Council Housing

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this timely and important debate and for the excellent speech that he is making. Although he briefly touched on the urgent need before moving on to the longer-term situation, does he agree that in places like Bradford, where we currently have 25,000 people on a waiting list—many are families with young children living in poverty and the same squalid, damp conditions that he mentions—there is an immediate, urgent need? Therefore, as well as asking the Minister how many—

[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but he can see the level of interest in the debate. We must have short interventions, please. Two or three more words and then we will let the hon. Gentleman respond.

[Imran Hussain]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the urgent need requires immediate housebuilding?

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[Chris Hinchliff]

I had better make progress; I am sorry.

Perhaps most importantly of all, if we succeed in delivering council housing in every community, we will take one of the most important steps in fighting the atomisation of our society, which brings so many social ills. If today’s children are able to put down roots wherever they are growing up, should they want to, with no need to move away in search of prospects and a home of their own, then friendships forged at school will no longer need looked back on with regret, as connections that once meant the world but could not survive the splintering imposed by a lack of homes for the young. Similarly, if the next generation is able to grow into adulthood alongside their parents, supporting them through older life will be a natural part of everything we do, not something we struggle to find time for, with the constant sense that we are left snatching for precious moments all too quickly passing by.

If our imaginary hero should fall in love and think about children of their own—and if we deliver council houses now—we can hope for a future in which the choice is simply whether a couple wishes to start a family, not whether they can afford one. Parents will be able to take time out of employment to raise their child and share in all their first memories, rather than living on borrowed time as burdens mount up.

In short, delivering the council homes our country needs to transform our housing market will make possible a society in which all the parts of life that really matter can finally come ahead of the relentless and disproportionate financial costs of housing that we see today.

How, then, do we realise these hopes? First, building a new generation of council housing is being held back by a pile of largely fictitious debt created by central Government. We cannot ask local councils to deliver the homes of tomorrow while burdened by a model that failed yesterday. Armed with even the best intentions, councils remain suffocated by housing revenue account debt; cancelling that HRA debt could deliver more than 280,000 additional social rent homes in the next decade.

To reverse decades of retreat from public house building and restore the public sector as the driving force in our housing market, new funding must come with new powers for local democracy. If we recognise that social housing delivers a public good, its provision cannot be put on a level playing field with speculative land promoters looking to make a quick buck, or be beholden to the supposed right of wealthy landowners to inflate the value of their land to extract more from the public purse. Councils need to be able to assemble all the land we need for developments, large and small, including where it is already optioned, and to acquire land at existing-use prices, so that council house building is viable in every part of the country.

Above all, we must invest in our councils’ institutional capacity to deliver the housing we need. Even with the fairest possible wind, and even if all the economically destabilising military conflicts around the world came to a close, the truth is that, if the Chancellor showered every local authority with all the funding they could want, the expertise and institutional knowledge to use it would no longer be there.

To deliver the council housing that I suspect every MP in this room wants to see, we need to attract the best and brightest in the country to work in our local authorities, whether as an elected member or as an officer. We need to restore the standing of our underfunded, undervalued and overworked councils, so that the whole country can see that a career in local government is the most tangible route to shaping the future of our nation. From town planning to architecture, design, ecology and construction standards, only the very best is good enough for our constituents, so local councils must be where people go to excel.

In our determination to remove the institutional barriers holding back council house building, we cannot undervalue solutions to get families out of temporary accommodation and off waiting lists now. The Prime Minister was right in his recent conference address to set out plans to take control of empty properties. We should back councils to acquire neglected and empty properties at scale. We have seen throughout our modern history that, in times of crisis, our citizens are conscripted for the common good. Where housing lies dormant during an emergency, we must be willing to take the same approach to property.

The truth is that, from the standing start that we have inherited, in which local authorities such as mine have not built a single council house in decades, new house building will take years to ramp up. However, the housing crisis is one that requires urgent resolution. We must therefore make the acquisition of existing properties to rebuild our council housing stock as important a part of the Government’s mission as new builds. With the housing market in the doldrums, we have a much-needed opportunity for councils to purchase and re-let at affordable rates hundreds of thousands of homes across the country, to bring down waiting lists now.

There are, of course, up-front costs, legislative hurdles and, I expect, a mouthful of teething problems, but it is the bitter medicine we must take today to stop the bleeding of public money to those profiting from the broken system. We must never forget that the Government’s £39 billion investment in affordable and social housing is dwarfed by the £70 billion that the Government are set to spend over the next five years on housing support to subsidise the gap between the rents that private landlords charge and what tenants can afford.

