Social Housing Bill [Lords]

Gideon Amos Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 10th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my experience as a social landlord.

The Liberal Democrats have long called for a major programme of social housing—150,000 homes per year—so there are elements of the Bill that we welcome and we will support it today. Extending the qualifying period to 10 years and cutting discounts will slow the loss of social homes, as we have been hearing. Protecting a newly built social home from sale for 35 years should give councils more confidence to build again, as will the improved right of first refusal. The protections for tenants fleeing domestic abuse are welcome and overdue, and we support them. So there are important steps in the right direction, but the Bill as a whole is nowhere near the scale of what is needed.

As other hon. Members have pointed out, right to buy was not on its own the biggest issue; it was the complete failure to replace properties, home for home. Thanks to the Conservatives, in Taunton and Wellington, as in the rest of the country, there are thousands fewer council homes than there used to be, all while the need for social housing has grown and grown. There are 4 million fewer council houses in this country than there were in 1980. Even taking into account replacements, social housing and registered social landlords, the number of social homes in this country has dropped by 1.5 million homes.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I agree with the majority of what the hon. Gentleman has said so far; he may come on to things that I do not agree with later in his speech, but we will have to wait and see. Will he reflect on the fact that the impact of councils losing their council housing stock has been that they have had to spend more and more money on temporary accommodation? It is a zero-sum game for local councils and the impact on families and young people has been particularly difficult, including in my constituency of Harlow.

[Gideon Amos]

I thank the hon. Member for I forget where—he does not mention it very often, but maybe it is Harlow. He is right and I will come to exactly that point about temporary accommodation.

The Resolution Foundation found that only one home was replaced for every five sold. That is a direct failure of Governments of all persuasions to build enough social housing. The Conservatives reversed their policy of allowing councils to spend 100% of receipts soon after they introduced it. In comparison, in 2004, a Labour Government required three quarters of receipts to be sent straight to the Treasury. Homes were sold at around half their value, and what money there was from receipts went elsewhere, not into building new social homes, and building rates plummeted.

I am glad that the new Prime Minister talks a good game on devolution, but even under the measures in this Bill, councils will remain unable to stop the loss of council homes from right to buy. The Liberal Democrats would give councils that power to end right to buy in their areas, if that is right for them and their communities. The Government should trust councils to understand their communities and their own housing markets.

When it comes to the Conservatives, who seem to be chasing their ideological bedfellows in the Reform party, apparently the priority is not building housing; it is finding a minority to blame for the problem—a group to alienate as “the other” when we should be focusing on building for the whole of the UK and everyone who lives here. Their amendment banning people who are not full British citizens from social housing overlooks the fact that people subject to immigration control are already ineligible for social housing—that is the law—but they want to go further.

The nurse on the ward at Musgrove Park hospital, in my constituency, would not be welcome under this Conservative amendment and would not be allowed to have a social home or a council house. The care worker who looked after people during the pandemic would not be welcome under this Conservative amendment. Under a Conservative Government, they would have nowhere to live when it comes to council and social housing. That is ironic for a party that has produced two Prime Ministers born outside Britain. As the Member of Parliament for Taunton and Wellington, I do not know whether I should inform his grace the Duke of Wellington that the first Duke of Wellington would not fully be a British citizen under the Conservative amendment tabled today because he was born outside Britain.

[Gareth Bacon]

That is total rubbish!

[Gideon Amos]

I suggest the hon. Gentleman reads the Conservative amendment that refers to reserving social housing for British citizens.

[Gareth Bacon]

The Duke of Wellington was British.

[Gideon Amos]

No, the Duke of Wellington was not born in Britain—the hon. Gentleman needs to have a look at his history books—[Interruption.] Regardless of the history of the Duke of Wellington, attempts to use the Bill to pump up divisive culture-war claptrap does not deserve our attention. Rather than pointing the finger of blame at minorities, we should be talking about how to build more social homes, and that is exactly what I will go on to do.

