Social Housing: South Cotswolds

Roz Savage Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue of social housing in the South Cotswolds, and I thank the Minister for being here this evening.

Across our towns and villages, from Biddestone to Barnsley and Hullavington to Hillesley, the story is the same. The need for genuinely affordable, safe and well-maintained housing has never been greater, yet precisely when the need is most acute, the supply of such homes is being allowed to dwindle away. In Wiltshire today, more than 3,600 households wait on the council’s housing register. Families and individuals are waiting for a secure, affordable home. Many are in the higher-priority bands, recognised as being in significant need.

Local parish surveys tell the same story. Biddestone and Slaughterford parish council has undertaken two surveys in recent years, both confirming a clear and continuing demand for affordable housing. There is also a growing need among older residents for smaller, adapted homes so that they can downsize locally, which will free up family houses for the next generation, yet in many villages that option simply does not exist.

I want to make it clear that I am not advocating arbitrary housing targets. I am talking about ensuring that the right kind of homes are built—homes that local families, key workers and older residents can actually afford to live in and want to live in, and homes that have the infrastructure that they need. While the Government have set new national housing targets that will more than double the number of homes expected in areas such as the Cotswolds, those figures risk doing more harm than good if they ignore our local realities.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that schemes such as the new social housing in Minehead—the first social housing for a generation—coupled with more social housing in Mid Devon specifically for elderly people to downsize from their own social housing are the way forward? Does she also agree that the Liberal Democrats in both institutions should be recognised for doing a jolly good job?

[Dr Savage]

That does indeed sound like an excellent idea.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for bringing forward this debate. I spoke to her beforehand to get an idea of what she would be referring to. We had a debate in Westminster Hall this morning on homelessness, and one point that came through very clearly was affordability. House prices can sometimes be over 10 times the average of what people can afford from their earnings. In my constituency—I suspect it is the same in the hon. Lady’s—many young people want to buy for the first time but cannot get a mortgage because the houses are too expensive. Does the hon. Lady agree that to address the needs of those who want to buy a house or access social housing, the Government must build more houses to bring the prices down so that people can actually afford them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Savage]

I agree with the hon. Member about the financial impacts and even more so the social impacts of young people not being able to afford their first home and fly the nest of their parents. It is having a catastrophic impact on young people.

Returning to the South Cotswolds, around 80% of Cotswold district lies within a designated national landscape—the Cotswolds area of outstanding national beauty—and of the remaining 20%, roughly half is flood plain.

[Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and highlights perfectly the pressure on the landscape in southern England. Does she agree that there is a great deal of scope in many towns and even some larger villages for building on brownfield land? In Reading there are a number of examples of this, and I am sure colleagues have examples from their own areas. Brownfield could provide a very valuable resource to help protect the countryside.

[Dr Savage]

I could not agree more that we should be prioritising brownfield sites as well as refurbishing existing housing. We could very nearly, if not completely, meet the housing target through those means without needing to take space away from nature or food production.

Imposing a target of over 1,000 homes a year in the Cotswold district may make a good headline, but in practice it encourages speculative development on greenfield sites, where services are often poor and flood risk high, rather than genuinely affordable homes for local people in more appropriate locations. But I want to be clear that the debate is not about opposing new housing; it is about ensuring that what we build reflects local need, protects our environment and natural heritage and strengthens our rural communities rather than undermining them.

Our infrastructure is already stretched thin. Many of our villages have limited public transport, ageing drainage systems and GP surgeries that are full to capacity. Broadband and mobile coverage remain unreliable in too many places, and with climate change flood risk is rising with every winter storm. We simply cannot add hundreds of new homes without first ensuring that the essential services of water, drainage, transport and healthcare can cope. Our infrastructure is fragile. Growth must be planned sensibly, sympathetically and in a logical order according to local constraints, not imposed from the top down and literally bulldozed through.

These homes must also be genuinely affordable. Over the years, many local authority homes have been transferred to housing associations under large-scale voluntary transfer. In North Wiltshire, that happened back in 1995. Those homes now belong legally to the housing associations, not to the council, but too many of those housing associations are now selling off rural homes rather than refurbishing and retaining them. In some villages, every remaining affordable home could be lost. Once they are sold into the private market, they are gone forever—they will never again be available at social rents. That result is devastating for rural communities. Young people who grew up in these villages find they can no longer afford to live in them. Teachers, carers and nurses are priced out, and older residents find nowhere to go when they want to downsize. If we want our villages to remain vibrant, living communities and not just be picture postcard backdrops, we must ensure that people of all incomes can afford to live and work in them.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am grateful to my friend and constituency neighbour for giving way. She is speaking with a huge amount of common sense. Of course, her problems in the South Cotswolds are replicated in the North Cotswolds. The problem with increasing the housing numbers—doubling them from 500 to 1,000 a year, as she said—is that the planning system is not delivering us the number of affordable houses. The developers will argue against building affordable housing, because they can make more money out of executive three, four or five-bedroom houses. We need to alter the planning system so that developers, through viability arguments, cannot exclude the building of social housing in some cases altogether.

