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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I will speak to my Amendment 116. The Government are charging us all with getting behind the idea that there will be 1.5 million new houses by the end of the Parliament. I suggest that one way you could achieve that is by being serious about the number of empty homes in the United Kingdom, particularly England. There are 250,000 empty homes in England and, at the same time, 164,000 children and 124,000 families are caught in temporary accommodation. I am not saying it would be easy, but you could be wise and do nationally what Manchester, Plymouth and Wales are trying to do: incorporate empty homes into the fabric of their housing strategies. If that could be done, it would be a real plus.

I was born in Notting Hill, which was full of empty homes in the post-war period, along with Bayswater and that area. The middle classes did not go off to the colonies any more; they went to Bayswater and to Notting Hill, and they started to convert these voids into precious homes. Environmentally and socially, it was wonderful. It got too wonderful: the house that I was born into, which was a slum, would now cost about £20 million—if they have not pulled it down because it was such a slum.

Overall, it would be a good idea for the Government to say that they are going to empty our temporary accommodation and look at new ways of doing that that incorporate buildings that are left empty for over six months. Some 250,000 houses are screaming out, in my opinion, for us to intervene. There would be all sorts of problems because some people would find it inappropriate, but, if the Government were serious about this, those homes could be put to much more use. You could start kicking a hole in that required 1.5 million.

What the noble Lord, Lord Young, said was wonderful. If we spend all the money on new houses, what are we going to do about those failing estates and the voids? What are we going to do about the fact that many local authorities and housing associations cannot afford to convert void houses that are boarded up? This Government have to have a strategy on empty homes. I do not see that in the strategy at the moment.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly to say that the regeneration of some of our social estates is a high priority. The last Labour Government spent a lot of money regenerating city centres. I hope that, if they have long enough, this Labour Government will give a similar high priority to the regeneration of some of our social estates.

It has not been easy, and more difficult in some respects, given the right to buy. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, regeneration takes a long time— 10 or 20 years—so it is difficult to see easy or quick returns, and resources are a huge problem. To achieve the regeneration of these estates, often you need partnerships, not just the local authority but housing associations and private developers. There is obviously an important role for mayors in this as well as we progress.

The main experience that I have had is of the Rowner estate, in Gosport, which was a Royal Naval estate. It was in huge dereliction after the Navy left its responsibilities. The regeneration of that estate has taken 30 years, with a genuine partnership that involved quite difficult decisions, such as the decision that to regenerate it would require it to be turned into an estate that was one-third owner-occupied, one-third private rented and one-third social housing. The transformation has been remarkable. There are many estates up and down our land that are neglected and need an initiative from the Government. In the rush to get high numbers of new houses, we must not forget the regeneration of our older estates.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is either the market or the state; that seems to be the argument.

In 2017, I went to a city that was having problems with a whole bevy of people. What we did was to try to reorientate the way that local charities worked together. One of the things that really interested me was getting charities working with businesses. I am very interested in the idea that you get businesses to trade with charities so that money does not really pass hands, because the businesses have to spend and the charities have the need.

We identified a housing association that wanted to expand its work. It had gardening facilities; it had painting, decorating and repairing and all that. It wanted to expand but was very limited in this very small town. I went to talk to estate agents—the most evil people on God’s earth, according to some—and I said, “Look, what you’re doing is buying services, because you’ve got 150 or 250 buy to rents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you bought the services from a housing association? You would pay the same rate”. It would also help the housing association to address a problem that nobody talks about. I have not heard anybody say—excuse me, I have put too much glue in my teeth. I am getting them redone in Turkey soon, so that I will not have the problem.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Anyway, to address the problem which I have not heard anybody mention: why is it that if you live in social housing—if you are the child of social housing—you have about a 2% chance, as a child, of finishing whatever levels you do to leave school and then getting into university or a highly skilled job? I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Best, about this when I first came into the House. The problem we were trying to address in that little city was that 70% of the people living in social housing were unemployed. We have to face that, and I do not see any provision in this Bill for creating the opportunity.

I believe in social mobility, like the noble Lord, Lord Bailey. What I do not like about what he says—forgive me my trespasses; he is a Conservative, so I cannot agree with him, even though we come from the same neck of the woods, up there in Notting Hill—is that the only way you can get social mobility is through a housing purchase by your family. Why is that? I know it is true, and I know hundreds of people who have done it, but why has social housing changed so much from the days when our Minister was moving to Stevenage?

