Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, as an adviser to development forums in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cheshire and the Thames Valley, and as a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation.

I am glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, because she made a number of interesting points, one of which I want to add to, if I may. I was pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who said many things that will help to inform our debate and get us beyond what might otherwise be an unhelpful polarisation between those of us who believe from experience that the right to buy is a successful policy that should be continued and those who for other, perhaps ideological, reasons want to restrict the right to buy.

There is a practical point about how right to buy should be managed. For example, if the Government wanted to reduce the discount and chose to do so, there would be an unwelcome practical implication for those who had legitimate expectations that they would be able, after a number of years, to exercise the right to buy. I think they should, at the very least, be able to continue to exercise the right to buy on the understanding that they would continue to occupy the house for a long period, and that if they cannot commit to that, or to the right of repurchase by the local authority, they should not be able to exercise the right to buy. There are ways in which we should be able to support right to buy, rather than simply restrict it.

The point I want to come back to, which the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, helpfully made, is the distinction between affordable and social housing. I hope that where we are at the moment in the debate on this Bill and associated issues is looking at increasing the supply of homes for social rent. I am afraid we are very far from where we need to be. From my work in development forums, I know that many developers are unable to secure purchases by housing associations and registered providers of contracts for the supply of affordable housing. That is impinging on the number of homes that are available for social rent. Roughly one-quarter of what they are providing is for social rent, so that is probably 30,000 affordable homes coming through the Section 106 route, of which probably no more than 7,000 are homes for social rent.

Homes England is, correctly, pursuing an increased social and affordable housing programme, but, even if that achieves the 60% social rent composition that Homes England is aiming for, that would mean a maximum of 18,000 homes for social rent a year, and I will be very surprised if it manages to reach that figure. We are probably looking at no more than about 25,000 homes for social rent in total, but the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, who is not presently in her place, was talking about housing federations and the like looking for up to 90,000 additional homes for social rent. I do not know how we can possibly reach that figure.

However, I say to the Minister that if it is not even necessarily part of the scope of this Bill, it is important for us to look at additional ways in which we can generate capital to support investment in additional, affordable and, in particular, social housing. I suggest that she has a look at the Legal & General report, published in April this year, which looked at the possibility of, as it were, energising the latent value in the social housing stock for the purposes of reinvestment into new social housing. That is what many noble Lords on all sides of the House are looking for. The report essentially proposes that housing associations—and the same principle could be applied to council housing stock, where it exists—take the latent value and say, “Let’s transfer this as a large-scale transfer into a partnership provider”, where the partnership is with institutional investors who are looking for long-term investments with an index-linked source of income, which, of course, is what we now have by virtue of the CPI plus-1% increase in rents.

So there is the possibility of generating additional capital that can then be reinvested back, directly through the housing associations, into additional affordable housing. Legal & General’s estimate is that, if this were done for about one-third of the total housing stock in housing associations, it could lead to as many as 8,000 additional social homes per year, representing roughly one-third of the total of affordable homes that could be funded as a consequence of such a major project. Time does not permit me to talk more about this but I hope that Ministers will look actively at it. I would be pleased if they were able, with officials, to engage with this report and its possibilities, and with the housing associations and the local authority sector, to see whether we can create a new programme that would deliver that degree of value, because at the moment we have housing revenue accounts that are cash constrained and housing registered providers who are cash constrained with all the costs of maintenance, building and so on. We have to find ways in which we can realise their asset value in order to overcome their present cash constraints.