The failure to replace social homes, among other factors, means that more and more people are in temporary accommodation. There are 132,000 households in temporary accommodation, and councils spent £2.8 billion on it last year. The scourge of poor-quality temporary accommodation exists for far too many children, and that is why we need a big public housing programme to match the scale of the challenge. If for no other reason, we must do that because it is incumbent on all of us in this House, across parties, to end the tragic loss of children’s lives. The Shared Health Foundation has highlighted that temporary accommodation was found by a coroner to be a contributing factor in the deaths of 104 children in the last five years.

[Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)]

I have almost 180 families in Woking in temporary accommodation, and it is tragic for them. Some 20 of them are located outside the borough. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to ensure councils can locate people in temporary accommodation locally so that it does not devastate their lives as much as it does at the moment?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. People should be able to stay in their communities, and we need local, affordable housing and social housing at scale to deal with that issue.

[Richard Quigley (Isle of Wight West) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Tory idea of capping the local housing allowance would mean that families who cannot afford to stay in their area will have to move out of the area, tear their children out of school and turn their lives upside down?

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the local housing allowance and the huge effect that it has on local families and housing markets. It needs to be uprated. I must return to my speech, or you will start giving me looks, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Among other things, we must free up councils to build. My Lib Dem colleagues on Somerset council would build 600 council houses; they are already building council housing in parts of the county for the first time in a generation. The council has sites for another 600 houses and wants to build them, but it does not have the headroom in its housing revenue account. The Government promised to confirm their approach to a discounted borrowing rate for housing revenue accounts in the autumn, so we and councils eagerly await that news. If Ministers will not raise the £3.9 billion per year to the £6 billion per year that we have put in our manifesto for social housing, will they use some additional funds to write off some or all of that housing revenue account debt so that councils such as Somerset can get building again, as Shelter and others have called for?

On the scale of the need, the Government have reannounced that 60% of their programme for 300,000 homes will be social housing, which is 18,000 a year. That is welcome, but when that was first announced in July 2025, we said that it was not enough, and reannouncing it this summer does not make it enough. Will the Government raise the target for social homes—if not to our target of 150,000, then to a number higher than 18,000 a year?

In addition, the Bill does very little to address the unique issues of affordable housing in rural areas. In Taunton and Wellington, all that people are seeing is unprecedented plans for private housing, which many cannot afford. The council has been instructed to consent homes for 180,000 people in the next 15 years. The population of Somerset has never grown by 25% in any 15-year period in its history, and it will not do so in the next 15 years, but acres of beautiful countryside will be gobbled up for private housing permissions that many people in my constituency cannot afford.

Proposals to eat up the green belt have a consequence for social housing. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) has brought to my attention an inspector’s decision in Gweek in Cornwall, following the Minister’s own policies, in which all social housing was removed from a previous consent on appeal, because, under new, mandatory Government housing targets, the new five-year supply could not be met. All private housing must now be allowed, and all social housing must be removed from the scheme. That needs to be addressed.

However, this is not just an issue in Cornwall. Most of England—at least, most of southern England—is covered by councils that, thanks to the new standard method, can no longer achieve the new five-year land supply. With the majority of those councils, we have a planning free-for-all in which social homes are not being safeguarded. The standard method has to go. We should replace it with a return to properly researched household projections that take into account movements between regions and safeguard exception sites for social housing, which are being lost. Fortunately, my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives has thought about this issue, and he has a Bill that would do exactly that. Permission in principle capped at nine dwellings sits below the affordable housing threshold, so that, too, means that sites are being lost.

The Government’s Bill does protect rural social homes from being sold, which I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues welcome. However, as long as the planning system that runs alongside it closes down the supply of new ones, it will simply not be enough. Overall, this Bill does not go far enough. In contrast, our Liberal Democrat Housing Bill—I had the privilege of presenting it to Madam Deputy Speaker not so long ago—would establish a target of 150,000 new social homes a year, including a new wave of rent to own, allowing young people to get on the housing ladder. It would require the Secretary of State to report on progress on meeting that target and would give local authorities the proper powers over social housing they will need to achieve it, including the right to end the right to buy in their area if it is right for them and their community. That is the Liberal Democrat vision for a revolution in the delivery of social homes, and I commend it to the House.