Social Housing Bill (First sitting)

Edward Argar Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Gareth Bacon]

The amendments concern the Bill’s proposals for the governance of capital receipts. Under clause 10, the Secretary of State would gain new powers to make significant determinations, including scope to vary provisions between local authorities and to apply determinations retrospectively.

Much like my concern about deciding the definition and scope of “rural”, this is not about firming up an already over-rigid system, but about ensuring that the Bill does not tear away too much power from Parliament and give it to Whitehall. It is only right that Parliament, not unelected civil servants, should decide the criteria for the allocation of capital receipts. That is why we have tabled these amendments, so that a regulatory framework can be established to provide parliamentary oversight and to give confidence and certainty to local authorities. This is an essential change to the Bill, and we will seek to divide the Committee on it.

As it stands, leaving determinations to the whim of the Secretary of State means leaving local leaders unsure of the direction of future decisions. It undermines precedent and destabilises already fragile funding requirements. The amendments replace the proposed determinations with clear and unequivocal guidance, with amendment 95 specifically ensuring that such decisions come with the approval of both Houses of Parliament. Amendment 98 doubles down on that by also requiring consultation with local authorities.

The Minister may believe that bringing such decisions in-house comes with the bonus of speeding them up, but we believe that making decisions in Marsham Street’s corridors rather than in town halls means local authorities will be left with uncertainty, which will not speed up the building of social homes, but slow it down. Moreover, nothing would be a greater barrier to building social homes than watching receipts being siphoned away.

Under clause 10, the ability to reallocate capital receipts between local authorities will always lead to some councils losing out. It is never going to be popular with councils when they find that, after running the numbers, planning the funding, consulting local people and preparing the foundations, the Secretary of State has robbed them of their funding and given it to another council. It sounds suspiciously similar to the injustice arising from the Government’s disastrously unfair funding review. I therefore urge colleagues to support amendments 92 to 98 and ensure that power stays local.

[Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)]

I support the amendments in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington. They involve a perfectly reasonable and proportionate request for this House to have a role in scrutinising what is put forward by the Government and recommended by the Secretary of State.

I spent six years as a Minister. I took countless statutory instruments through Delegated Legislation Committees. By and large, it is not a complex process; it requires a bit of time on the part of officials to get the drafting right, but the process in this House is not complicated. It ensures that a Minister is directly accountable: they have to be on their brief, and they have to be able to clearly articulate the rationale behind what they are doing and, quite rightly, to be challenged by right hon. and hon. Members. That is so important in maintaining or even in creating trust from our communities—the transparency that that democratic accountability brings to what, as my hon. Friend clearly set out, will on occasion undoubtedly be relatively, if not significantly, contentious decisions relating to significant sums of money.

My hon. Friend set out the case for amendment 95 very clearly. The powers in clause 10, when exercised, may well see some local authorities feeling that they are losing out, to the benefit of other local authorities. Without getting into what those decisions may be or where the money may go, in terms of process and democratic accountability, it is not unreasonable that both Houses should have the opportunity to scrutinise the powers in clause 10.

[Rachel Blake]

I am listening with interest to the right hon. Member’s remarks, and I have some professional experience in this area. Amendments 95 and 98 seem more about delaying a reasonable approach to the Government administering right-to-buy receipts. I am interested to know what the Opposition think would be the alternative to any kind of movement of right-to-buy receipts between local authorities. Would it be entirely acceptable for right-to-buy receipts not to be reinvested in council homes?

[Edward Argar]

The hon. Lady appears to be making a point that I was not actually making in my remarks. My point is about the process. As I said before she intervened, I am not making a judgment on the decisions the Secretary of State may or may not make about those capital receipts; I am making a point about democratic accountability and transparency.

Going back to the earlier group of amendments praised by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington, the procedure that is used when legislation comes before Delegated Legislation Committees in this House is not complex. It does not engender lengthy delay; it just ensures that our constituents can see that we are considering that legislation, that we are debating it and that the Minister can answer the questions put to him. I have no doubt, in the case of this Minister, that he will be able to answer them; sadly, it has not always been the case that every Minister, on both sides of the House, has been capable of doing that. However, I am sure this Minister would have no challenges in coming before a Delegated Legislation Committee and answering the questions put to him.

Amendment 98, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington and supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, would require consultation before determinations were made on capital receipts. Again, consultations do not have to be overly complex or lengthy. If Members go on gov.uk, they will see that there are myriad Government consultations out there at any one time on very significant issues, down to issues such as, for example, the methodology used for reporting land use statistics in the country. The Government routinely consult on a whole range of things, whether that be a significant, detailed and lengthy consultation on something complex or, often, a very short and sharp consultation. They give people the opportunity to have their say, and those who genuinely have something in the way of expert knowledge to contribute.