Why is it that social housing is now nothing like what it was? Having been brought up in the slums of Notting Hill, I was stuck in a Catholic orphanage for a few years and then moved to Fulham, where we were in a block of flats and had a toilet that we shared with no one, whereas when we lived in the slums, we had to queue up if we wanted to do our business. We might have had to wait two days for certain services that you would want in a toilet, but there we had our own beautiful piece of social housing. In that block of flats were trainee police officers, trainee teachers, drivers and all sorts of people, including disabled people and those who were old. It was sociable and socially mixed.

Unfortunately, what has happened to social housing is that it is under threat. It is under threat because the bar has been raised by local authorities and now it takes only the most desperate, largely, whereas in the good old days it was a reflection of the working class, the upper working class and even the lower middle class. Until we address the issue of around 70% of people living in social housing not having a job—they are stuck and their children are stuck—the arguments around it will go on, but we need to address the poverty that is thrown up but not addressed at this moment. It is certainly not addressed in the Bill.

I am a great believer in social mobility. I am a perfect example of it; I am as posh as anything now, though I did not start poshly. But I would love to see a situation where social housing was addressed as a place of great opportunity, great security and great comfort, so that it becomes what virtually everybody here today has described as the beginning of a new future. Unfortunately, for too many people it is not a beginning of a new future. It is a place where you and your family are parked for maybe the next 100 years.

Birmingham City Council and Unite: Refuse Workers’ Pay

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We all want to see the dispute brought to a resolution as quickly as possible. The government-appointed commissioners have been in place at the council since 2023 to oversee its improvement journey. That involves working with the council to make sure that its decisions align with its statutory duties. On the waste dispute, it is not true that the commissioners are blocking a viable deal. As noble Lords would expect, the commissioners are supporting Birmingham City Council to ensure that its approach is in line with its legal obligations, including the best value duty. They report regularly to the Secretary of State, but they are independent of government and Ministers do not dictate their decisions or approve their actions.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible for us to agree that one of the reasons we are in this dispute is that refuse workers are so badly paid? I am a former refuse worker —I was a road sweeper for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea—and I can honestly say that this is a disgrace. If we do not have the removal of rubbish, cities just fall apart.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises an important point about the pay of public service workers, and it is very important that they are recognised for the real value they provide in our communities. But even before the strike, Birmingham’s waste service was failing residents. For example, in 2024-25 residents registered over 120,000 missed bin collections. The council now has to press ahead with the much-needed transformation to build a waste service that is fit for purpose and delivers for the people of Birmingham. That of course includes recognising the staff as they should be recognised.

National Plan to End Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of whether new funding allocations to local authorities are sufficient to deliver the prevention commitments in the National Plan to End Homelessness.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, last week the Government launched their £3.5 billion national plan to end homelessness, a bold initiative informed by the voices of those with lived experience of homelessness and rough sleeping, as well as councils, mayors and homelessness organisations. Over £3 billion of that funding will go to local government through the local government finance settlement, with prevention at its core. The strategy is designed to tackle the root causes of homelessness alongside immediate action to help those experiencing homelessness now. It will bring an end to the current tension that forces councils to choose between investment in prevention and meeting temporary accommodation costs.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

With £2.8 billion spent on temporary accommodation in the last year by local authorities, forcing many of them towards bankruptcy, the £2.5 billion the Government have allocated, even if you look upon it as trying to cover the costs, is 28% short of the actual cost of temporary accommodation for local authorities. Are the Government going to do anything about allocating enough resources so that we do not have this situation where people are left on the streets because there is no temporary accommodation, and do not have the problem of our local authorities going bankrupt?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful for all the work the noble Lord has done in this area. The Government are very aware of the challenges councils face due to the rising demand for temporary accommodation; it has been growing in recent years and is a real challenge for them. We are committed to considering the best way to sustainably fund good-quality temporary accommodation and reduce reliance on poor-quality provision. To support this, we are working across government, including with our colleagues in the DWP, in the interministerial group on homelessness and rough sleeping to explore the impacts of subsidy rates on local authorities. This week we will announce the local government finance settlement—the first multi-year settlement in a decade—giving councils the certainty they have repeatedly asked for to enable more spending on prevention and less on crisis management. That is the answer to this in the long term.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 15th May 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

278: Clause 145, page 162, line 36, leave out subsections (1) and (2) and insert—
“(1) Subject to the exceptions set out in this section, this Act comes into force on the day on which it is passed.(2) Parts 2 and 3 of this Act come into force on such day as the Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument appoint.” Member's explanatory statement
This amendment and others in the name of Lord Bird would bring the majority of the Act into force on the day that it passes, with the exception of some areas where regulations or consultation are needed.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I declare my interests in the register in and around housing and things in that area. I will speak to Amendment 278 and the other amendments in my name—Amendments 282, 286 and 291—as they all work together. My amendments would bring the majority of the Bill and the new tenancy regime into force on the day that it passes, with the exception of some areas where regulations or consultation are needed. The purpose of this is to end Section 21 evictions at the earliest possible moment.

