Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Farmer]

82: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Provision of information and collaboration on housing for prison leavers(1) The Secretary of State has a duty to—(a) ensure local housing authorities receive the necessary information, and(b) facilitate effective collaboration between local housing authorities, HM Prison and Probation Service and other relevant organisations,to prevent prison leavers at risk of homelessness from being unable to access housing.(2) The Secretary of State must, by regulations made by statutory instrument, publish—(a) requirements for the nature of the information that must be shared with local housing authorities,(b) the timescales on which the information must be provided to local housing authorities,(c) the timescales within which local housing authorities must respond, including when they need to confirm whether or not housing will be available,(d) requirements for local housing authorities to respond to the person or body which made the social housing referral for a prison leaver, and(e) guidance for local housing authorities on their responsibility to provide further information as required.(3) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, and annually thereafter, the Secretary of State must publish a report setting out the number of prison leavers provided with social housing by local housing authorities on release from prison. (4) The Secretary of State must lay the report under subsection (3) before Parliament.(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that local housing authorities receive information and effectively collaborate with other organisations as necessary to provide housing to prison leavers at risk of homelessness. It also to require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on social housing provision to prison leavers.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 82 is in my name and I support the three other amendments in this group, tabled by my noble friends Lady O’Neill of Bexley and Lord Jamieson. Amendment 82 augments my Committee stage Amendment 94, and I thank MHCLG for two meetings with officials which have helped me refine what I think is needed. Summarising briefly the arguments I made in Committee, which are still all valid, I would say that this amendment does not require local authorities to house ex-prisoners but aims to improve their rehabilitation by prisons and local authorities working better together to prevent post-release homelessness. Releasing prisoners into homelessness, and especially rough sleeping, makes their rehabilitation almost impossible. Unsurprisingly, they will be more than twice as likely to reoffend as those released into settled accommodation.

They are also far more likely to die. In an investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman into 137 deaths after release over a two-year period, almost one-third of those dying within two weeks had been released homeless. The PPO described homelessness on release as “a considerable issue”. It is also a growing issue. Last year, there was a 28% rise since 2021 in the numbers of deaths within two weeks of release. Greater pressure will shortly come from the 10 monthly tranches of early releases from English and Welsh jails, starting on 2 September 2026, of an estimated 6,000 prisoners. HM Inspectorate of Prisons told the Commons Public Accounts Committee in November 2024 that, at some prisons, the limited housing stock available for those released had been

“overwhelmed by early release schemes”.

The Government are aware of this. Ministry of Justice data shows almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025—a 39% rise from the previous year. Its national plan to end homelessness states that this

“could have been prevented had better coordination and planning been in place”—

hence the timeliness and needfulness of my amendment. It would ramp up accountability on local housing authorities’ compliance with the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, because some are far better than others, under similar stock pressures, at finding ex-prisoners accommodation. Effective partnerships with prison, probation and other organisations are key to successful operation of the Homelessness Reduction Act’s duty to refer, which should kick in 50 days prior to release.

My amendment would tighten up the existing legal framework, as it is not delivering as it should, and its reporting requirements would reveal how local authorities compare with their statistical neighbours. It would enable regulations to specify more clearly how and when local housing authorities must respond to referrals. Prisons are also not consistently complying with the duty to refer; hence, regulations would also tighten the process at their end.

My new amendment explicitly refers to the need for effective collaboration between all relevant agencies, for reasons that I will now explain. Given the urgency, I am pleased that there has already been promising news on its direction of travel. First, the new Prime Minister —and I sincerely wish him well—has promised to end rough sleeping. Over half of all “duty to refer” referrals to local housing authorities are from criminal justice agencies, highlighting just how many of those threatened with rough sleeping are prison leavers. I met Andy Burnham when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester and asked if he had ever visited what used to be the city’s notorious HMP Strangeways. He had not, but he mentioned that practically all the men he saw sleeping rough on the road down to his office from what is now HMP Manchester had recently been released from there. Symbolically, they had barely moved on. Given today’s remarks, he clearly remains profoundly exercised by this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I thank my noble friend Lady Eaton and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for her support, particularly in highlighting the variability of councils’ responses to notification that homeless prisoners will be coming out on their patch, and how councils right next door to each other vary from one to another. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for her contribution.

I thank the Minister for understanding this amendment. I am slightly disappointed, but I am aware of the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm and that quite a lot of work could be done on this in the Summer Recess. It is quite a simple amendment. Therefore, in view of the timescale that the Prime Minister has put on this—by the end of this Parliament—I ask that the Government use the Recess usefully to tidy up this amendment, maybe to come back at Third Reading with their own government amendment. In the light of that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 82 withdrawn.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I will be following along with her arguments but will speak to my Amendment 94. I start by thanking the Minister for the helpful meeting I had yesterday with her officials.

