King’s Speech

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley. On social care, she is absolutely right.

On housing, the Government’s target of 1.5 million homes is not a policy but a dream. By their own calculations, they are already 400,000 adrift. In London we need 88,000 new homes a year. Last year they finished 6,000. While I welcome all the plans to speed up planning, much of which are now in place, that is not the problem. The number of sites with planning permission not yet built on is more than 1.5 million. The problem is not potential supply but demand. Builders will not build if there is not a buyer. If there is no buyer, it is not just the market buyers who are hit but the people wanting social homes. Following what the right reverend Prelate said on affordable homes, half the social homes are built through Section 106. They are built on the back of market homes. If we do not get the market homes, we do not get the social homes. That hits those in real need.

On 17 December 2024 the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, answered questions on a Statement that stated that there were,

“to our shame as a nation, just shy of 160,000 homeless children living right now in temporary accommodation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/12/24; col. 1057.]

A year later it had risen to over 176,000.

We need to kick-start both markets—market homes and social homes—and we urgently need a successor to Help to Buy for first-time buyers. Most renters want to buy. The average rent is higher than the average mortgage payment. But, without wealthy relatives, many renters simply cannot afford the deposit. This is where we need urgent government action in conjunction with the financial institutions and developers to find a successor to Help to Buy. I note in passing that the Government made a profit of £1.3 billion on Help to Buy.

On remediation, I warmly welcome the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Roe, to chair the building safety regulator. I commend him on the progress he has made in reducing the backlog of approvals for new high-rise homes. But there is a real challenge post Grenfell. Almost nine years later, over half a million people are still living in flats with a fire risk. Less than 20% of buildings over 11 metres high with unsafe cladding have been fixed.

The remediation Bill puts a little meat on the bones of the Government’s remediation acceleration plan, but there are still a range of issues on which leaseholders and I have been campaigning: non-cladding defects are not comprehensively funded; non-qualifying leaseholders continue to face ruinous costs; developers in the developer remediation contract are, in far too many cases, doing the bare minimum and marking their own homework; safety risks are being reassessed as tolerable, with buildings left half safe; building insurance premiums remain eye-watering; leaseholders are still having to pay for waking watches; and shared owners still face problems—they cannot sell because their registered social landlord will not buy, so they are having to sublet.

On funding for buildings under 11 metres with the same sort of cladding as Grenfell, we had an announcement in July 2025, but we still have no details. The BSR’s remediation improvement plan is yet to have an effect on high-rise buildings, with the median approval time now at 46 weeks. Leaseholders and residents are pushed from pillar to post, scrambling for simple answers about their homes.

In opposition, Labour understood that accelerating remediation without fixing the structural problems that I have mentioned would not work and recognised that remediation had to be comprehensive and independently overseen, with leaseholders and residents at the centre. Put simply, some leaseholders in some buildings are protected from the costs to fix some safety defects—that is simply not good enough. I look forward to working with this Government, as I did with the last, to do justice to leaseholders, who are in no way to blame for the misfortune that confronts them.