[Dr Savage]

I thank my friend and neighbour for his intervention. We do not agree on everything, but we are definitely of like mind on this. I also defer to his experience as a surveyor with great knowledge of the building industry.

Moreover, those who remain in the existing housing stock are too often living in conditions that are simply unacceptable. One of my constituents lives in a flat with her two daughters. The elder daughter developed what was thought to be asthma, but doctors now believe that her breathing problems are caused by mould spores in their damp home. She describes nights spent in panic as her daughter coughs uncontrollably. The landlord’s response has been seasonal mould washes rather than a proper fix that would get to the root cause of the mould problem.

Some social housing providers have proved difficult for my team even to get a response from, let alone resolution. Other constituents tell me of homes left empty for months in villages where people are desperate for somewhere to live, of properties that could easily be brought up to modern energy standards just left to deteriorate and moulder, and of repairs delayed or done poorly. That is inefficient and frustrating. It borders on the inhumane.

To be fair, the Government have recognised the issue in principle, for which I thank them. The recent policy paper, “Delivering a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing”, calls on providers to work with the Government both to build new homes and to upgrade existing ones, but the reality on the ground is that policy is not being enforced. Associations continue to sell off rural stock while neglecting maintenance and retrofit. I urge Ministers to pause the disposal of rural affordable housing by GreenSquareAccord and similar providers until the new policy framework is clarified. It makes no sense at all to sell the very homes our communities so desperately need.

We also need stronger enforcement to ensure that housing associations meet their obligations both to build new homes and to maintain existing ones to a decent standard, and there must be consequences for failure to meet those obligations. I ask the Government to support councils in rebuilding their capacity to own housing stock directly. Wiltshire council has expressed that ambition and deserves the financial flexibility to make it a reality.

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

On housing stock, I am proud to have been the leader of Teignbridge district council—I draw the House’s attention to the fact that I am still a member—which has built council houses for the first time in 30 years. There are a number of adjustments that can be made, including increasing the number of homes from 200 to 500 before needing a housing revenue account, and I had a meeting with the Housing Minister on making that easier. The Minister told me that he was going to announce that and make that happen, but I am not convinced that that has yet happened. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is one of several adjustments the Minister could easily make so that it is easier for councils to build more council houses?

[Dr Savage]

That seems like an eminently sensible plan that I wholeheartedly endorse.

Coming back to genuinely affordable housing across the South Cotswolds, there is a planning tool designed for exactly that purpose. Rural exception sites are small parcels of land on the edge of villages, released specifically for affordable housing for people with a strong local connection. They are protected by legal agreements so that the homes remain affordable in perpetuity. When properly supported and implemented, rural exception sites can deliver well-designed homes that keep communities alive. Alongside that, we also need to see community-led housing playing a bigger role, with schemes initiated and owned by local people, often through community land trusts. Such schemes build not just houses but communities.

The affordable homes programme, which is the Government’s main grant scheme for affordable housing, has real potential to help, but it too often works for large urban developments rather than smaller rural ones. It is an urban tool being implemented in a rural setting. It can provide vital funding for social rent and community-led schemes, yet the rules and deadlines are often too rigid for parish-level projects. I therefore urge the Minister to make the programme more flexible and to strengthen the rural uplift, so that building a dozen good-quality, energy-efficient homes in a Cotswold village is just as viable as building hundreds on the edge of a city.

I am inspired by the tradition of alms houses, which is one of Britain’s oldest and most dignified forms of social housing. I was encouraged to see an architecture award recently given to some alms houses in London that show how modern design can honour that alms house heritage: small, beautiful, and community-oriented, with shared gardens and growing spaces. I can just imagine developments in our market towns and villages similar to those we already have in Cirencester, although those are many hundreds of years old.

[Matt Rodda]

Does the hon. Lady have anything she wants to say about the value of good design principles and linking to the existing traditional architecture in specific communities? We have had a great deal of success in our community in preserving the historical brickwork of Reading and encouraging new developments to copy that style, colour and range of bricks. I see that the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) is nodding. He has the same local architecture with the same wonderful array of bricks and sometimes use of flints as well. Would the hon. Lady like to see that highlighted and encouraged?

