Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is either the market or the state; that seems to be the argument.

In 2017, I went to a city that was having problems with a whole bevy of people. What we did was to try to reorientate the way that local charities worked together. One of the things that really interested me was getting charities working with businesses. I am very interested in the idea that you get businesses to trade with charities so that money does not really pass hands, because the businesses have to spend and the charities have the need.

We identified a housing association that wanted to expand its work. It had gardening facilities; it had painting, decorating and repairing and all that. It wanted to expand but was very limited in this very small town. I went to talk to estate agents—the most evil people on God’s earth, according to some—and I said, “Look, what you’re doing is buying services, because you’ve got 150 or 250 buy to rents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you bought the services from a housing association? You would pay the same rate”. It would also help the housing association to address a problem that nobody talks about. I have not heard anybody say—excuse me, I have put too much glue in my teeth. I am getting them redone in Turkey soon, so that I will not have the problem.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Anyway, to address the problem which I have not heard anybody mention: why is it that if you live in social housing—if you are the child of social housing—you have about a 2% chance, as a child, of finishing whatever levels you do to leave school and then getting into university or a highly skilled job? I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Best, about this when I first came into the House. The problem we were trying to address in that little city was that 70% of the people living in social housing were unemployed. We have to face that, and I do not see any provision in this Bill for creating the opportunity.

I believe in social mobility, like the noble Lord, Lord Bailey. What I do not like about what he says—forgive me my trespasses; he is a Conservative, so I cannot agree with him, even though we come from the same neck of the woods, up there in Notting Hill—is that the only way you can get social mobility is through a housing purchase by your family. Why is that? I know it is true, and I know hundreds of people who have done it, but why has social housing changed so much from the days when our Minister was moving to Stevenage?

Why is it that social housing is now nothing like what it was? Having been brought up in the slums of Notting Hill, I was stuck in a Catholic orphanage for a few years and then moved to Fulham, where we were in a block of flats and had a toilet that we shared with no one, whereas when we lived in the slums, we had to queue up if we wanted to do our business. We might have had to wait two days for certain services that you would want in a toilet, but there we had our own beautiful piece of social housing. In that block of flats were trainee police officers, trainee teachers, drivers and all sorts of people, including disabled people and those who were old. It was sociable and socially mixed.

Unfortunately, what has happened to social housing is that it is under threat. It is under threat because the bar has been raised by local authorities and now it takes only the most desperate, largely, whereas in the good old days it was a reflection of the working class, the upper working class and even the lower middle class. Until we address the issue of around 70% of people living in social housing not having a job—they are stuck and their children are stuck—the arguments around it will go on, but we need to address the poverty that is thrown up but not addressed at this moment. It is certainly not addressed in the Bill.

I am a great believer in social mobility. I am a perfect example of it; I am as posh as anything now, though I did not start poshly. But I would love to see a situation where social housing was addressed as a place of great opportunity, great security and great comfort, so that it becomes what virtually everybody here today has described as the beginning of a new future. Unfortunately, for too many people it is not a beginning of a new future. It is a place where you and your family are parked for maybe the next 100 years.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I will speak to my Amendment 116. The Government are charging us all with getting behind the idea that there will be 1.5 million new houses by the end of the Parliament. I suggest that one way you could achieve that is by being serious about the number of empty homes in the United Kingdom, particularly England. There are 250,000 empty homes in England and, at the same time, 164,000 children and 124,000 families are caught in temporary accommodation. I am not saying it would be easy, but you could be wise and do nationally what Manchester, Plymouth and Wales are trying to do: incorporate empty homes into the fabric of their housing strategies. If that could be done, it would be a real plus.

I was born in Notting Hill, which was full of empty homes in the post-war period, along with Bayswater and that area. The middle classes did not go off to the colonies any more; they went to Bayswater and to Notting Hill, and they started to convert these voids into precious homes. Environmentally and socially, it was wonderful. It got too wonderful: the house that I was born into, which was a slum, would now cost about £20 million—if they have not pulled it down because it was such a slum.

Overall, it would be a good idea for the Government to say that they are going to empty our temporary accommodation and look at new ways of doing that that incorporate buildings that are left empty for over six months. Some 250,000 houses are screaming out, in my opinion, for us to intervene. There would be all sorts of problems because some people would find it inappropriate, but, if the Government were serious about this, those homes could be put to much more use. You could start kicking a hole in that required 1.5 million.

What the noble Lord, Lord Young, said was wonderful. If we spend all the money on new houses, what are we going to do about those failing estates and the voids? What are we going to do about the fact that many local authorities and housing associations cannot afford to convert void houses that are boarded up? This Government have to have a strategy on empty homes. I do not see that in the strategy at the moment.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly to say that the regeneration of some of our social estates is a high priority. The last Labour Government spent a lot of money regenerating city centres. I hope that, if they have long enough, this Labour Government will give a similar high priority to the regeneration of some of our social estates.

It has not been easy, and more difficult in some respects, given the right to buy. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, regeneration takes a long time— 10 or 20 years—so it is difficult to see easy or quick returns, and resources are a huge problem. To achieve the regeneration of these estates, often you need partnerships, not just the local authority but housing associations and private developers. There is obviously an important role for mayors in this as well as we progress.

The main experience that I have had is of the Rowner estate, in Gosport, which was a Royal Naval estate. It was in huge dereliction after the Navy left its responsibilities. The regeneration of that estate has taken 30 years, with a genuine partnership that involved quite difficult decisions, such as the decision that to regenerate it would require it to be turned into an estate that was one-third owner-occupied, one-third private rented and one-third social housing. The transformation has been remarkable. There are many estates up and down our land that are neglected and need an initiative from the Government. In the rush to get high numbers of new houses, we must not forget the regeneration of our older estates.