Provision of Council Housing

Ellie Chowns Excerpts

Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. The points he raises perfectly exemplify why the provision of council housing is so important.

England has seen 724,000 more net additional dwellings than new households since 2015, yet in the same period the number of households in England on local authority housing waiting lists rose by more than 74,000.

[Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

Given that 1.3 million households are on council housing waiting lists, and given the previous Labour commitments to tackling the social housing crisis that he presented, does the hon. Member agree that it is extraordinary that the Minister has repeatedly refused to set a target for social housing? The Government think that setting a target for building any type of housing will address the housing crisis, but they are failing to address the specific problem of building social housing.

[Chris Hinchliff]

I fully agree that council housing is essential to meeting the housing crisis that we face, and I hope that we will hear ambitious remarks from the Minister.

The question is not simply how much housing is built, but the type of housing built and for whom. As has been referenced, more than 1.3 million households in England are trapped on waiting lists—a rise of 10% in the past two years alone. The scale of our failure to provide homes for all our citizens is staggering and reveals in the starkest possible terms the absolute folly of relying on the private sector to meet the public’s basic needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) on securing the debate, and thank the other hon. Members who have made contributions to it.

The provision of council housing is of the utmost importance to this Government. After decades of marginalisation, we are once again asserting the necessity and value of social and council housing, as a crucial national asset to be proud of, to invest in, to protect and to maintain. Doing so is imperative, because successive Government have, for decades, failed to build sufficient numbers of social and council homes in England, and that failure is at the heart of the acute and entrenched housing crisis we face today.

As has been noted, as a result of diminished social and affordable housing supply, particularly in the wake of the coalition Government’s decision in 2010 to slash grant funding for affordable homes, over 1.3 million households now languish on local authority waiting lists, millions of low-income families have been forced into insecure, unaffordable and often substandard private rented housing, and, to our shame as a nation, over 169,000 children will go to sleep tonight in temporary accommodation. Acutely conscious that it would not be quick or easy, we entered government determined to turn that situation around, and that is precisely what we have begun to do. In the brief time available to me, I will detail how the Government are kick-starting a decade of social and affordable housing renewal, and set out the ways in which we have laid the groundwork for a reinvigoration of council house building.

As the House will know, the Government stood for election on a clear manifesto commitment to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation. We did so to address the urgent need to provide homes for those for whom the market cannot cater, but also because the provision of social and affordable housing supports wider housing delivery. We know, for example, that on sites where more than 40% of homes are affordable, build-out rates are twice as fast. Boosting the supply of social and affordable homes is therefore at the heart of our efforts to ramp up housing supply more generally, and to meet housing need and housing demand in full across the country.

[Dr Chowns]

Given that the Minister feels that social housing is so important, can he explain why he will not set a target for it?

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Member will know that we have not set a target as things stand, for the reasons that we have debated on many occasions, but we keep the matter under review.

[Dr Chowns]

The question was why.