Social Housing Bill [Lords]

Luke Murphy Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 10th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

Indeed. That is precisely why we are introducing the notification window: we want to give local authorities and other providers the maximum opportunity to bring those homes back under their control. It is just as important that they are able to do so in practice. There are other issues affecting local authorities. A number of my hon. Friends in oral questions at the start of the week spoke about pressures on housing revenue accounts. All those issues are bearing down on the ability of councils to buy homes. We are looking at reforms to this area, not least the cap on acquisitions.

[Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will make a bit of progress, because there are a lot of Members who want to speak, but I will come back to my hon. Friend later.

I now turn to the Bill’s second core objective: increasing protections for tenants who are victims of domestic abuse. No one should be forced to remain in an unsafe situation because they fear becoming homeless, yet last year about 15,000 households in England had to find a new social home as a result of domestic abuse. Existing legislation provides scant protection for social housing tenants who are victims of domestic abuse and who wish to remain in their current home without their abuser. Landlords can evict perpetrators, but only in cases where the victim has already left. That means that all too often victims are forced to choose between staying in danger or losing their home. This is an utterly unacceptable state of affairs, and through the Bill, we will end it, as part of our Department’s ongoing efforts to deliver the Government’s unprecedented commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

I am not going to give way. Madam Deputy Speaker is glaring at me because I am taking too much time. I know that many Members want to speak. I will try to come back to colleagues as I progress through my remarks.

To ensure that victims of domestic abuse can access safe and secure housing, the Bill provides for stronger legal mechanisms to remove a perpetrator from a social housing tenancy and enable victims to stay in their home or move to alternative accommodation as a sole tenant. In response to constructive debate on the subject in the other place, we intend to bolster the discretionary possession ground so that the existence of a relevant protective order can provide the basis for proceedings, rather than evidence that the order has already been breached being required. The new powers will apply where the victim is personally connected to the perpetrator tenant and is a current or former occupant of the property. By aligning the approach with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, the Bill will cover a broader range of relationships, including partners, former partners and family members.

The Bill’s third core objective is reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and providing regulatory clarity so that providers can invest in new social and affordable homes with confidence. The Housing and Planning Act 2016—incidentally, the Bill Committee of which I happened to serve on as a young Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then shadow Housing Secretary, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey)—contains a series of social housing provisions that have never been brought into force. The Bill will repeal the following measures to clarify the statute book and provide the sector with certainty that they will never be implemented. First, this Government have no intention of implementing provisions that would have required councils to charge higher rents to higher-income social tenants, also known as mandatory pay to stay. The policy could have incentivised tenants to reduce work hours to avoid higher rent, so we are removing it from the statute book.

Secondly, the Bill will repeal provisions that would have required councils to grant fixed-term tenancies of between two years and 10 years generally to all new tenants. This Government will continue to encourage landlords to make the best and most effective use of their homes to meet housing need, but we have no intention of prohibiting lifetime secure tenancies, which provide much-needed security for many households and support social mobility, and so we are removing that policy from the statute book.

Thirdly, the Bill will repeal provisions that would have required councils to sell off higher-value vacant housing stock and make annual payments in respect of expected sales to the Treasury. This Government have no intention of implementing this policy and want to see these assets remain for councils to manage and use as they see fit, so we are removing it from the statute book.

As well as repealing provisions from the 2016 Act, the Bill reforms the outdated housing consents regime, which can be time consuming and resource intensive for councils and often leads to delays in delivering new social and affordable housing. The Bill will streamline the consents process to empower councils and remove bureaucratic impediments that restrict councils’ flexibility in managing their housing stock, while retaining checks and protections where appropriate.

Did my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) want to intervene?

[Luke Murphy]

indicated dissent.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Or have I caught him unprepared? I was going to give him a chance there.

To conclude, after years of marginalisation, this Government have emphatically and unashamedly asserted the necessity and value of social rented homes. They are a crucial national asset to be proud of, to invest in, to protect and to maintain. This Bill will protect precious social homes for future generations and incentivise the building of many more of them. It will give social housing providers the confidence they need to invest in new social and affordable homes, and it will support social tenants who are victims and survivors of domestic abuse.

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[Gareth Bacon]

That is very well put by my right hon. Friend.

The Government do nothing to prioritise building. The Bill will not add a single social home to the housing stock. The Government are seeking to heal an illness before they have properly diagnosed it, and are offering a solution to a problem to which there is already an answer. If they were serious about reforming the right to buy and building more homes at the same time, perhaps they would look at how proper management and effective reinvestment of receipts could lead to an increase in housing supply, especially on brownfield sites. As my colleagues in the other place noted, it is better for everyone and for the economy if we make two homes out of one. Through efficient, productive and successful management of right-to-buy receipts, we can both sell a family home and support a family on the waiting list into another one. As homelessness peaks at record levels and the number of children in temporary accommodation reaches a dizzying summit of 178,000, it beggars belief that the Government are not looking at that more closely.

However, I recognise that house building is not an overnight fix; it takes time, but for many families on the waiting list, that is something they simply do not have. We must therefore consider how best to free up existing stock to support those most in need.

[Luke Murphy]

The shadow Minister is giving his view eloquently on social housing, but in 2010, the then coalition Government cut the affordable housing budget by 60%. Five years later, there was a 97% fall in the building of social rent homes. Would he like to apologise to the House for that record?