Amendment 94 does not require local authorities to house ex-prisoners but aims to improve their rehabilitation by prisons and local authorities working better together to prevent post-release homelessness. This is the point of the amendment. About 10 years ago, I started working with the Ministry of Justice on prison reform, specifically conducting two reviews on how prisoners could maintain family and other key relational ties to prevent their reoffending. I am still involved in the implementation of the recommendations of those reviews, but I am beginning to feel a little like an IPP prisoner with no set date for release.

My amendment would contribute to a collective refocus on offender rehabilitation, which is much needed if we are to have any hope of reducing our prison population and the criminal justice budget. Reoffending costs this country £18 billion a year. Releasing prisoners into homelessness, and especially rough sleeping, single-handedly undermines any rehabilitation activity they have ever undertaken. Their proven reoffending rate, 76%, is more than twice that for those released from custody into settled accommodation, at 36.4%.

I have been told that existing legislation to prevent homelessness is adequate. However, there appears to be very little accountability regarding local housing authorities’ compliance with that law, which I will touch on briefly. Some are far more effective than others at finding accommodation for ex-prisoners. This is not simply about available housing stock, but the processes they follow and how well they work in partnership with prison and probation. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reports, for example, that several London boroughs are frequently problematic, while others with very pressured housing markets are not. Similarly, in 2025, the London Assembly Housing Committee reported inconsistent practice across London boroughs with weak co-ordination between prisons, probation and borough housing teams.

My amendment seeks to tighten up the rather loose legal framework, which is not delivering as it should. Ministry of Justice data says that almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025—a 39% rise from the previous year. My amendment’s reporting requirements would reveal how local authorities compare with their statistical neighbours. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 introduced a duty on public authorities, including prison and probation, to refer those at threat of homelessness to local authority housing teams, because they would be released within about two months and have nowhere to go. Looking briefly at how that should work, statutory guidance says, rather weakly, that

“Housing authorities are encouraged to … acknowledge receipt of any referral”,


which

“may be in the form of an automatic email reply”.

If that is all the prison is getting and there is no feedback loop, the referral may have simply entered a bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle. Non-statutory guidance says:

“The duty to refer will help to ensure that services are working together effectively to prevent homelessness … It is also anticipated”—


which, again, sounds a little weak—

“that it will encourage local housing authorities and other public authorities to build strong partnerships which enable them to work together to intervene earlier to prevent homelessness through increasingly integrated services”.

However, the local housing authority is merely required to contact the prisoner being referred. The guidance also states merely:

“It is good practice for local housing authorities to go beyond referral procedures and work with other public authorities to prepare a comprehensive assessment of need”


for the prisoner. Where is the grip on local authorities? They are paid from the public purse to obey the law. They are, or should be, accountable for spending and saving public money. Reducing reoffending by just 1% would save £180 million.

My amendment would enable regulations to specify how local housing authorities must respond to referrals. Regulations would specify response times they would need to work to, including when they would need to notify a final decision, and require them to inform the prison or the Probation Service as well as the prisoner. Prisons have a strong legal duty of care towards prisoners and are responsible for pre-release planning. They also need this information and cannot rely on prisoners passing it on to them. The London Assembly Housing Committee found that prisons are not consistently complying with the duty to refer, with late referrals from prison contributing greatly to uncertainty; hence, the regulations are tightening the process at their end as well.

To conclude, currently there are many gaps in the system that we need to close so that soon-to-be-released individuals no longer fall through them. Without accommodation, as we have heard from other noble Lords, they cannot seek work, restructure their lives or take ownership of their rehabilitation. It can be a matter of life or death. Just last month, a Guardian investigation reported record numbers of deaths within two weeks of release in 2025, a 28% rise since 2021. The primary driver, according to experts, is a rise in prisoners being released into homelessness and falling through “trapdoors to crisis”. The duty to refer was designed to prevent this wherever possible. Almost 10 years on from the Act that introduced it, we must acknowledge that it is not working as it should be for ex-prisoners. The Bill provides the perfect opportunity to fix it.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to these amendments, and it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Farmer: he is one of the most indefatigable and persistent champions of the family and of the education and rehabilitation of prisoners, and I commend the work he has done over many years.

As a constituency MP, I had a prison in my constituency. I was once critical of what I thought was the cushy lifestyle of the women’s wing of the prison—it was a coterminous prison, men and women—because it provided aromatherapy in the gym. I criticised this, as the local MP, and of course the Sun put it on the front page, with the immortal headline, “In for a stretch”, which was quite amusing. The serious point is that we can spend very significant amounts of money to make sure that prisoners can read and write, understand civic engagement and have meaningful work, but that is all completely wasted if, when they leave prison, they go back into the clutches of the nefarious and criminal classes, particularly drug dealers.

I commend both noble Baronesses on the Liberal Democrat Benches. The noble Baroness, Lady Teather, will not remember, but we worked together, many moons ago when she was Children’s Minister in the other place, on the rather niche subject of children with Tourette’s syndrome—she did a great job in that role in the coalition Government. Both noble Baronesses are absolutely right that we need to focus. These are permissive amendments to focus on collecting and collating as much data as possible on both ex-offenders and Armed Forces personnel. That is all that these amendments ask for and I heartily concur with all the later amendments in this group.