I have some interesting research, which I would like to give. No-fault evictions are currently at an eight-year high. Since the previous Government pledged to end no-fault evictions in 2019, 1 million renters have been served a Section 21 eviction notice. Over 100,000 households have been threatened with homelessness due to one of these evictions. Any delays in ending Section 21 will lead to more renters facing an unwanted move, potentially causing hardship and, in some cases, homelessness. Section 21 has meant that privately renting is considered to provide instability. A quarter of all renters have lived in three or more homes in the last five years. I could go on reading like this, but it is not my style, so I will end there.

It was 2,222 days ago when then Prime Minister May said that we were going to get rid of Section 21. The reason that I have brought forward these amendments is that they would not allow ending Section 21 to be kicked into the long grass, as it has been over the last six years. Michael Gove and everybody in the last Government whom I spoke to said, “Yes, yes—we ought to do something about it”. I am very concerned that what will happen is that we will say that Section 21 needs to go through some more debates and that we need to wait for the legal process, but then even more people will end up being thrown out of their homes.

I raise another question, which I find very frightening. I am the product of a slum house and slum landlords. I was born in 1946; when in 1951 we did not pay the rent, we were thrown out in the streets, and all our goods were put out there. This would really upset people in the Labour Government at the time, but they did not do an awful lot about it. The Conservatives came in, and they did not do an awful lot about it—the fact that a family could be laid out on the streets without the law becoming in any way involved.

When the Conservatives came in, they passed a rent Act—I think it was in 1955—which changed things; when Labour came in, in 1965 it was changed again. You could look at it as the goodies and the baddies: for a Conservative Administration, the goodies are the landlords and the baddies are the tenants; for the Labour Party or a Labour Government, the landlords are the baddies and the tenants are the goodies. I have watched this and been involved in this process for decade after decade. From my experience, I feel that we need to arrive at a situation, but we are not going to unless we really rethink how we deal with tenancies, landlords and tenants. The important thing to me is that we stop this coming and going, this balancing—this seeking of who is in the wrong and who is in the right. Both sides of the argument must get together, and this is where I want the work to be done, where tenants and landlords are advantaged by the stability that comes, and it is not engined by the fact that it depends on which Government are in as to who are the goodies and who are the baddies.

This has been a major problem for me over many years. In 1965, when the Labour Government under Harold Wilson brought in the Rent Act, it meant in fact that you had this peculiar situation where all the support went to the tenant, and for hundreds of thousands of people who were landlords and had property, it was removed, and enormous pressure was put on social housing. So for social housing, the local authorities—it was not housing associations—had to keep raising the bar. My brothers, who were on the council housing list in Hammersmith and Fulham in 1965 and were number 101 and I think 105, were scratched because the pressure on social housing was so enormous. Social housing ended up largely with people who were incredibly troubled, not ordinary working-class people, often single mothers with a number of children, and you had this development of the creation of almost ghettos of people who were living in social housing rather than the social mix of the social housing I moved into at the age of 10.

I use this opportunity to say that I want to get rid of Section 21 because it legalises insecurity. But overall, I also want us to be looking carefully at how we can begin a process of balance and equilibrium between tenant and landlord, because they both need each other. How many tenants are paying for people to buy houses? How many tenants are helping landlords put money aside for their pension? How many tenants are putting the children through university, because it is one of the few places where you can get prosperity? Unless we get to a situation where we get the equilibrium, then over the next 10, 20 or 30 years, as politics change and as Governments change, we are going to be having this kind of arsy-versy sort of world of one being the bully and the other being the hero or victim. I beg to move.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

There is a point here which I hope the Minister will listen to carefully: the speed with which legislation is put into operation. I make this point only because it has been true over a whole range of issues. It is true on new housebuilding: we change the building regulations, and it is five years before they actually come into operation, because of the way in which we deal with our legislation.