[Gareth Bacon]

I listened to what the hon. Gentleman said. Of course, one of the things we do not get from Government Members is any commentary at all about the state of the economy in 2010, after 13 years of their party being in power. The public finances had to be right-sized—the country was heading towards bankruptcy. They are happy to disown their record and criticise everybody who followed, but perhaps it would be slightly more honest if they prefaced their arguments with an acknowledgement of that.

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[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak opposite the new Minister, with whom I very much enjoyed working on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. Now that she is on the Government Front Bench, I suppose it is left to me to ask the tough questions.

The Government have said that the Bill has been designed to encourage social housing providers to invest in the building of new socially rented homes. They want to encourage councils to build by restricting right to buy. That is the wrong approach. Yes, waiting lists for councils homes are far too high, but making it harder for tenants to get on in life and escape the clutches of the public sector is not the right solution. Instead, Ministers should look at what their policies are doing. Despite their promises, Labour is going backwards on house building.

As our reasoned amendment states, last year there were

“12,810 fewer net additional dwellings delivered in England compared to the previous year”.

Why are the Government not pledging to take on the developers, who are sitting on thousands of unbuilt planning applications? The Institute for Public Policy Research—Labour’s favourite think-tank—has found that 1.4 million homes have been left unbuilt since 2007, despite planning permission being granted. The figure of 1.4 million homes sounds rather close to the Government’s challenging target of 1.5 million new homes.

People are fed up with the eyesores in their neighbourhood—levelled ground left abandoned, surrounded by hoardings. I can show the Minister many examples in my Broxbourne constituency, and I am sure that hon. Members from right across the House can do the same. Taking on the land-banking developers would have widespread public support, but this Government only seem interested in making it easier to build on the green belt. We are still waiting for them to reveal what action they are taking to speed up building following the consultations held more than 12 months ago, so there is clearly no urgency.

The Government should also consider who should be eligible for the help of a social home. People who come to this country and wish to live here should not rely on the generosity of taxpayers. Making Britain your home should be earned by working hard and integrating; it should not come with a free ride on the benefits system. That is why the Conservative party will end social housing tenancies for foreign nationals. Ensuring that only UK nationals can access social housing would free up 230,000 homes for British families. That change would make an immediate and significant difference to those stuck on council house waiting lists, but the Government would prefer that they sit around waiting for the Bill.

Sadly, this Government, and especially their Back Benchers, are blinded by their ideological dislike of right to buy. It is clearly—[Interruption.] A number of Members have asked where Conservative Members were today. As I said in a Westminster Hall debate, Members of Parliament have a lot to deal with. When we do surgeries in our constituencies and people say, “When I turn on the TV, I see hardly anyone in the Chamber,” we all explain why that is. I suspect there will be times when all hon. Members cannot make it to important debates that their constituents want them to attend.

It is clearly the view of Labour Members that if we had no right to buy, social housing waiting lists would disappear, but where do they think the 2 million families that have utilised the scheme would be without it? Well, I can tell them: they would probably be in the same home, but it would be subsidised by the taxpayer rather than privately owned. Abolishing right to buy is not the silver bullet that they think it is.

The Government are placing huge burdens on social housing providers to help Ministers meet their own net zero targets. The cost of complying with new energy regulations is causing significant pressure, and getting 713,000 homes up to minimum energy efficiency standards is estimated to cost £4.5 billion. The Chartered Institute of Housing told the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee that housing associations do not want to buy properties with gas boilers because they know that it will cost them more money to strip them out and make properties energy efficient. That is pushing up council house waiting lists.

The National Housing Federation is clear about what that means: spending billions to comply with net zero regulations will make it harder to build new homes. Ministers already know this, as they reduced energy efficiency targets for social housing in January on the basis that providers could not build new homes because of the financial burden of upgrading their existing stock. If Ministers want councils to be incentivised to build, entirely getting rid of those expensive regulations would be a good place to start.

What is positive in the Bill is the review of the shared ownership scheme, and I hope the Minister, when she gets to her feet, can confirm that the Government intend to keep that review in the Bill. This obligation was added by the Government only due to the diligent work of the Conservative team in the other place. I have lived in a shared ownership property, and I know that—as for other forms of ownership, such as leasehold—reforms are desperately needed to fix the many problems residents face. The Opposition agree that the provisions to protect victims of domestic violence are needed, but a separate legislative measure would have been the right way to bring those forward.

I gently say to the many hon. Members who have made impassioned speeches that, when I was a council leader, I had a number of meetings with housing providers and housing associations, and not once in the hundreds of hours of meetings I had with social housing providers did they say to me that they could not build new social homes in Broxbourne, or in fact across the country, because of the right to buy. It was never mentioned as a reason why housing associations are not building social homes.

[Luke Murphy]

Providers did, however, when the Conservatives were in government, point to the 60% cut in the affordable housing budget, which nearly led to the abolition of social rent under the Conservative Government. There was a 97% reduction in builds between 2010 and 2016; that is the record that the hon. Member’s party stands on.

[Lewis Cocking]

The hon. Member has intervened on me quite a lot, and we have had quite a ding-dong in this Chamber. I say gently to him that when I speak to housing providers, they tell me that one of the reasons why they cannot build new social homes is the Government’s increase to employer national insurance contributions, which means that they spend more money on taxes, rather than on building new social homes.

In summary, this Bill is the wrong approach, and it is fundamentally built on the wrong beliefs. It will not build a single new social home, but it will deny many families the opportunity of ever owning a home of their own. The Conservative party will always be on the side of aspiration and opportunity, and that is why we will vote for our reasoned amendment.