Social Housing: Mould

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to see the noble Baroness back in post. The Government are absolutely right to come down hard on social housing landlords who have not doing what they should have in keeping their properties up to a decent standard. The ombudsman, the social housing regulator and legislation are all great but the amount of money available for social housing remains the same, and switching resources to getting that older stock up to muster is going to absorb an awful lot of money in the years ahead. Are we going to see quite a big decline in the new affordable social housing that is so badly needed?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

No. Through the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, which, sadly, I did not see the end of, we intend to deliver more social housing. That came out strongly throughout proceedings on that legislation. The noble Lord is right; there are a lot of challenges for the sector in upgrading its stock, after many years of not putting money into it. We will all be working on that. This year we gave £30 million to Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. We wanted to look at how such investment would help them make improvements, and we are looking at that intervention quite closely for the future.