Let us take the disgraceful situation of successive Governments, of both parties, on Dalits. We passed the change so that Dalits could claim compensation for the way they were treated because of their caste. We changed the law in this House. It still has not come into operation—it has been put off and put off because of the way the legislation works.

I hope the Minister will recognise that what has been so ably introduced is two things. First, I entirely agree that we want a proper balance and a way forward. Tenants need landlords and landlords need tenants; that is obviously so. But I hope she will also take on board the fundamental issue of how quickly changes in legislation go through, and how often you are left with continuing delay. It is not just in this Bill—and she is not responsible for other Bills—but I hope she will take back the genuine concern of many of us about the length of time it takes for decisions that we make to affect ordinary people, which is, after all, why we make them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I understand the noble Lord’s concern. There is ongoing dialogue with the Ministry of Justice, and I hope to be able to update Members before Report on where that has got to as soon as we are able to. I do not think it would be helpful to have a running commentary on it but my honourable friend the Minister for Housing is in dialogue at the moment with the MoJ. I will update noble Lords as soon as we get to the end of those discussions.

I turn to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Hacking. Amendment 281 seeks to delay a number of provisions coming into force. The Bill currently provides that these provisions commence two months after Royal Assent. Two months is a well-established precedent, and I see no reason why commencement of these provisions should be delayed. For example, the provisions include important protections for tenants and provide local authorities with better powers to enforce housing standards.

Amendment 287 would set a time limit of 12 months between Royal Assent and the implementation of the Bill’s tenancy reforms in the private rented sector. Amendment 288 would change the approach to tenancy reform implementation in the Bill. It would require that the measures were applied to new tenancies no earlier than six months after Royal Assent and to existing tenancies no earlier than 12 months after Royal Assent. Amendment 289 would require that the conversion of existing tenancies to assured tenancies under the new tenancy reform system took place no earlier than 12 months after Royal Assent. As I have set out previously, we will end the scourge of Section 21 evictions as quickly as possible, and we will introduce the new tenancy for the private rented sector in one stage.

I assure my noble friend that this Government will ensure that the sector has adequate notice of the system taking effect but, in order to support tenants, landlords and agents to adjust, we will allow time for a smooth transition to the new system while making sure that tenants can benefit from the new system that they have waited so long for as soon as is realistically possible. We are planning a wide-ranging campaign to raise awareness of our reforms, supported by clear, straightforward and easy-to-read guidance to help landlords to prepare for change and to help tenants to be ready for it. On that basis, I ask my noble friend not to press his amendments.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Unfortunately, I was not in a position to sit up last night or the night before because I have a full-time job. Yesterday, I was in Cardiff working with people in the Government there. We had a big event around the Big Issue. It was wonderful to be there and to be given the opportunity, I hope, to work with the Welsh Parliament on the idea of social housing, social justice and all that. So I hope noble Lords will forgive me for not being here last night to see all their noble work.

I want to say a few things. I think one of the real problems is that people do not understand the role of a tenant. They know the role of a landlord: the landlord owns a piece of property, and they rent it out to somebody. But the role of the tenant over the last 50 years has been to enrich the landlord. If you look at what has happened to the property market over the last 40 or 50 years, the role of the tenant has been to make sure that the landlord gets richer and richer, because we know the way the property market has been going. It has been going in a direction where people can buy a house in one decade—my ex-wife did so—and sell it later in the decade for maybe two or three times as much. The landlord would often have done not much more than rent the property out and keep it going.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

That is not true.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am telling the noble Lord that, from my experience, it is. From my experience, what has happened is that tenants have made a very large section of the population who are small landlords much wealthier.

Private Rented Sector: Affordable Rents

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question and for all his expertise on this subject. A few weeks ago, I attended an investors’ summit in the City of London where there was great enthusiasm about investment in the housing market. We welcome those institutional investors and recognise the crucial role that the build-to-rent sector in particular is playing in building those 1.5 million homes. Last year, we announced a £700 million extension to the home building fund to support housebuilders and to catalyse that institutional investment. This should support the construction of 12,000 more homes, including build-to-rent. We also announced a £3 billion guarantee for SME and build-to-rent housebuilders through the reopening of guarantee schemes, which should deliver the construction of around 20,000 new homes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, could the Government also turbocharge getting rid of Section 21, which legalises insecurity in the lives of people paying rent?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I absolutely agree with the noble Lord about the insecurity that Section 21 presents. It is also a huge economic burden on local councils as they pick up the tab for emergency accommodation coming out of Section 21 evictions. That is why our Renters’ Rights Bill contains clear proposals to get rid of Section 21 once and for all.

Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government going to address the fact that we have never learned to turn the tap off? We have more and more people falling into homelessness from different sectors of society—people are having problems all over the place, as the noble Baroness said. My concern is this: we are always going on about the emergency, but where in the background are this Government or the next working on reducing homelessness by turning the tap off and getting rid of the inheritance of poverty, which is what produces most homelessness?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right in what he says. He will know that we have set a target of building 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament, which in the long term is the answer to tackling this issue. In the short term, we need to tackle the issue of many children spending years in temporary accommodation, when they need space to play and develop, at the same time increasing the funding to tackle the long-term causes of homelessness and poverty, which, as he rightly says, sit at the heart of this. The Renters’ Rights Bill, which is coming before this House very shortly, will tackle some of the causes of homelessness.

National Insurance: Employer Contributions

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I have seen the figures from the Nuffield Trust. The Government have provided additional funding for local government, as the noble Lord is aware. I have cited the figure before but will do so again: there is £3.7 billion of additional funding for local government. As I have said several times in this debate, we wanted to do more. Unfortunately, we have to be fiscally responsible, and this Government will continue to be so.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I must just point out a difference between business and charities, and the help for both. I am an employer of a little social enterprise group. We pay tax. We do not get the breaks or all sorts of other things that charities get. It is hitting us, so we will have to review whether we can employ so many people because of this new employment tax. Can the Minister encourage and include social enterprises—social businesses—in her mix to support them?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point about social enterprise. I am a great champion of social enterprises. They do magnificent work in our country. I set out the basis on which the Government are providing support to SMEs under this regime. Those organisations will benefit from the way we have completely exempted many businesses from having to pay NICs and many others will remain the same as they were before. I hope that will help social enterprises but I am happy to discuss that further with him if he wishes to.

Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord very much for that wonderful introduction. My family are Irish, and I think they are even more verbose than the Welsh, but we will not have an argument over that.

I should explain why I am not going to bamboozle your Lordships with loads of statistics and why I can probably make very little contribution to what we have been talking about. Ten years after I started the Big Issue, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do for the next 10 or 20 years. I said, “For the last 10 years I’ve been mending broken clocks, and for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to try to prevent the clocks breaking”.

In 1991 when we started the Big Issue, 501 homeless organisations were with us. They supplied every conceivable thing for a homeless person, from a condom—not a girlfriend, a condom—all the way through to a place where you could clean yourself, sleep and all that. But not one of those organisations ever asked the question that I wanted to ask: when is somebody going to turn the tap off?

Why do we often see homeless people as homeless? I have never met a homeless person whose problem was homelessness. I met someone who, like a social iceberg, had homelessness just above the water where you could see it, but underneath I could see all sorts of things—abuse, social isolation, mental health problems. I saw 90% of the people I have worked with, who I come from, inheriting poverty.

I was with Prince Charles once, as he then was, at a meeting in our building. He said that anybody could fall homeless. I thought to myself, “That’s not quite right”; I could not imagine him homeless. He was trying to create the idea, as so many people do, that anybody can fall homeless. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned a PhD student who could read Hungarian. Brilliant—I could bring you dozens of them, but I could bring you thousands upon thousands of people who have inherited poverty. Because those people inherited poverty, there is a predictability of failure that none of us has ever really addressed.

We tried to address it 75 years ago when we created the welfare state. We tried to address the fact that there were people who were unwell, ill educated, doing jobs that destroyed their bodies and caught in poverty. But did we ever really put the effort, the energy, the drive and the wonderfulness of our intellectual ability into saying, “Why is there no science for breaking people from poverty or a government department especially looking to prevent poverty”, so that we do not have a situation where the only inheritance people get is that they are poor? I believe we live in an age of dunces. Unfortunately, the dunces are the people making the decisions.

I am astonished that poverty costs us so much. I reckon that, of every £1 paid by the taxpayer, about 40p goes into poverty. We, in a sense, leave poverty. The Conservatives are great believers in leaving poverty to work itself out because there are so many examples of people two or three generations away from the coalface, or even one generation, so they think poverty should just be sorted out by leaving the system. Then Labour believed in inventing a methodology that created social housing but did not answer the problem. Only 2% of people whose children are brought up in social housing ever get out of poverty. Only 2% ever get to university or even finish their A-levels. In my opinion, we have these big contradictions. Until this House and that House embrace the idea of finding a way of turning the tap off, we will just have a lack of social housing as a forerunner for getting out of poverty.