[Mr Dillon]

On amendment 98 and the consultation, have the right hon. Member and the Opposition considered whether, if a local authority felt it had not been consulted, that would open up a legal route to delay the allocation of capital financing and therefore slow down the growth of house building?

[Edward Argar]

Over many years, I have found that consultation done properly leaves very limited legal risk. Where Governments get it wrong—I do not want to overly speculate on what has happened with the Government’s consultations and process around local government reorganisation—the hon. Member is right that there is a potential for JRs, although I would highlight that a judicial review can focus only on process, not on whether the decision should be relitigated.

If consultation is done well—I would have thought that consultation on this issue should be fairly simple—I believe it can enhance the transparency that is important in bringing our constituents with us and in ensuring that the Government are directly accountable to hon. and right hon. Members in this House. When the legislation is introduced, under our amendments as a regulation, that consultation is there to be drawn on. I genuinely believe—I have seen it for myself—that when a Government are willing to listen to a consultation response, they can, if they do things openly, often come up with a slightly better or tweaked outcome.

[Danny Beales]

The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. My experience is that local councils that are seeking to deliver new council homes have been calling for right-to-buy receipt reform for a long time. The previous Government had an overly restrictive approach to right-to-buy receipts. Councils were only allowed to keep a third of them for three years, and if they could not spend them within that time, they had to return them to the Treasury with interest. As a result, many decided not to take their receipts at all.

It therefore seems quite sensible not to tie up councils that are trying to build new homes, which is quite a complicated and time-consuming process, in consultations and discussions, but to give the Secretary of State the flexibility to work with local authorities, to give them more receipts, to increase the period within which receipts can be used or to reallocate them to schemes and councils that can build within an acceptable period. Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree?

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point, but he makes the same point, in a sense, as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, and it is not what I am speaking about, which is the process. I do not believe that a consultation would tie councils up in knots or delay things inordinately, or indeed that introducing these changes through regulations rather than by diktat of the Secretary of State would cause unnecessary delays.

This process is about transparency and accountability. We have done it before in Government; indeed, this Government have done it with regulations. I have sat on a number of DLs; maybe I have upset the Whips at some point, because I sit on a DL almost every week, when I am not sitting in a Bill Committee—such is the fate of a former Cabinet Minister on the Back Benches. However, the point I am making is that this Government and other Governments have used the delegated legislation system to get things through quickly but none the less with democratic accountability to this House. That is the point being made by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington in these amendments. It is about giving our constituents the confidence to trust that this House has debated what the Secretary of State recommends. Knowing the majority in the House at the moment, I have no doubt that the Minister would easily win any votes in a DL on matters such as this.

[Rachel Blake]

I will have a go at delving into the process point; I do think that these are simply delaying amendments from the Opposition, but I will nevertheless engage on the principle of the process point. What is it about a determination, which would be open to written or oral questions, that the Opposition do not think is transparent and democratically accountable?

[Edward Argar]

The very simple fact that there would be no vote on it by Members of this House, regardless of whether that was in a Committee, which is of course a subset of the House where we can debate and raise issues. I have a lot of time for the hon. Lady. I spent almost 10 years sitting on her local council before I was elected to this place, and I still closely follow Westminster politics. Consequently, I know that she is a hard-working and diligent Member who engages with all these issues particularly closely. However, the simple answer to her question is that Members would not have a vote on the Secretary of State’s determination.

With that, I will conclude by again reiterating my support for the intent behind the amendments that my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington has tabled.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Let me say to hon. Members that I have never found the process in Delegated Legislation Committees particularly fast in any instance, but I recognise the reasonable concerns that have been put. I think they are unfounded, and for the reasons I will set out, I hope to reassure hon. Members.

Clause 10 simplifies and modernises how the rules on right-to-buy receipts are managed. Its intent is to improve administrative efficiency and to provide flexibility. To understand our purpose behind the clause, it is important to have an accurate view of the current arrangements. As things stand, every stock-holding authority has an agreement with the Secretary of State, allowing it to retain all its net right-to-buy receipts, provided that it spends those receipts on replacement social housing.

In practice, this is hugely administratively burdensome. There are over 160 stock-holding local authorities, all of which must be issued with identical section 11(6) retention agreements whenever the rules change. That requires issuing, tracking and chasing agreements for signature across every one of those authorities, creating unnecessary bureaucracy for both councils and central Government.

Clause 10 replaces that with a simpler approach. It provides the Secretary of State with a power to disapply or modify the requirements on the use of receipts set out in regulations by determination, which will then apply consistently across all local authorities. That removes the need to replicate the same agreement process many times over.

Concerns were raised in the other place that we may be seeking to use the clause to require councils to start repaying a portion of their receipts to the Treasury. Let me reassure the Committee that that is absolutely not the case. We fought hard to ensure that local authorities could retain 100% of their receipts. Hon. Members may recall that the previous Government temporarily made that change, but reversed it before the last election.