Council Housing

Debate between Richard Burgon and Chris Hinchliff

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the delivery of council housing.

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Jeremy. I must declare an interest as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on council and social housing, for which Shelter expertly provides the secretariat. The APPG is currently undertaking an inquiry into barriers to council house building and the solutions required. Although I do not want to overly pre-empt our findings today, I do want to take the opportunity to invite the Minister to attend the launch of the report from that inquiry, and I invite hon. Members across the Chamber today to attend the evidence sessions we are currently holding, including that taking place shortly after this debate.

Given the imminent Budget, I will not ask the Minister for lots of spending commitments today. Instead, I would be grateful if he could answer just one specific question: will he put a number on what is meant by

“the biggest council house building programme”

since the end of the post-war period? I think we would all be interested to know what precise target the Government are setting.

I am keen to be optimistic and positive in my contribution today, so I will get the polemical bits out of the way first. There is, I am afraid, a nasty strain of ideology infecting political circles these days that seems to think of our fellow citizens as a lumpen mass of incorrigible misanthropes motivated only by mercenary selfishness and having no care for the good of their wider community when it comes to housing and development. That is certainly not my experience. It says more about the miserabilism of the so-called YIMBY—yes, in my backyard—movement than it does about those they accuse. There is no public support barrier to building high-quality homes in the towns and villages in my constituency. Indeed, people are crying out for it. When the public tell us they do not want this particular rubbish, the problem is the rubbish, not the public.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this vital debate; he is right. People in Leeds and across the country know there is a council house crisis and they support, I believe, Shelter’s campaign for the Government to make national council house building a mission, because building council houses not only provides homes; it is a bit like rent controls. An intervention in the private market can bring rents down because the private sector cannot solve the council house crisis and the housing crisis. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I completely agree. We have seen for many years that the market cannot solve this problem. In fact, it speaks to a rotten lack of ambition that the political response to children living in cramped, damp and overcrowded conditions has so often been to demand that we lower our expectations for the future, promising that the only way to get families out of temporary accommodation is to reduce insulation standards, concrete over the countryside and ignore risks such as flooding and the lack of infrastructure. Then, it might be more profitable for developers to cast their crumbs down to our communities. What a tragic irony that we are told that the only way to rescue families from low-quality emergency housing is by lowering the standards of the permanent homes we build instead. The problem was never that our standards were too high. It was the surrender to neoliberal capitalism and the lack of political will that accompanied its hollowing out of our state’s capacity to function that stopped the building of decent, affordable homes at scale.

Secondly, it is worth paraphrasing Keynes early on in this debate by reiterating that claiming it does not pay to house the people of this country in affordable, high-quality housing is one of the most dismal notions ever advanced by modern economics. We have the technology and the capacity to house everyone safely, comfortably and in beautiful surroundings. If private capital says it is not profitable enough to do so, the problem is with the economic model, not with the hope for our nation’s future.

Having dispensed with those points, before we get to the question of how, I want to dwell briefly on the possibilities of a future in which the Labour Government achieve their council housing goals. When we debate this subject, we often focus—and rightly so—on the immediate crisis and urgent need that council housing can alleviate, but the power of council housing to transform the future of our society does not end there.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity

Debate between Richard Burgon and Chris Hinchliff

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered environmental protections and biodiversity trends.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Roger. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this will be one of my longer speeches, so I had better not take too many interventions. Let me also say at the outset that this speech is intended first and foremost to support and encourage the Minister in the task ahead of her. She has one of the most important jobs for the whole Government and for the future of the country.

On that upbeat note, I turn to the litany of despair that constitutes a brief review of biodiversity trends in this country. Not a single one of England’s rivers is in good overall health. The same is true of our sea floor. Just 7% of our woodland is in good condition. Half of England’s hedgerows, which now should be bursting into bud and sprays of blossom, have been ripped up and grubbed out. Eighty-five per cent of our heathland is gone, as are 95% of our chalk downland meadows—the European equivalent of tropical rainforests. Our traditional orchards have declined by 81%, and 85% of England’s salt marshes have also been lost.

It is little wonder that one in six species in these islands is at risk of extinction. The scale of the wealth that we have squandered in pursuit of vapid notions of progress is staggering. It is more than just depressing; it is an existential threat to our way of life. The Government’s recent national security report on biodiversity loss confirmed that the collapse of nature is putting at risk the ecosystem services on which our society depends.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He is making it clear that biodiversity and our natural environment are in complete crisis. Given that, would he agree that the slogan “Back the builders, not the blockers” is one of the worst slogans that the Labour party has ever come up with? People do care about local democracy, biodiversity and nature, so that slogan should be put in the bin, where it belongs—the recycling bin, of course.

Provision of Council Housing

Debate between Richard Burgon and Chris Hinchliff

Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff]

I agree with my hon. Friend and will come to right to buy later in my speech.

As Bevan described,

“the speculative builder, by his very nature, is not a plannable instrument.”—[Official Report, 6 March 1946; Vol. 420, c. 451.]

They build what makes them most money, while we need our councils empowered to assess the needs of their communities and directly deliver for them, because that is in the public interest.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend extensively quotes Aneurin Bevan, a man with whom he shares the honour of being unfairly suspended from the parliamentary Labour party. I am sure that, like Aneurin Bevan, he will return and go on to deliver greater things. Does he agree that a mass council house building programme could help to drive down rents in the private sector, because it is the lack of council house provision that has allowed private rents to rocket, pricing people out?

[Chris Hinchliff]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct in his assessment of one of the many benefits of council housing.

The provision of council housing is uniquely important for meeting the Government’s objectives, because of the risk in designing housing policy around a target delivered by a market over which we have limited control. Once again, Bevan was right when he said that committing to general housing targets would be “crystal gazing” and “demagogic”. He also stated:

“The fact is that if at this moment we attempted to say that, by a certain date, we will be building a certain number of houses, that statement would rest upon no firm basis of veracity”.—[Official Report, 17 October 1945; Vol. 414, c. 1232.]

It is only with council housing supplied directly by public authorities that we can give real confidence to the electorate in our ability to deliver. The last time we were building 300,000 homes a year, nearly half the total was council housing, and if we want to secure an increase in construction to 1.5 million new homes over the course of this Parliament, the lion’s share of the balance must come through council housing.