Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I certainly support this Bill, which will help with the operation of the right-to-buy scheme. I was doubtful about right to buy when it first came in, but I do not now support its abolition in any sense, although I recognise that in Wales and Scotland they have found it necessary to do so. But it needs to be subject to some additional measures.

I support the provisions in this Bill. I have long thought that the qualification of the length of time that a person has to be a tenant of the council before they have the right to buy has been too short, and we are addressing that. I recognise that the Bill provides that new build is not subject to the immediate right to buy for 35 years. I strongly support the provisions in this Bill relating to people suffering domestic abuse. I also recognise what others have said: it is a question not simply of giving the tenancy to the abused spouse or partner but of making sure that she—it is normally she but sometimes he—does not suffer additional abuse by finding an alternative safer location for them. These measures are important for making right to buy operate more easily and to protect existing tenants.

However, I cannot help but feel a little disappointment that the Social Housing Bill that I saw in the initial list of provision for this Session of Parliament is so limited. We have a situation in which the market in every form of tenure of housing in this country is in total crisis, and particularly the social housing element is in crisis. Thousands of people cannot ever envisage being given any social housing. We have councils that do not provide any social housing and we have numbers of people who are stuck in property that requires new input to bring it up to the safe standards that are required. We see the health of our children being endangered by the dampness and unhealthy conditions in some of our social housing. All those things need addressing, but they all need money.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said at the beginning, we need to have a guarantee that money goes back into the social housing sector. I understand the clear exposition from the noble Lord, Lord Young, as to why the need to recycle the money was not followed by successive Governments, whether it was in the hands of the Treasury or the local authorities, and we deplore that. But from now on should we not, by some mechanism or another—the Treasury, after all, has mechanisms for ensuring that departments and local authorities spend money in many different directions—establish the principle that the money received for the disposal of right-to-buy homes goes back to create greater and more improved social housing? If that is not done, we will again go through the process that the noble Lord, Lord Young, described, and end up with the fact that social housing for those who really need it is not available.

I hope that, if we require a broader housing Bill, which I hope the Minister will be able to produce in the coming months, or at least in the next Session of Parliament, there is a new approach to social housing. I do mean social housing, not the broad definition of affordable housing; the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, was absolutely right to say that that confuses the issue. We mean social housing, and we need to ensure that resources are directed to people who can deliver social housing. That requires a lot of things to happen: it requires changes in planning laws, and changes to ensure that the construction industry itself is capable of doing this, which probably requires tackling the oligopoly of big housebuilders and developers, which tend to dominate and persuade local authorities that social housing is actually not a good idea because they cannot make enough money out of it. We need to make an approach on lots of different fronts to get the new social housing delivered, but we should start from the premise that what goes out of the social housing sector should go back in. There must be an obligation on local authorities and the department to produce a new form of legislation and new mechanisms to ensure that happens.

I hope my noble friend the Minister can give me the assurance that at some time in the foreseeable future we will see another Bill to ensure that the level of social housing is kept up and that therefore we see an end to the terrible situation whereby the lack of social housing at present creates misery. A failure in housing policy for many years needs to be addressed by this Government, and I hope that the Minister can give us an assurance that that will indeed happen.