Renters’ Rights Bill

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, Amendment 62 in this group, in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, is also about a particular form of occupational housing. I need to declare an interest: I own one small apartment in the West Midlands which has been let out to a tenant for a long time, but, according to some of the media, that makes me a kind of Rachmanite landlord who is trying to destroy the Bill. I can assure your Lordships that that is the last thing I have in mind.

This is about people who live in tied accommodation. As a Church of England bishop, I live in what I suppose we should call a tied palace rather than a tied cottage, but it is accommodation that I inhabit only for as long as I exercise my current office. That is the situation for the vast majority of stipendiary Church of England clergy, many other ministers of religion, and also for farm workers and estate workers who are required, for the better performance of their duties, to live where they actually work. It is a category that is accepted by HMRC, in terms of taxation legislation, as a special form of tenure. A large proportion of those who live in tied accommodation do not have the capacity during their working lives to save up and be able to provide for themselves in retirement, when they eventually have to move out of their tied dwelling.

I will not benefit from the amendment I am proposing to your Lordships today, because I will be able to accommodate myself by other means, but the Church of England Pensions Board lets out 50 or so properties each year—that is the average over the last few years—to retiring clergy, or sometimes to the spouse or surviving civil partner of a member of the clergy who has died in office, usually at about 60% of what the market rent would normally be in those circumstances. These properties are made available for clergy to look at any time up to about five years before they retire. The importance of that is we know that when people retire and move out of tied accommodation, they need time to think about where they are going to live, what sort of community they will want to settle in and put down roots in, because it is probably where they will stay for the rest of their lives.

At the moment, what the pensions board is able to do, and what other landlords who are used to accommodating people in tied accommodation can do, is to reserve a property for some period of time in advance and let it out in the meantime, but that will not be possible if the Bill passes in its present form. All that my amendment seeks to do is to make a small change that will allow an extra ground for granting possession where it is to accommodate somebody who is moving out of tied accommodation and the person who is providing their accommodation in retirement is somebody who is closely connected with who they were working for. It may be a former employer. In the case of clergy, who are officeholders rather than employees —a bit like police officers, we are officeholders—it will be an appropriate charity that provides accommodation in retirement.

This would make very little difference to the availability of rented housing overall—it would not make it impossible for other people to find properties to rent—but, as we have already heard several times today, there are people who wish to rent for a shorter period of time. It would be known that these properties will be subject to that clawback when the person who has earmarked them retires. If this amendment is not accepted, I fear that what will happen is that properties will simply lie empty for several years until the member of the clergy or the farm worker is ready to retire into them, and thus take properties away from the rented market, which I do not think is the aim of the Bill at all. I think this is a rather modest, quite niche measure, which would affect only particular categories of labourer, but for them it would make a huge difference to be able to identify where they are going to live when they retire a few years ahead of retirement and to know that that property will be available for them on the day of their retirement.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly from these Benches, in part to spare my noble friend’s voice—I assure noble Lords that no wine has been taken this evening.

I will stress something that is beginning to cause confusion on these Benches: the suggestion that an assured shorthold tenancy is in some way secure. It has been well documented over many years that huge insecurity is attached to an assured shorthold tenancy. Everything that we have learned about the huge turnover has for so many tenants been attached to the fact that ASTs are sometimes down to six months. A periodic tenancy—which has no end—is surely more secure than these fragile assured shorthold tenancies, which are often for only six months and cause huge insecurity for so many tenants. For that reason, these Benches are extremely concerned about the current direction of travel.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I will begin by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Austin of Dudley, who sadly is not able to be in his place today. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath, reminded us just a few minutes ago in her excellent speech, Ian is the son of a Holocaust survivor. It was he who helped me understand the significance of this day, long before either he or myself were Members of your Lordships’ House.

Unlike my present diocese of Manchester, Dudley, where I was then the bishop and the noble Lord, Lord Austin, was an MP, did not have a very large Jewish population. Nevertheless, at his instigation, every year we sent two young people from Dudley College of Technology to Auschwitz. They reported back to our annual Holocaust Memorial Day event that was held in the college, where they told very moving stories of what they had seen and how it had made them feel. Their witness, alongside the testimony of Holocaust survivors, helped inspire young people who were born almost half a century after the Holocaust to understand why we today must be constantly on the vigil against those voices that seek to deny the common and equal humanity and dignity of every single human being. Those who denigrate, despise and ultimately seek to destroy those whom I, as a Christian, will always declare as being created in the very image of God.

I now live in Salford, in the midst of the largest Jewish community outside of London. The boundary of the eruv, which permits many of my Jewish neighbours to undertake tasks such as pushing wheelchairs and prams on the sabbath and other holy days, is my garden wall.

This year, I have been delighted to see the success of the Holocaust Memorial Day schools exhibition held in Manchester Cathedral. It features the work of Church of England primary schools across the whole of Greater Manchester from many culturally, racially and religiously diverse communities. The children responded to key themes of the Holocaust in a number of ways. Some of them created origami paper cranes as prayers for peace; others reflected on Pavel Friedman’s poem, The Butterfly, which was actually written in a concentration camp. There was a re-creation of the pile of children’s shoes from the children who lost their lives at Auschwitz—that was very difficult to look at—and a collection of human portraits from many different cultures to celebrate our differences.