[Dr Savage]

This is what we all want to see. Modern housing can be beautiful and blend almost seamlessly with existing housing stock in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It also helps communities to meld together when housing melds together. There are many villages in my constituency, and obviously the Cotswolds are associated with beautiful architecture in that lovely, honey-coloured Cotswold stone. Where the development is sympathetic, it is welcome, but there are other places where it is has been less sympathetic, and that tends to have an impact on the relationship between the residents in the old village and those in the new development—so yes, I wholeheartedly encourage and endorse the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion.

I can imagine developments like almshouses in our market towns and villages: clusters of low-energy homes built with local materials and ideally by local building firms, surrounded by shared green space for fruit and vegetables. That is how we build not only homes but communities. To make this happen, planning policy must reward quality and community value, not just sheer quantity. Rural exception sites need to be protected and strengthened, and national targets must recognise environmental constraints. We cannot meet housing numbers by paving over flood plains and protected landscapes.

Public bodies should be required to release small sites near services and bus routes at fair value for social housing, for convenience. Councils must also be able to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts, with longer timelines, so that they are able to replace lost homes on a like-for-like basis. We must also address the pressure from short-term lets and second homes. A distinct planning use class for short-term lets, coupled with local powers to limit numbers and apply fair premiums, would help to ensure that homes remain homes, not vehicles for investment. This would help to keep our villages alive. So many of them are being hollowed out, with half or more of the homes empty for much of the week, meaning that local pubs, shops and schools really struggle to remain viable.

Finally, I ask the Minister to consider, please, a South Cotswolds pilot, bringing together Homes England, local councils and housing associations to plan small-scale, sustainable, community-oriented social housing. This would showcase what can be achieved when we design for place, people and planet, not for spreadsheets. Social housing is not a statistic; it is a lifeline. It keeps the nurse in Tetbury, the teaching assistant in Fairford and the young electrician in Cirencester living in the communities they serve. It keeps our schools open, our shops busy and our bus routes viable. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and to working with her to ensure that every community in the South Cotswolds has the affordable, safe and sustainable homes it needs.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Roz Savage Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Vikki Slade]

I agree that there is opportunity to do much more as the Bill moves into Committee. Communities’ long struggles to save such assets is not because of a lack of passion or volunteers, but because the system feels stacked against them. “The Museum of Broken Dreams”, a display on the parliamentary estate, shows some good examples of where community groups have lost out to commercial developers who have demolished buildings and walked away, or where the groups cannot get support.

We are pleased to see sporting assets included in the right to buy and we welcome their indefinite inclusion on the register, but we want environmental assets to be included as well, so that we can protect our land for restoration and nature management. We also want restoration of the funding for neighbourhood plans, so that smaller authorities, which will now struggle to make such plans for their tiny communities, can do so without onerous costs to their residents.

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

To pick up on my hon. Friend’s point about environmental concern, at the moment local authorities have a weak duty on biodiversity—to consider from time to time what they might do to conserve or enhance biodiversity—so does she agree that the Bill offers a real opportunity to strengthen such environmental protections, to get this country back on track?

[Vikki Slade]

I believe that the community right to buy has huge opportunities for councils. In Committee, I hope that we will be able to improve and enhance the Bill for everyone.

As a former retail business owner, I welcome the removal of upward-only rent reviews. Businesses should not be locked into rising costs when market conditions shift. This is a long-overdue reform that will help small businesses to adapt and survive. The Bill makes interesting and welcome changes on things such as pension schemes and transport devolution, but misses the opportunity to improve council standards and attendance, and it fails to establish in statute the promised council of regions and nations or the local authority leaders council, both of which would be important in giving local government a stronger voice in Whitehall.

In conclusion, the Liberal Democrats support the principle of devolution. We recognise the crisis in local government funding and we welcome the fair funding review promised later this autumn. The Bill, however, does not deliver the ambitious shift in power that our communities need. It risks disenfranchising places left at the back of the queue with no funding or timeline to work toward. We cannot support a Bill that centralises control, weakens local accountability and misses the chance truly to empower communities, as we laid out in our reasoned amendment. We urge the Government to think again, and to revise and recommit to genuine devolution and community empowerment so that we can support the Bill.

Residential Estate Management Companies

Roz Savage Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, who is doing a great service to his constituents by exposing that problem.

In too many constituencies, residents are plagued by rogue developers who provide housing under a freehold tenure, but force residents to accept the estate managers or shared owners of public spaces within the developments. We have heard shocking examples from all over the country, which surely demonstrate the scale of the problem and the need to act. In one block of flats in my constituency of Taunton and Wellington, people have been unable to get repairs for a leaking roof from the owner of a building in Corporation Street—it has been leaking for nine years without being attended to.

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

In my constituency of South Cotswolds, there are tragic stories, including about disabled residents being trapped in their flats due to a lift being out of order. Another constituent was informed that their charges had risen from £1,500 to £2,100 per six months. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need urgent action from the Government to end this daylight robbery?