Domestic Abuse Refuge Spaces

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 21st June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

In April 2021, the Home Office provided £1.4 million of support for a migrant victims scheme to provide the support that the noble Baroness talks about because they have no recourse to public funds. A pilot has been run by Southall Black Sisters and their delivery partners, providing a really good wraparound support service for migrant victims of domestic abuse; this has included offering them sustenance, helping them, counselling them and giving them legal advice. During the pilot, the scheme supported 425 migrant victims. We have allocated another £1.4 million this year to continue to fund this pilot; we are going to take on board the lessons learned by Southall Black Sisters.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the Office for National Statistics has found that a third of domestic abuse victims are male, yet there are very few refuge spaces for men and children in London, the Home Counties and the east of England, although there are places elsewhere. I recently visited a men’s charity in Kent, where there are none at all. How will the Government encourage local authorities to bridge that gap?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My noble friend brings up an interesting issue. Yes, we talk more about women than men but there are men who are victims of domestic abuse. The problem is that the numbers are smaller so it is difficult to get a lot of refuges across the country. Under the safe accommodation support duty, tier 1 local authorities are required to assess the need for, and provide support for, all victims of domestic abuse, including male victims. The male victims’ organisation that keeps an eye on this is called ManKind and provides expert input into monitoring these duties as part of the domestic abuse safe accommodation national expert steering group, which is chaired by my colleague, Felicity Buchan. The voice of the man who is domestically abused is there at the centre; we ensure that they get the support they need.

Inclusive Society

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for the opportunity to debate this important issue. I will focus, as did my noble friend Lord Dobbs, on the report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. I declare my interest in that currently two-thirds of my grandchildren are of mixed race.

I was disappointed by the shrill, vituperative inaccuracies of many of the criticisms of this report. They contrast starkly with the calm, nuanced and reasoned tone of its conclusions. At the heart of the controversy are different expectations as to what will drive change and improve outcomes for the disadvantaged and excluded. As the BBC reported:

“While the Left ‘emoted’ on race, the prime minister wanted a data-driven report”


which recognised the complexities driving disadvantage, and for the commission to make practical recommendations.

The Cabinet Office’s Race Disparity Unit, set up in 2016, built a comprehensive database on race and ethnicity which the commission is the first major independent body to use to investigate how ethnicity and other factors impact on outcomes and deeper underlying causes of key disparities. Surely it would be more surprising if access to this rich new seam had not generated new insights and a more productive narrative. Ideology cannot be allowed to negate these, as Trevor Phillips explained in the Times:

“Depressingly, a minority want the debate about race to continue as a medieval contest of faith, in which the catechism—‘institutional racism’, ‘white privilege’—is mouthed unthinkingly, without understanding. Those who deviate are lashed as heretics … it is the self-proclaimed radicals who are, in fact, least keen on change. For the zealots to justify their revolutionary aims … ethnic minorities must remain in suffering.”


Specifically, this report’s data-driven conclusion was that family structure contributes more than racism to outcomes. One commissioner described the key moment in the whole process as when all 10 said, with one voice, that family was what distinguished the success stories from the failures. This was the first government-commissioned report to engage seriously with the family, and it does so respectfully but unapologetically, rejecting

“both the stigmatisation of single mothers and the turning of a blind eye to the impact of family breakdown on the life chances of children.”

Father absence is linked to criminality and imprisonment, and family breakdown to gang membership of both girls and boys. The great attraction of gangs is that they provide families, albeit highly dysfunctional ones that can be lethal.

Sadly, such insights are not new. A thematic review by Croydon’s safeguarding children board found that fathers of over two-thirds of children of concern did not live at home and a father walking out was frequently the turning point in a child’s behaviour. Three-quarters of the boys were involved with gangs and over half the girls known by police to be violent, with almost two-fifths suspected of knife crime.

To conclude, ignoring or vilifying this report will not build a more inclusive society. Getting behind its practical, evidence-based recommendations will, however, enable us to build on the hard-won progress of generations of ethnic minorities, many of whom came to our four nations seeking a better life. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that the Government will further support family hubs and give the green light to the important “support for families” review, as the commission recommends?

Levelling Up

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I completely agree that education is very much the engine of social mobility and addresses the points that were raised. We need to judge our levelling-up agenda against a package of measures that could also support skills development through things such as the new community renewal fund and the UK shared prosperity fund.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm whether the levelling-up fund will accept bids containing social infrastructure elements such as funding to transform family support into a family hubs model? Transformation typically requires revenue funding to redeploy senior staff and backfill their roles, the development of missing services et cetera, as well as capital funding to refurbish buildings. Is this fund open to both capital and revenue funding bids?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, local government does tend to separate capital and revenue, and the UK levelling-up fund will have more of a capital focus. However, this could include community spaces important to local areas that support the family policies that my noble friend has raised.