Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

89: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Empty dwelling management orders: prescribed period of timeIn the Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Period of Time and Additional Prescribed Requirements) (England) (Amendment) Order 2012 (S.I. 2012/2625), omit Article 2 (prescribed period of time).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to reinstate the period of time that a dwelling has to be unoccupied for before local councils can apply for empty dwelling management orders to six months.

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[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased that I am being given the opportunity to speak to these two interesting amendments, Amendments 89 and 90. They are very simple. They are nowhere near what I want to achieve in life, but they are, in a sense, a halt in a becoming. In 1998, we had a situation where under the Blair Government—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Order! We cannot hear the noble Lord.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Shall I talk louder? The rain in Spain goes mainly down the drain. Sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. You are on my side.

Tony Blair or somebody in his Government had the idea that, if a house was empty for six months, it should be available for the local authority to turn it into some social usefulness. After the Second World War, Abbé whatever his name was said that because of the crisis of homelessness every empty property should be used by the local authority and the national Government to get people out of homelessness.

The Blair Administration said that if a property was empty for six months then it was important that it should be available so the local authority could say, “We will utilise it and return it back to you when you need it if you want to sell it, move your family in or whatever”. That referred to local authority housing, which at the time had in the region of 20% of voids. It was a period when many buildings that had been social housing had been rubbished and were not used properly.

I am here today partly to try to get the Government to move from the situation that we are now in. We know that the coalition Government, shall we say, kicked the can further down the road when they changed the period from six months to two years, so a property had to be empty for two years before the local authority could take it over. In my opinion, we should return to six months. I have had discussions about that with this wonderful Minister, and I hope she is in government—I really do. If we have the opportunity of returning to that time period then we could start kicking holes in the fact that there are so many empty houses out there, and that we have 160,000 children and 174,000 families in temporary accommodation. Would it not be brilliant if we could use empty homes as part of providing that need? That is one of my amendments; I cannot remember whether it is Amendment 89 or Amendment 90—forgive me my trespasses.

The other thing is that I want to invest in social housing. I should declare my situation: I am a social entrepreneur, a social investor, who runs a business, The Big Issue, which deals with the crisis of homelessness in the streets but also runs an enormous social business. We invest in 600 social businesses around the UK. Last week, I had the great pleasure—I am sure your Lordships cannot imagine me crying—of opening a school. I had to cut the ribbon of a school for disabled children down in Sunbury that Big Issue Invest had put £3 million into. So I am interested in the use of social business. Where do we get our money from? We get out money from the City of London, from family offices and from high net worth individuals. I am trying to bring two things together: one is the need for social justice around social housing and the other is freeing up the way that businesses can invest in social housing so that we can remove the anomalies that Governments have thrown up. We want to get into a situation where you can make money out of social housing but for the benefit of the most disenfranchised people in British society.

I am glad that Mr Burnham has taken as his first wonderful option the ending of rough sleeping. As an ex-rough sleeper, I have been campaigning for 35 years to get rid of rough sleeping. I have been campaigning to get rid of people leaving prisons and ending up on the streets. I am an ex-offender, and I was blessed that I did not end up on the streets. I ended up on the streets because I was running away from not just the police but my family.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sure that the noble Lord will understand that I cannot comment on individual planning cases—it would be very unwise to do so from the Dispatch Box. But he will know that there has been, as I said, this recent consultation on the NPPF. It has a different rules-based policy approach and that has been out for widespread consultation. We had 20,000 responses to that. The new NPPF would introduce an expectation that local authorities plan to meet as much of their development needs as possible on brownfield land, and that is supported by a whole series of policies which will increase housing supply on brownfield, include providing strong policy support for the intensification of brownfield to provide those additional homes.

It would be fair to say that, whenever we introduce a new NPPF—and we certainly did last time when we introduced one in December 2024—we have monitored it and made some changes to it. We are constantly looking at the NPPF, and that is the benefit of the way our planning works. We can be flexible in the way we approach these things. I am sure that officials will continue to keep that under review once the new NPPF is published.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I will make my final comments. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, obviously does not know Peckham, because, if he did, he would know that the clock tower is very important for the well-being of people in Peckham, as there is not an awful lot to look at. I am sorry—I am joking.

But it is interesting that we cannot achieve many of the things we would like to achieve in this world because of newts or clock towers getting in the way. I have been involved in the brownfield site argument. When I worked as a member of a revolutionary organisation in Southall, we tried to get the old AEC factory turned into a housing association. Eventually, it became a private housing residence, so it did work its way out. There are many limitations to brownfield sites.

In summing up, I would like to dwell more on the idea of businesses investing. Amendment 90 focuses on the idea that we can get businesses involved in investing in social housing. When I say businesses, I mean social businesses such as Big Issue Invest. We found it incredibly difficult to invest in social housing. Forgive me for saying so, but all of the reasons why it is easy are not easy: Big Issue Invest has funds and can get more funds to invest in social housing, but the impediments are largely because of planning and the fact that there are all sorts of limitations placed on it. I would like to see social businesses and businesses meeting their ESGs and using their money to bring about social transformation.

Companies such as L&G want to build more social housing, but the impediments placed on them are quite incredible. That is why I raise the possibility of removing all the impediments to investment by businesses, which will make money out of social housing but will be able to provide people with what they need.

There is a company I am working with called Resonance, of which I declare I am not a director, and there is no way I will get money out of it. Resonance is a business that takes social housing that local authorities cannot develop because they are void. It does them all up and then brings in tenants who are taken off the streets, so to speak. It is absolutely brilliant, but there are too many impediments to the ability of business to help us with the voids and the empty homes. I am looking at these little things from my own experience, not from the experience of other people. I therefore beg leave to withdraw my amendment—God bless you.

Amendment 89 withdrawn.