Housing: Cost of Living

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The Government have a number of schemes that we are using to support small and medium-sized house builders to help them to provide not only social housing but also private housing. I am happy to write to my noble friend with all that information.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the Affordable Housing Commission, which I had the honour of chairing, has recommended a national fund to enable social housing landlords to acquire and modernise the properties of those private landlords who now want to exit from the market. Does the Minister agree that that would produce an enormously good bang for the buck? Not only would we swiftly get more social housing that was secure for those who lived in it, but we would see the modernisation of properties that need to be decarbonised, thereby reducing fuel poverty at the same time.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Yes, I agree with that. We are seeing some difficulties within the private rented sector because of the issues of the maintenance of these private properties, but also because of the expectations, as the noble Lord said, about the decarbonisation of those properties. That is why we are offering a number of funding streams to SMEs at the moment in order to do that.