[Gideon Amos]

“Daylight robbery” is a good way of putting it. Those staggering increases in charges, with very little notice or warning to residents, are experienced in many of our constituencies, including my own.

In my constituency, I am receiving complaints about FirstPort from residents of Parsonage Court in Wellington, and from those of Quantock House, Pavilion Gardens, St George’s Square and Firepool in Taunton. I am also receiving complaints about Cognatum Estates from residents of Cedar Gardens and Fullands Court. These issues are arising in a whole range of properties.

New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill

Roz Savage Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) for bringing the Bill before the House. As an environmental campaigner for the past 22 years, I very much support any Bill, including my own Climate and Nature Bill—a shameless plug—that encourages the shift away from fossil fuels. However, I do not support every measure that increases the use of renewables, which is why the sunshine Bill is so important.

There are good ways and less good ways to meet our international commitments on carbon emissions and climate change. A less good way, as has already been mentioned by many hon. Members, is to cover large tracts of our countryside in solar panels without the agreement or co-operation of local communities.

[Katie White (Leeds North West) (Lab)]

I welcome the Bill, but the choice between solar farms and rooftop solar installations is not a zero-sum game; they both have a distinct role to play. In our most ambitious plans, solar farms would account for less than 1% of land cover. Does the hon. Lady agree with Tom Bradshaw, president of the National Farmers’ Union, that solar farms represent a diversification opportunity for farmers that will also be good for the British public?

[Dr Savage]

I thank the hon. Member for the good points she raises, but I would like to see more solar panel installations that are motivated not by profit, but by concern for people and planet. That is my concern about some of the very large solar installations we are seeing proposed across the country, including in my constituency of South Cotswolds. We are rightly proud of our beautiful countryside, so a proposal for a 2,000-acre solar farm has provoked outrage and objections from nearby communities. Some 88% of respondents to an early consultation are against the plans. Some might say that their sacrifice is necessary for the greater good, but when I put myself in the shoes of nearby residents, I cannot agree.

I love my morning walks, which help to keep me sane—well, relatively. We need to be encouraging people to spend more time enjoying the outdoors, with all its benefits for mental and physical health, as well as strengthening the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. When I consider how I would feel if my cherished morning walk, through green fields, was instead going to be a walk through fields of black, shiny solar panels, past humming battery storage facilities, I would not be happy. Let us keep our countryside beautiful. It adds insult to injury for the people of Hullavington, Luckington and Sherston to see massive new warehouses and new homes springing up with not a solar panel in sight.

We need to meet our environmental goals in collaboration with people, not in opposition to them. My Climate and Nature Bill, which I will introduce next week, emphasises the need for public engagement on our journey to net zero. That journey will not be easy and will only be made more difficult if people feel that net zero is something that is being imposed on them, by corporate interests or Government, without respect for the wishes of nearby residents. Where ground-mounted solar may be necessary, let us make it small scale and community led.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

The Government’s housing targets mean that my area needs 9,500 new homes over the next 20 years, which thousands of my constituents are very worried about. Many of them would be far happier if they knew that the properties being built would meet the needs of local people, by being affordable to buy and cheap to run. Does my hon. Friend agree that the New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill is not only a no-brainer, but an essential part of gaining public support for house building?

[Dr Savage]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend.

We also need to increase our national food security, decreasing our reliance on vulnerable international food supply chains and depending more on home-grown food, grown to trusted standards. Most farmers want to grow food, not solar panels. The need for a national land use framework is becoming ever more pressing.

We need a sensible long-term strategy for how we use our finite resource of land space in this country. I would like to see a much greater emphasis on multipurposing our land area. We need to get away from dividing up food production, housing and electricity generation. We can make much better use of our land when we take a multilayered approach. To that end, it makes sense to prioritise rooftop solar ahead of greenfield sites. Some 60% of UK solar targets could be delivered on rooftops by 2035. Generating energy at the source reduces the strain on the national grid, improves overall energy resilience and reduces the need for long, wasteful grid connections

Generating energy at the source reduces the strain on the national grid, improves overall energy resilience and reduces the need for long, wasteful grid connections or ranks of electricity pylons marching across our countryside. Retrofitting solar panels to houses is costly and disruptive; it is so much more efficient and effective to install solar at the time of building. In Europe, they get this. The EU solar standard requires solar panels on new and existing public, commercial and residential buildings. The EU’s goal is to increase the use of renewable energy and reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and it is working.

To me, the sunshine Bill is a win-win-win. It is a win for the UK, reducing our need for imported energy sources and improving our resilience and self-reliance; it is a win for householders, who can reduce their energy bills by generating their own electricity; and it is a win for the planet, supporting our transition away from fossil fuels. I will wholeheartedly support the sunshine Bill.