The need for the housing is there, and we are already paying for it. The only question before us is whether we turn that spending into a lasting public asset or keep paying over and over again for failure.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman and I remind all Back-Bench colleagues that you should continue to stand up, so that we know you still want to be called. You can see that there is a great deal of interest in this debate. I suggest that you all keep to about two and a half minutes; that way, we will get everybody in.

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[Hannah Spencer (Gorton and Denton) (Green)]

Britain’s housing crisis did not happen by accident. It is the direct result of political choices that placed profit over people. For decades, Governments have chosen to allow the stock of genuine council housing to decline while expecting the private market to pick up the pieces, and it clearly has not.

Across our region of Manchester and Tameside, 3,180 households are in temporary accommodation, including more than 5,000 children. Kids should be thinking about whether they are having their favourite meal for tea, not how they will crowd into accommodation unfit for purpose or facing the prospect of sleeping rough. To pay for temporary accommodation, councils have spent almost £3 billion in the past year, which is a staggering increase of 88% in just five years. That money is going straight into the pockets of private landlords, often to banks and big corporations that call property investments assets rather than homes.

I see what that means for people in Gorton, Denton, Abbey Hey, Burnage, Longsight and Levenshulme every single day. I see domestic abuse survivors paying eye-watering private rents while sat on waiting lists, despite being assessed as a priority, hard-working young people giving up on the dream of ever owning a home of their own, and elderly people who know that they will simply not be able to afford their rent once they retire.

The Green party is clear: we need a new generation of council housing that matches the scale of the challenge before us. That starts with putting an end to the loss of housing stock. Right to buy has removed hundreds of thousands of homes from the social sector, which are often now being rented out by private landlords. To be clear, I do not blame anyone who has bought their council home. The problem is with the policy that allowed affordable homes to be sold off without replacing them. Protecting existing stock is only part of the answer. Councils have to be given the tools and resources to build their own homes and to purchase privately owned ones. It means making better use of public land and helping councils to acquire the hundreds of thousands of long-term empty homes that should be brought back into public use.

The Government can continue to kick the can down the road by spending billions to manage the ever-worsening consequences of the housing crisis, or they can invest in solving it. My message to the Minister is simple: stop the loss of social housing, allow councils to buy homes back into public ownership, build council homes at scale and bring empty homes back into use, introduce rent controls and give councils the powers they need to lead the way. Every family deserves more than a roof over their head. They deserve a place to belong, and council housing remains one of the most effective ways the Government have of making that a reality.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

The good news is that I can be a little more generous and allow you all a whole extra 30 seconds each. With three minutes, I call Josh Newbury.

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[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

Sir Jeremy, it is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairship.

Across the span of one of England’s largest constituencies, housing, or the lack of it, is one of the main drivers of people coming to my constituency surgeries. It is one of the main drivers of people in desperate need of a place to call home, as my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) has just movingly set out. It is an issue that needs to be taken far more seriously, not just in this place but across the country. The particular lack of access to affordable and social housing in some of our most rural communities is something that has escaped much of the national debate in recent years.

Unfortunately, I must say that the Morpeth Conservatives, who run Northumberland county council, are currently engaged in what I can only describe as an ongoing misinformation exercise about the impact of trying to provide more housing. It is very clear to me that what is needed across Northumberland is appropriate development of the homes that are needed to allow people to build lives and communities, and to keep those communities together and functioning, but also to provide long-term stability to young people growing up in those communities, so that they know they will be able to have a life where they have grown up, should they wish to, rather than growing up with their noses pressed against the windows of communities that they will never be able to be part of because they cannot get a home there.

I will not keep colleagues’ attention for too long, but the crucial thing, from where I stand, is delivering those homes in areas where people can have access to them, where they can be rented at a reasonable rate, and, crucially, ensuring that they are not removed from circulation but are accessible to local people, so that those people can work in the pubs, shops and businesses that keep the lifeblood of our communities moving.

Without that, we will continue to see younger people forced out of rural communities, forced to leave their families and unable to care for their elderly relatives. That is something that comes up far too often—time and again—in my regular constituency surgeries.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

I thank the Back-Bench speakers for their co-operation and discipline. We now come to the Front-Bench speeches, beginning with the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

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[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

In the interests of order, I should probably make it clear that other private Members’ Bills are available.