Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Best Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I declare my housing interests as in the register.

I commend the Bill, which introduces a number of legislative changes to enhance the quantity and quality of desperately needed affordable and social housing. I particularly welcome its provisions for constraining the right to buy, for the repeal of the awful and never-enacted measures to enforce sales of the best social housing, for the next steps in the endless story of the Grenfell tragedy, and for greater security for domestic abuse victims. Together, this whole package of measures will make an important difference.

In Committee, I will be bringing forward some modest but important amendments on points of detail, but for this Second Reading debate perhaps I could set the Social Housing Bill in its wider context. The Government have been taking significant steps to increase the output of councils and housing associations. The social housing sector’s subsidy settlement via Homes England, at £39 billion for the next 10 years, is the best since 2010. The national housing bank looks promising, and the agreement for rents to be increased by CPI plus 1% annually for a decade should ensure ongoing management and maintenance costs are properly funded. Other government measures aim to streamline planning consents and get the reluctant housebuilders to allocate a proper proportion of their new homes for social housing. That is all good stuff which will, I hope, produce around 50,000 new affordable homes per annum, more than half at social rents.

However, it is worth remembering that total investment in the social sector is a fraction of its level in times past. The proportion of the nation’s homes represented by council and housing association accommodation has fallen from its peak of 32% to just 17% today, partly due to the more than 2 million sales under the right to buy. The Bill seeks to address this problem of running the bath with the plug out, which should encourage councils to build once again.

Nevertheless, there is one serious omission in the Government’s support for the social housing sector: there is virtually no funding or strategy for the upgrading of hopelessly outdated current housing stock. That includes the leftover 1960s and 1970s prefabricated estates and tower blocks that now need renewing or replacing; the flats over shops in half-abandoned high streets; and the unfit privately rented pre-1919 properties that are long past their sell-by dates. While the Government’s emphasis on adding 1.5 million extra homes over the life of this Parliament is to be greatly applauded—particularly with the emphasis on social housing—it is a serious hole in the Government’s strategy that existing outdated housing is largely ignored. While I welcome the special help for particularly deprived neighbourhoods in the form of the Government’s Pride in Place initiative, this new funding does not stretch to improving existing accommodation. Sadly, the current absolute priority for new building is leaving tens of thousands of tenants in the sort of conditions that led to the untimely death from cold and mould of little Awaab Ishak in Rochdale.

Investment in housing-led regeneration has its own paybacks, with beneficial side-effects that are not always so apparent from the building of new homes: the most hard-hit local economies get a boost; much-needed opportunities emerge for training and apprenticeships for the growing number of NEETs; communities can see and engage with the renewal of their local environments; health and well-being can improve for populations with the worst health records; and hope and aspiration, after years of neglect, can be restored. The Renew project, representing the social housing providers in the northern regions, shows what can be done using devolved powers and funding for pilot schemes. In Greater Manchester, mayoral development corporations—MDCs—with wide powers are busy with major regeneration projects.

In relation to private sector properties in urgent need of upgrading, Blackpool Council, for example, is putting pressure on the worst landlords and taking direct action of its own through a local housing company. Elsewhere, community-based housing organisations are acquiring and modernising the poorest-quality private rented housing. So much more could be done to improve neglected estates and neighbourhoods if regeneration were mainstreamed once again. Maybe the Government’s overdue long-term housing strategy will address this omission. Perhaps the shift in powers to the mayors and combined authorities will lead to greater priority for regeneration activity. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister when the promised national housing strategy can now be expected.

Finally, I will comment on the state of the housing association sector. Mergers and takeovers have led to fewer and much larger organisations, which has brought some downsides. This trend has obvious financial advantages—lower borrowing costs and economies of scale in procurement and employment—but it has meant that some housing associations are geographically widely dispersed and decision-making is distant from those affected. Some of the sector’s broader, housing-related, place-shaping activity—local employment schemes, partnerships with local homelessness charities, civic engagement of staff in local affairs, et cetera—has unfortunately been lost. In return for the help that the Government are now providing and the extra support from this Bill, I hope more of the housing associations will behave like the best in class and increase their sensitivity to their tenants and communities at the local level, regaining the trust and confidence that this sector needs and deserves.