Meanwhile, local authority Holocaust Memorial Day events in Greater Manchester, including one that I attended in Manchester Town Hall, had local speakers who were Holocaust survivors or from their families. Respect was shown to them at these events by members of all our main faith communities: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jain. In my role as convenor of the Greater Manchester faith leaders, I have the privilege of leading representatives of all our major faiths. We are good friends and good neighbours.

The multifaith Challenging Hate Forum, which is hosted by my cathedral, undertook its own visit to Auschwitz, led jointly by my dean and Rabbi Warren Elf. My wife was part of that trip in March 2019. We also have vibrant bilateral groups, such as our Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester, where relationships that are forged and sustained over many years prove so vital when we find ourselves in tense times. I am privileged to work closely with the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region, and to use my voice here in your Lordships’ House to raise concerns that it and other faith communities have first prompted me about.

The Church of England teaching document, God’s Unfailing Word, which was published in 2019, speaks of attitudes towards Judaism over many centuries as providing,

“a fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism”,

and of the need for Christians to repent of the “sins of the past” towards our Jewish neighbours. It notes the part played by flawed Christian theology in promoting negative stereotypes of Jewish people.

I am grateful to other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and my right reverend friend the Bishop of Lichfield, for reminding us that anti-Semitism did not arise in the 1930s but was nurtured and grown over the preceding two millennia. There can be no overlap between the truth of our witness to Christ, which it is the task of theology to articulate, and the darkness of anti-Semitism. We have a duty as Christians to be alert to the continuation of such stereotyping and to resist it. My right reverend friend was a member of the group that wrote this document, though I note he was too modest to refer to that in his own speech earlier.

Remembering the Holocaust serves as a bulwark against the ever-present forces across the world that seek to resurrect vile, violent and murderous anti-Semitism or to perpetrate fresh genocides against other targeted groups. This year marks 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre, when more than 8,000—mainly men and boys—were killed in just a few days by the Serb forces. I am proud that, in Manchester, we—again together, as all our faiths and others—commemorate Srebrenica Memorial Day each year.

In Britain, we take pride—I take pride—in our pluralistic society, one where people are free to practise their religion and express their identity and where they should be able to live without fear of persecution. But we must never take those freedoms for granted. They are the product of a long history of struggle and sacrifice. Yet, as other noble Lords have said, they remain under attack—even in the UK, even today. We must make sure that atrocities such as the Holocaust never happen again. We must speak up and act up when anti-Semitism, racism or xenophobia happen.

As a schoolboy in Manchester, I studied alongside many fellow pupils who were Jewish. Most of them would have lost family members in the Holocaust. Simply being boys together—we did not have girls in those days in my school, and it still does not—taught me that we were one humanity under the skin. Indeed, the only practical difference between being Jewish or gentile seemed to be that my Jewish friends got to go home a lesson early on winter Friday afternoons.

As others have said, with each anniversary, the memories of the Holocaust slip away from living memory. If we are to hold firm against the evils of fascism and other extreme ideologies—as indeed we must—as each generation of survivors passes on, it is incumbent on all of us to remember the past. Today’s debate plays a vital part in enabling that, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley—a good friend, who does so much excellent work to promote strong relationships between different faiths and communities, and who spoke so strongly and movingly in opening our debate today—for giving us this opportunity to build “For a better future”, to quote the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.

Future Homes Standard

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My noble friend is quite right that, as we set out in our Plan for Change, our growth agenda and our drive towards net zero are not exclusive: there is no conflict between them. I see three major opportunities for us here: great jobs, training, skills and apprenticeships for our young people, both in construction and in retrofitting; manufacturing capability for technology such as heat pumps, solar and maybe many new aspects of that; and building on our country’s fantastic reputation for innovation as we develop the green technologies of the future. These things are totally compatible with our growth agenda.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of a housing association. Housing associations are a key provider of homes for those who can least afford high energy bills. What support will there be for housing associations when they are bidding for grants to subsidise the properties they are building? It does cost that bit extra, maybe £5,000 or £6,000 per home, to build to the standards that we need to.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I understand the issue; in fact, I met the National Housing Federation just last week to discuss these issues. We want to drive forward the delivery of affordable housing, particularly social housing, and we recognise the costs that will make. We will be considering, once we have set the standard, what that cost might be and what further support we might offer.

Community Engagement Principles and Extremism Definition

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a series of excellent points. I totally agree about extremist behaviour and its disproportionate impact on women and girls. Let me reassure the noble Baroness that we are looking at ensuring that we have more female voices—not just female voices, but young female voices—in the faith space. Let me also let the House know that I have been up and down the country and have engaged not just with the major faiths but with every faith in our country. That has been a privilege, but I have learned that there need to be more female voices in the faith space.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, a decision under the previous Government about a particular Islamic organisation being characterised as extremist led to the defunding and collapse of the national Inter Faith Network. I wonder if the Minister agrees that the Inter Faith Network provided a vital role in co-ordinating interfaith work at a national level. We do great things at local level, but we need some national work as well. Will he urge His Majesty’s Government to commit to refunding the Inter Faith Network?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate, with whom I have worked closely in the interfaith area in the north-west of England. I totally agree about the work of the Inter Faith Network. It is important that there is a national forum. Although we will not be bringing back the Inter Faith Network as it was previously, we are looking to ensure that that work is brought back and we are exploring ideas. My department, the MHCLG, has just commissioned some research and a consultation on what form that will take in future, so that there is a national interfaith presence that the Government can regularly engage with.