodies?