Home Owners and Home Ownership

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it is common ground that we need more homes, but this Government are going entirely the wrong way about it. We are on track to complete fewer new homes in this Parliament than in the last—a period that was disrupted by Covid and the strategic supply shocks unleashed by a European war. It is not hard to understand why we are failing, but to mask the failure to grow in our cities, impossible unachievable new targets have been set in the countryside, and have undermined the equity and collateral in the largest sites with the greatest entry costs. Any old orchard for a handful of homes has economic preference over the strategic allocations, which are being left to moulder. Yes, the five-year land supply is part of the problem, not the solution. New levies, fees and charges amount to between £30,000 and £40,000 for a new dwelling house, and I now learn that regulatory costs for high-rise flats amount to about £70,000—a real fiscal disincentive, borne disproportionately by the young and the first-time buyer making a start.

There are three elements to sustainability, but Natural England has been granted a veto on the creation of new homes in the largest parts of the country with the greatest housing potential—as if not building new homes is going to clean up our rivers. All those ecological and archaeological reports, which can only be done at certain times of the year, add delay, cost and increased risk. Failure to dot an “i” or cross a “t” means growth is postponed for a year by quangos acting as judge and jury in their own court, using the consent process as a make-work scheme for university chums and colleagues, while bricklayers, tilers, roofers and ground workers are put out of work. The Labour Party, which was established to represent the journeyman, has nothing to say to these people.

Only last week, the Home Builders Federation told me about the case of a small piece of ground suitable for nine homes that cost about £40,000, but was burdened with proposed biodiversity charges of over £200,000. That was before the madness of the nutrient neutrality levies. No wonder the developer walked away—no homes built there. Now there will be more mayoral taxes, and building safety levies in London—£90 a square metre in Fulham—are chilling our capital’s housing growth. The fiscal incontinence of this Government, unable to get spending under control, has led to the highest interest rates for two decades, which have killed off nearly all the small builders. Even the largest operators, public companies, are now struggling with the number of active sites, which is down 20% in London since this Government started.

Only this morning, the Times reports that worse is to come: 140 of the 166 developers operating in London are working on projects due to complete in 2027. Without a pipeline of work from 2028 onwards, the Times says they will “effectively exit London”. Of course, the Government try to blame councils for this sorry situation, but to find the culprits they just need to look in the mirror. This is their calamity.

Looking at the situation for families who have aspired to, and own, a stake in their own home, we have a Prime Minister who tells them that their land and property is not taxed enough; the politics of envy, and a mansion tax that falls on the old widow eking out a pension while living in a home bought generations ago; second home surcharges that are crashing the tourist economy of coastal communities; a resistance to addressing the injustice in the balance of power, and sharp practice, between shared-ownership owners and the RSLs, where the residents cop all the costs and the landlord gets off scot-free; and crazy stamp duty rates that damage labour market liquidity, trap people in their homes and discourage inward investment in our economy.

The Government are trying, of course, but their medicine is making the patient worse. Vibes alone will not build these homes. The new town programme is dead on arrival, not even going so far as to long list schemes with fast rail connections, grade-separated junctions and all the land assembled in the adopted plan, with the unanimous support of the local planning authority. It is just incompetent.

The emergency relaxations on high-rises in London will expire before they can do any good, so that is another three years wasted. On 1 January, the Government plan to implement even more taxes—on steel and cement. How many more burdens can the construction industry take? We have to call time on these delusions, because build costs have leapt while house prices have fallen. Can they not see the jeopardy here? Why would anybody want to catch a falling knife like this?

The property market is being taxed to death. Whether you are building, buying, selling, owning, renting or being a landlord, this Government are crushing aspiration while missing their own numeric manifesto target by miles. This matters because workers cannot move about, growing families cannot get on, the old cannot downsize and the young cannot upsize. Worst of all, the journeymen are being put out of work.

The economist Arthur Laffer, with whom I had dinner last night, says that you cannot tax yourself to success. But Britain is taxing itself to death, no more so than in building, construction and housebuilding, with a dogmatic whole-economy experiment on housing that is killing home ownership and aspiration. It is just not working.

National Infrastructure Projects: Devolution

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the devolution of powers on the delivery of national infrastructure projects.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

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

My Lords, nationally significant infrastructure projects do what they say on the tin: they are national. No devolved powers have altered the consenting of the decision-making route for NSIPs, so no assessment of impacts has been made. Decisions on nationally significant infrastructure projects remain nationally accountable, with the relevant Secretary of State taking decisions, of course following examination and recommendation by the Planning Inspectorate. Devolution supports infrastructure delivery by giving local leaders stronger tools to align housing, transport growth and supporting infrastructure.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, water companies have warned that there is enough water supply to handle only another 420,000 new homes—far fewer than the 1.5 million planned by the Government. How will the Government ensure that sufficient water infrastructure is built to keep pace with the building of new homes—homes our nation needs?

Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. Across England, there will be thousands of councillors and council officers who have worked for months, sometimes years, to deliver an effective solution to the Government’s top-down reorganisation diktat. They will have devoted scarce resources in both funding and precious time. Today, they will be despairing. With the stroke of a ministerial pen, all their careful planning has been consigned to the waste bin.

The principle of devolution is the right one. Unfortunately, the Government have conflated devolution with local government reorganisation, and that has resulted in this sorry mess. There are any number of questions that the Minister must answer, given that, in July, she gave an assurance in this Chamber that a decision on the final reorganisation plans for the remaining councils would be made in October.

I am confident that there will be many specific questions about individual councils, so I will restrict my questions to general principles. First, given that the Government’s decision has been made following legal advice, can the Minister publish that advice and provide a summary for us in her response? Will she tell the House when those councils with agreed plans were informed? Some councils had already developed financial planning on the basis of agreed reorganisation. What support will the Government provide for those councils now facing severe financial pressures?

Today’s announcement has left councils and their residents in limbo. The Statement makes it clear that elections for districts will take place next year. That indicates a longer timeframe for reorganisation than a speedy review. Asking people to become councillors for a non-specific period is difficult. Equally, encouraging voter enthusiasm will be more challenging. What are they voting for? How long will it last? Local democracy has been the real loser in all this, with elections cancelled and democratic terms of office extended on a whim.

The process by which the Government determined the parameters of this reorganisation defied the importance and relevance of local communities. For example, new councils were told they had to have a population of at least 300,000, with a maximum of around 500,000—although, of course, one of the new Surrey councils has a population of 700,000. That was stated despite many existing unitary metropolitan councils being smaller than that. For instance, Calderdale, in my own west Yorkshire, has a population of just over 200,000. Many councils in the Manchester mayoral authority have a population of around 300,000 or fewer. That was one reason why communities lost out in this top-down reorganisation.

This is a thorough and embarrassing dog’s breakfast for the Government. It has all stemmed from the flawed notion that the financial crisis facing county councils could be resolved by changing the seats around the table and going for reorganisation, while ignoring the historic community ties around which many councils were created. The Government have much to do to put the “local” back into local government. I look forward to a thorough explanation from the Minister.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Minister!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, first, the un-cancellation of local government elections and now the embarrassment of this one, from a hapless MHCLG. Back in April, when your Lordships debated local government reorganisation, I characterised the proposals for Norfolk as a cut-and-shut job that would shame Arthur Daley. It would create England’s poorest council in east Norfolk and throw up in the air the authorities responsible for homelessness, housing, economic growth and planning. No wonder we challenged it. Today, the leader of my council tells me that the Government will refund our legal costs, well into six figures. Can the Minister tell us quite how much money the Government will be refunding to councils across the country to reimburse them for challenging decisions which we now conclude were unlawful and should never have been taken in the first place?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The strength of the representations of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, on this matter shows the differing opinions that we have seen throughout this process. There are strongly held, different views on all sides, and it is important that we continue to take those into account as we go through the review process.

First, as I should have emphasised more when I was speaking earlier, I recognise the amount of work that councils have already put into preparing for reorganisation. As I said, this work will not be wasted, but I appreciate that it comes with a cost. Financial commitments may have been made, and we will look at this as part of the review.

I have already spoken about transition costs. The overall costs of reorganisation are of course to be taken into account, but we also know that reorganisation can save money. There has been a £90 million saving in North Yorkshire and £75 million in Buckinghamshire since their unitaries were established. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, saved money when she reorganised Wiltshire into a unitary.

There are also associated legal costs. LGR is often contested in the courts. It is a right and proper part of our democratic system that important issues can be challenged in the court system. The Government engage legal advisers to defend those decisions whenever challenges are brought, and that brings costs with it. But the questions are so significant, and the implications so long-lasting, that the extent of legal costs should be viewed in that context. Legal costs will be determined in the usual way.

Nature Restoration Levy Regulations 2026

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, environmentalists are up in arms on the nature restoration fund and EDPs because they break the link between a development and its nature mitigations. Developers are saying that the cost, risks and delay are making development unviable, while everybody argues that nothing is getting built in those areas of the country with the greatest housing potential.

Taken together with all the environmental fees, charges and other levies, it has put the price of a new home up by about £30,000 to £40,000 in the last five years. The hard truth is that well-meaning but counterproductive nature levies and other levies are damaging our economy, with brickies, ground workers, sparkies and chippies all sitting idle. Of course, the simple truth is that not building new homes—especially social homes, which are the first to get the chop when viability is in question—is not going to clean up the rivers. The organisation that is meant to grip this has singularly failed in the five years since it misdirected Ministers that families trying to get their feet on the housing ladder should bear the brunt of upgrading the sewage treatment works, rather than the water companies whose job it really is.

The situation we find ourselves in today is a direct result of Natural England misdirecting itself as to the science and arithmetic of nutrient mobility. It confused absorption with adsorption and has misrepresented scientific papers that it purports support its position when the reverse is true. By way of a declaration of interest, I am involved in the fertiliser industry, so understanding nutrient mobility in soils is one of my specialist subjects.

About four years ago, when it became obvious that Natural England had stymied housebuilding in my area and was incapable of addressing river pollution, I established the Norfolk Environmental Credits company, which is owned by all the councils of Norfolk, to do the job that Natural England has the staffing, powers, software and responsibility to do, but does not. I was the person who set up that green financial market referred to by my noble friend Lady Coffey. Five years on, if it were not for people like me rolling up my sleeves to get this problem addressed—and franchising it to other council areas in other catchments—no new homes would have been built in the entirety of this Parliament. I would like to take credit for this, but I am anxious that all this hard work will have been for nothing if Natural England takes our homework, runs away with it and leaves us high and dry.

The problem is that Natural England has been allowed to get away with being simultaneously the regulator, adviser, enforcer, operator, pricer, procurer and competitor in a market in the grossest case of multiple conflicts of interest that, in any other walk of life, would be closed down for being contrary to the public interest. Its advice has caused us to sleepwalk into an Alice in Wonderland situation where a fertiliser colleague could sell a farmer a kilo of phosphate for 85p, but a developer must spend £50,000 to remove it from the treatment works at the other end.

If that was not crazy enough, the Government have made the river problem even worse by subsidising the production of over 20 million tonnes of biogas digestate—applied to the land at the wrong time of year—which does more than anything else to turn the rivers green. Yet these polluters do not pay a penny into the fund. It is wrong.

All these levies have brought developers to their knees. All they wanted to know was how much, when, where and how these charges would be applied, as well as the scope, extent, cost and regulation that the EDPs require in an evidence-based and transparent manner, with a degree of consistency from one place to another. But it was too much to hope for. When the regulations were laid in June, the first were all about how Natural England could charge and enforce its fees. We are still none the wiser on the important things. The credibility of the nature restoration fund ultimately rests on a simple question: will levy income be sufficient to fund conservation measures for as long as they are required to deliver the promised environmental outcomes?

When we went through the then Planning and Infrastructure Bill, we warned of the consequences of allowing Natural England to lead on this when it could not even get their stories straight on the jumping spiders or the ponies or the advice on bird flu, which was used as a bogus pretext to license shooting in the land use framework. It has ceased to be trusted. Through its indolence, we still have no idea whether the EDPs would issue some sort of permit or a licence for the resident to flush his lavatory in his new home. That distinction is important. A permit is an asset that is tradable on the secondary market—repeating the milk quota disaster of the 1980s—whereas a licence, if no longer needed, perhaps because a sewage treatment works has been upgraded, can be surrendered so that the mitigation can be applied again for the benefit of the taxpayer for the remainder of the 80-year term. Is it a licence or a permit? We do not know. It is an important matter.

Now we get to the pricing. The market for phosphate credits has settled at around £5,000 per dwelling. That fee covers not just the immediate costs of introducing a mitigation but those tail liabilities of management for at least 80 years together with inspection and regulatory costs along the way. As I explained during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, this is an actuarial evaluation problem. The problem is that Natural England exhibits little understanding of this simple economic reality. All indications are that it will just pick a number out of the air that is wholly unrelated and untethered to those liabilities, and, in so doing, chop off at the knees people—like me, through our councils—who rolled up their sleeves to fix the problem when Natural England would not.

If it does that, it will at a stroke further damage our economic reputation, because there is one area in which the UK has developed some quite interesting and valuable intellectual property: the running of nature markets. All the indications are that Natural England’s cack-handed ignorance would completely destroy the accumulated value of these nature markets. Our company has already had to take an impairment.

When are the Government going to get a grip and rein in this organisation that has so wilfully misunderstood the science, made our economy smaller and homes more expensive, left social homes unbuilt and workers and professionals sitting at home, delayed mitigations and imperilled our global leadership in the nature market—all when Natural England’s first priority, through its regulations, was simply to featherbed their own bureaucracy?

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Fuller]

79: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Protections for adapted social housing(1) This section applies where a dwelling owned by the local housing authority or a registered provider of social housing—(a) has been substantially adapted for occupation by a person with a disability or support need, or(b) has been substantially adapted with the use of a Disabled Facilities Grant.(2) Before such a dwelling is allocated through the general housing allocation process, the landlord must take reasonable steps to offer the dwelling to a person whose needs would substantially benefit from those adaptations.(3) In this section, “substantially adapted” has such meaning as the Secretary of State may prescribe by regulations made by statutory instrument.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require social landlords to protect the pool of adapted housing by giving preference to applicants who could benefit from existing adaptations before allocating adapted homes through the general housing allocation process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am disappointed that a Bill that purports to protect the supply of new homes fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of adapted homes. We are an ageing nation and nowadays, many more premature babies survive into adulthood with life-limiting conditions. In Committee, I explained how councils might install housing adaptations so that a resident with an impairment can live more comfortably. I explained that it might be as simple as a grab rail or ramp. Half of such adaptations include a wet room, many with wider doors to accommodate wheelchairs.

In preparation for Report, I sat down with Kevin Philcox, the officer responsible for housing standards at South Norfolk Council. He told me that wet rooms are important because poor personal hygiene is a leading cause of infection and hospital admission among the elderly. Keeping yourself clean down there is not just about dignity; it helps keep our hospital wards clear. It typically takes between six and nine months to deliver an adaptation. I will not go into the reasons why, but in my council, we deliver about 150 such projects per year at an average of about £10,000 each.

I feel I have laboured the point, but the simple truth is that we do not have a large enough pool of adapted and improved homes to meet the demand. That is why the state invests in them. The local government department distributes yearly funding of over £720 million to local authorities for the purpose of improving homes and making them suitable for people with limitations. Some councils, such as my own, and other RSLs, top that money up. I suppose that making these improvements adds up to about £1 billion a year.

My amendment is about protecting the adapted stock—protecting that £1 billion per year investment—and about dignity for the most vulnerable in society. I have heard it said that this is an allocations issue and that this Bill is not going there, but I do not see it as an allocations issue in the sense that we are going to give preference to a particular veteran or a certain local person. This is about protecting the generality of the pool of adapted homes as society gets older, fatter and lives longer with debilitating impairments, so that there is a stock of homes where people can make the best of their lives and make their disabilities more bearable. If the state cannot recognise that simple truth, what is it for? Casually dismissing it as an allocations issue is wilful misdirection. We must grab this sufficiency issue now.

I have softened the text of my amendment so that the Minister can define the scope of what counts as a relevant adaptation. I have not been overly prescriptive, as I was in Committee. But it is really important that we protect that £1 billion a year investment, so that people of all abilities can have a home that they can get into and get on with.

Here is the problem my amendment seeks to remedy. When, as so often happens, a tenant passes away or moves on and the home is readvertised, with the exception of certain specialised sheltered accommodation, no credit can be given for those expensive and hard-won adaptations when a new family moves in. Tenants can ask them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy; it is a waste of money. It reduces the pool of adapted homes and is bad for everybody, especially the taxpayer, who funds the work twice—once to put it in, and again to take it out.

I will repeat the story I told in Committee of the brand new accessible home built with wide doors and low kitchen units, perfect for the wheelchair-bound resident. The first resident turned out to be exceptionally tall and, by and by, he tired of bending down to move the saucepans around the low-level hob. So, the council was obliged to replace the kitchen with a normal one. That is crazy—it should have been reserved for a wheelchair-bound resident in the first place.

The Bill purports to protect the supply of social homes. My council expert, Kevin Philcox—that man again —told me that, among housing standards professionals, protecting the adapted stock in the way I propose is both the Shangri-La and the holy grail of social housing policy in this country. That is quite a statement.

We have a new Prime Minister. He wants to make social housing a talismanic issue; this is du jour. I am suggesting something that would not cost anything, yet it would make huge strides in helping some of the most vulnerable people. It is here and now. I will not press this to a Division this evening, but I hope the Minister will take this to the department, and in turn to No. 10, which wants low-cost quick wins and can have them at Third Reading. I am serving this one up out of the goodness of my heart as a house-warming present for the new Prime Minister and the Secretary of State on their first day in charge. I beg to move.

[Baroness Teather (LD)]

My Lords, my Amendment 80 is a retabling of an amendment I tabled in Committee. I will say a few words at the end in support of the amendment to which the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, has just spoken.

My Amendment 80 would require the Secretary of State to review and report to Parliament on the extent to which former members of the Armed Forces are able to access social housing. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss this issue and for making clear her commitment to achieving progress on this. I also thank her hard-working officials for sending me a very helpful note about the data that is collected, which I note was sent extremely late in the evening, so I am sure they were working hard in advance of the Bill returning to the Lords today.

The Minister responded to my amendment in Committee and in more detail when we had the chance to meet. She explained that she sees the way of making progress on this as being incorporating it partly within the wider review of social housing allocation. I broadly support that proposal, which I think is a sensible way forward, but I have some questions that I would be grateful if she would respond to. The information that her officials sent me was about data. I was really asking for a lot more information so that we are able to scrutinise how the Government are getting on. The Government say they are making progress on this issue. We need to be able to see the impact of that. Are more of the Armed Forces community able to access social housing or is it having no impact whatever?

The data that was sent to me on local authority housing statistics reported that 2,649 households on housing registers are members of the Armed Forces community and have been given additional preference under local authorities’ allocation schemes and that this equated to around 0.2% of the 1.34 million households on housing registers in England. Do we really think that is picking up everybody who ought to be benefiting from being given an additional preference? How do the Government intend to ensure that all those in need report their need? How are they encouraged to report their need? Is the review being conducted going to meet the gap between the figure that we currently have and the almost certainly many others who are not benefiting from the measures that the Government have already brought forward? How are we going to monitor the progress that is made? How do we know that what gets delivered is going to be successful? How we measure success is an important question here.

My other point is about injured veterans who have a disability and require specialist or adapted accommodation, which relates to the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, just moved. We spoke about this in private, so the Minister is aware that this is an issue very dear to my heart as my husband is a wheelchair user and other members of my family who have complex disabilities have struggled to access housing. One of them remained in hospital for a very long time waiting for accommodation that would meet his needs. This is a question about not just the waste of taxpayers’ money of taking out adaptions that are done but the extreme waste of taxpayers’ money of keeping people in hospital waiting for an appropriate property that would meet their needs.

I know the Minister has said—and I accept this—that not every disability is the same, and people will often require something that is personally adapted to meet their needs. However, there are certain aspects of adaptation that are likely to meet many people’s needs, including wider doorways and wet rooms, so stripping everything out does not make any sense whatever. I really hope the Minister will respond to that. It dovetails neatly with my point about making sure we are meeting the needs of veterans as well as others.

I do not intend to push my amendment to a vote, but I would be pleased to hear the Minister explain how the Government are going to respond to the point about the gap between what we currently know about and the people who are facing the changes that the Government have made, and how we are going to reach them and make progress on those aspects.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I have outlined, both on this set of amendments and on previous ones, that we are carrying out an extensive review of stock management and allocation, so I hope all those issues will be taken into account in those reviews.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, the hour is late, and I have said I will not press this to a vote, but I am sincere in my desire to protect homes for the most vulnerable in society, to protect dignity and to enable them to get out. I was very taken with the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, who spoke from the heart. I accept the assurances that the Minister has given, but we need to reflect the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.

Today, there is a new Prime Minister and a new Secretary of State. I sincerely hope that the noble Baroness will stay in her place. In the last Session, she had some monster Bills—the devolution Bill, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and whole tranches of the pensions Bill—as well as this Social Housing Bill in this Session. We have spent many hours on opposite sides of the Chamber, not always agreeing but always respecting our views. With that in mind, I hope we can have an assurance that we will come back with something at Third Reading that places in the Bill some of the reassurances she has given for a new Government, to bind the new Secretary of State. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 79 withdrawn.

--- 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.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I associate myself with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, on Amendment 7. It is important that rural social housing stands apart from the generality of the pool of this valuable resource.

My Amendment 24 is a repeat of an amendment I tabled in Committee. Quite simply, it seeks to ensure that, when a social home is sold, the proceeds are recycled locally within the same strategic housing market area. When I was the leader of a council for nearly 20 years, every single home lost to right to buy was replaced and more. It can be done if you are organised about it. We recycled all the proceeds of right to buy into new homes by adding extra money alongside. Social housing is not the finite resource that some people would tell you it is. One of its features is that it permits a mechanism to renew over time the stock of social homes. As one house is acquired and replaced, it modernises the pool and provides affordable homes for new families. It keeps the system up to date.

I welcome the principle set out in the Bill that the receipts received by a council can be recycled by that council in pursuance of that replacement principle, but I have concerns that the Bill will prevent receipts in one authority being applied to a neighbouring one even if they are in the same housing market assessment area. In Committee, the Minister explained that it would be very difficult to define such areas, but I disagree. We have both been council leaders. When local councils, either individually or with their neighbours, plan for new homes under a local plan, there is a statutory duty to define the housing market area on which the plan will operate.

I remember very clearly devising a plan with two of our neighbours. Collectively, we set the target for how many social homes were required and that number was judged to be sound by an independent inspector. This is not something you just pluck out of the air. Later, when our neighbours in Norwich could not spend their right-to-buy receipts fast enough, they gave the money to us and we built new homes no more than a mile from the city boundary. It benefited everybody.

With that in mind, noble Lords might ask why we need my amendment. The answer is that we had to go through the rigmarole of applying for special dispensation from Norwich to lend or give the money to us to build a house no more than a mile from its boundary. That was crazy. If we are to devolve powers to local government, as the new Government installed only today intend, my amendment would speed that up and deliver more homes, more quickly.

I have spoken about councils. I now want to talk about RSLs, which are a significant part of the mix. They sit apart from councils and there is a whole panoply of RSLs that, having started small, are now in many cases huge concerns. In Committee, I explained that a local Victory Housing association close to where I live, which was originally spun out of North Norfolk District Council some 15 years ago, is now part of a huge combine where the shots are called in Gloucester, 200 miles away. The effect of my amendment would be to ensure that, if one of the old Victory homes was sold in Norfolk under right to buy, Victory would be compelled to replace that home close by rather than in other parts of the country. We must remember the principle that organisations such as Victory, now absorbed into Flagship, received those houses in trust from their predecessor bodies—for the most part, our councils. My amendment would ensure that the proceeds were recycled within the same area from which the home was originally seeded by those predecessor bodies.

We have a Social Housing Bill that purports to maintain the supply of local social housing. My amendment would give legal weight to that. Accepting it would mean that RSLs are required to replace the right to buys close by, not in other parts of the country miles away—in other counties or regions or even on the other side of the country where houses are possibly much cheaper to build but where the need is not necessarily there. It is as simple as that. My amendment recognises that the stock is not just a national numbers game; it is more local than that. If we accept it, it will make the Government’s stated objective of delivering more social homes much easier than it otherwise would be. I invite the Minister to agree.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, in winding for these Benches on these amendments, I start by saying that I do not intend to give long speeches opposing amendments we do not agree with; I believe that is the Minister’s job. I intend to be concise when setting out where we stand on each group, partly because, as noble Lords can hear, I have a little bit of a throat.

In the view of these Benches, these amendments largely seek to turn back the clock on reforms to right to buy. At a time when thousands of families are waiting for a secure, affordable home, the answer is not to make it easier to lose social housing stock faster. That sums up our view.

We believe that Amendments 1 to 6 would dilute or remove these important reforms. On Amendment 7, I have some sympathy with the perseverance the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has shown throughout on rural issues. I believe his intentions with regard to social housing are genuine, so I look forward to what the Minister has to say. But these amendments could weaken protections for newly built social homes by reducing the period during which they remain protected from sale, and that risks repeating one of the great mistakes of past housing policy: selling homes without replacing them. Two noble Lords have made much of how wonderful they were at replacing one for one and more, but we all know that that was not the reality and we do not want to repeat that.

On Amendments 9 to 12, of course we welcome transparency, but reports and reviews do not build houses. Our support is squarely behind the Government in increasing the supply of affordable, especially social homes, not creating additional reporting requirements. There are numerous amendments on Report that ask for more data and more reviews. I was grateful to the Minister for her letter this morning, albeit at the eleventh hour. There is a wealth of data there. It is sometimes difficult to pull it all together, but it is particularly informative.

Amendment 24, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, is described as a probing amendment. I have some sympathy with it, but when I thought about it, I realised it would impose unnecessary restrictions on how receipts are recycled. I was left questioning how big a problem this is. How many councils have trouble spending their receipts? If they know they are running into danger with that, do they not chat to their neighbours and say, “This is going to happen. Can we spend this between us?”

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I do not deny that we talk about it neighbour to neighbour, but the example I gave showed that in order to give effect to the desirable outcome I think we both seek, we had to have special dispensation. That was a waste of time, it added cost, it imposed delay and it increased risk. My amendment would sweep away all those impediments and let us get on with building the social homes we need more quickly without interference from the Government, who, if they are in their right minds, would say yes anyway.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I am not sure that it is quite as big, difficult and dramatic as that—we just did it.

We believe that the priority must be more social housing. We believe in better protections for existing stock and a housing system that works for those who need it most. We do not believe that these amendments help us to achieve that. I completely respect the views of the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and his team on this. I believe this is a legitimate political difference and we are just not going to agree on it, hence my short but sweet contribution. I hope to continue in that vein throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening—but not too late into the evening, I hope.

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Two years after a Select Committee recommended that buyback should be considered as part of the solution, it is time for the Government to act decisively to protect existing shared owners from financial harm and to restore confidence in the model. Shared owners have been failed by a scheme that was intended to help them. This was not Parliament’s intention when shared ownership was promoted as a stepping stone into home ownership. I beg to move and reserve the right to test the opinion of the House on either or both amendments.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support the shared ownership review proposed by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Watkins and Lady Thornhill, who have added their names.

In Committee, I drew attention to the asymmetry of powers and the imbalance in negotiating strength between the landlord and tenant in the case of shared ownership. I trod carefully when I characterised those who entered into these arrangements as financially unsophisticated, but the truth is that, in their natural desire to own at least part of their home, they have signed up to a situation with the certainty of all the costs but only the possibility of some of the uplifts if they happen. The terms of trade are stacked against them.

My noble friend Lord Young has raised several issues specific to shared ownership, which I will not repeat. Each is important in its own way. The Government feel that they are all independent of each other. The Government want to deal with them one at a time rather than all together, which is wrong. My noble friend concludes that the issues are harming, possibly irreparably, the case of shared ownership. I agree.

I am speaking in this debate because, after Committee, I was contacted by a shared ownership tenant, Lucy Hassall, who had heard what I had to say. She is sitting below the Bar of the House today. I want to use her case to prove the need for a fundamental review to reinvigorate the case for a fair and reasonable shared ownership system that works for families and helps them to build a stake in society.

Let us break down Lucy’s case to demonstrate why a fundamental review is needed. She spent a sum of money on a 99-year lease on a two-bed flat in 2005. Now, 20 years later, it is worth a little bit less—it happens. Last year, she wanted to move and inquired of her RSL about the process to sell. The landlord replied, stating that there were about 80 years left. In fact, there were under 80 years left. At that stage, they could have entered into a lease extension at no marriage value charge at all. The RSL manager, whom I will not name but who styled herself as an adviser, did not disclose that any delay could crystallise that marriage value. That was sharp practice and far from the social purpose that the National Housing Federation tells us is the golden thread that runs through all RSLs. Time apparently was not of the essence when indeed it was. Quite simply, Lucy and her husband were misadvised by their landlord, who was acting as a privateer, advancing their own pecuniary interests over the interests of their tenant.

A year later, Lucy inquired again about selling and was quoted £12,000 for the marriage value, plus £600 to confirm the cost of the leasehold extension, another £800 to cover some legal fees—her own legal fees—and another grand for the RICS to do an independent property value. This was all plus VAT—let us say £16,000 out of taxed income for a system that is available by law only to people on limited incomes. This was all in addition to the service charges and estate charges that were referred to by my noble friend Lord Young. I have received the same pleas from members of the public. This morning, a lady wrote to me saying that if only she could give away her 50% share in her shared ownership home for nothing she would be satisfied, but even at zero cost the landlord will not take it back. Why did the Hassalls’ RSL not write proactively to warn them of the marriage value jeopardy as the line approached? They did the reverse.

Now I look at the marriage value claim of £12,000. There is a helpful GOV.UK web page that helps people to assess what the marriage value might be. It is £11,000 to £12,000, but that is for 100% of the value and the Hassalls have only 50%. Had they been correctly advised 12 months ago, they would have owed nothing. This is a case of gross overcharging and further sharp practice. If shared ownership is to be the joint enterprise that it purports to be and that Parliament intended then there should be a degree of equity in the apportionment of these charges. The basic terms of these agreements are unfair. The tenant cops the lot and the landlord gets off scot free. That is not fair to people earning less than £80,000 a year, who are the only people who qualify for this. It is an abuse.

I have not tabled my social purpose amendment on Report, as I did in Committee, but perhaps I should have done. I am grateful to the Minister for writing to me about the issues in the Hassall case. I do not blame her for the disappointing reply. She just stated the law as it is. However, it proves that the law needs to change. She explained that the issue is down to the Hassalls because they have chosen to move.

Elsewhere in the Bill, the Government purport to support the victims of the social housing system. However, the Minister’s letter just perpetuates victim-blaming of those people who have purchased a shared ownership home and were suckered in on unfair terms that I will not repeat. We must have this review to correct the asymmetry of risk and reward and of market and pricing power, and to constrain the RSLs that are acting with a predatory and pecuniary advantage and obvious conflicts of interest. We must review the cost apportionment between the landlord and tenant, and ensure that there is proactive information for people who have been financially unsophisticated and suckered into these basic terms. I concede that the Minister has advised us on the selling of 99-year leases that it will be 990 years in future, but the marriage value is a further punch in the guts. That is the reality of the situation.

Lucy says that she has been left with an unsellable property and considers herself misadvised and mis-sold. I agree. A review is essential, otherwise shared ownership as a tenure is finished. That would be a shame, for it should be part of the mix. This Bill is before us. The moment to sort it out is now.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, the joys of following the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Fuller; I will be less hyperbolic but sincere and completely agree with what has been said.

The Minister will not be surprised that we on these Benches strongly support these amendments. She has been very generous with her time and commitment to this issue. However, we have reached a crunch point, which is why we will support these amendments and why we were pleased that they have been brought forward. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, has outlined everything clearly. I would go so far as to say that I do not really want another review; the facts are already known. Much work has already been done and some of the things that are wrong need urgent remediation, not waiting and waiting for a review, an outcome and the rest of it, but we are where we are.

Buyback and staircasing are the two main issue. Just imagine the horror. It is Kafkaesque to be unsellable and unmortgaged. Just think about that. I am certain that this would prey on anybody’s mental health. We need urgent action. Shared ownership is supposed to provide a route into homeownership. We on these Benches believe that it is a legitimate route for those who cannot afford to buy outright, especially in areas with high housing costs. We have all been contacted by very real people in very real circumstances; you do not want to be there. There does not seem to be a way out. I found the Minister’s letter very clear and compassionate, but it felt like she too was trapped, like the many people whom we are talking about.

This happens to people through no fault of their own. They have spent years being unable to sell or remortgage because of building safety. I would be really interested to know where we were on that—especially the failure of the external wall standard and being unable to staircase to 100% ownership due to rising property values, higher mortgage costs and additional fears. Many people who are unable to move on have become accidental landlords. We had one case where someone said that it is costing them hundreds of pounds a month to be an accidental landlord. When you are on low incomes, which you must be to be in this model, that is a hell of a lot of money every month. How do you deal with that? It is not what the scheme was designed to deliver and not what we would hope for it.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I intervene to indicate a preference for Amendment 105, which calls for a review of shared ownership, rather than Amendment 79, which calls for a strategy for increasing shared ownership. This is because there are features of shared ownership that need addressing before we increase the opportunities.

The Minister will recall the problems facing shared owners in flats with safety issues post-Grenfell. I am grateful to her for agreeing to amend the Renters’ Rights Act to reflect that. But that indicated how the law on conventional tenures such as owner occupation, leasehold or tenancy finds it difficult to accommodate the special nature of shared ownership, which is in fact a combination of all three.

I welcome the recent changes to the scheme, particularly the 10-year guarantee against certain costs. But the review proposed in Amendment 105 should take as its starting point recent critical reports from the National Audit Office, the HCLG Select Committee report on the affordability of home ownership, and the findings of the Housing Ombudsman on shared ownership.

The NAO found that shared ownership helps many people buy a home who otherwise could not. However, it said the scheme is complex; many buyers do not fully understand its long-term costs and risks; affordability pressures can hinder progression to full ownership, and government lacks the data needed to judge whether the scheme is delivering good outcomes for consumers. While recent reforms have improved transparency and protection, the NAO concluded that important gaps in understanding and oversight remain.

The HCLG report was more critical. The committee found that legal and valuation fees made staircasing expensive. The buyers have to pay all those costs, which can run into thousands of pounds, and do so each time they staircase. It found that rising house prices can make additional shares unaffordable and many shared owners never reach full ownership. It questioned whether the scheme is genuinely delivering the aspiration for full home ownership for many participants.

Then we have the ombudsman. Complaints to the Housing Ombudsman regarding shared ownership properties have surged by nearly 400%, jumping from 324 cases in 2020 to 1,564 complaints more recently. That sharp rise reflects growing resident frustration with hidden costs, building defects and the difficulties of staircasing or selling.

The ombudsman highlighted several reasons for this escalation. Many residents face staggering increase in service charges and rent hikes, which can feel disproportionate. Landlords frequently fail to chase developers or effectively restore defects such as cladding or fire safety issues after they are raised. On the sales process, he found incorrect charges at the point of moving in, miscommunication regarding staircasing—buying larger shares of the property—and general delays from solicitors.

The ombudsman summed up the problems by saying that there is a “mismatch” between the expectation and understanding of the shared owner and the landlord. He concluded that the Government should address the

“fundamental inequities in the way in which shared ownership is designed”—

a point made by my noble friend Lord Jamieson.

Bringing all that together may explain why there is such a low satisfaction rate with shared ownership, and the largest providers have the lowest satisfaction rate—frequently below 30%. Any review should liaise closely with the Shared Ownership Council, Shared Ownership Resources, which has produced several documents indicating how the scheme might be improved and has first-hand evidence of existing pinch points. I very much hope that the Government will take this opportunity to review the scheme, put this form of tenure on a more secure foundation and rebalance the responsibilities as between the talent and the landlord.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Young-of Cookham, and also the sense behind Amendments 105 and 106. There is an asymmetry between the risk and the reward involved in shared ownership—all the costs but only half the uplift, if there is one. The risks include very large unexpected costs, which my noble friend raised and I do not intend to repeat. There is 100% of the costs, but only half the capital.

This has been sold to people who one might say, without patronising, are less financially sophisticated, as a lower cost way of getting their foot on the ladder. But the facts bear out the assertion that mortgage costs on the whole would be less than the rent they are paying on the half. It is not necessarily low cost at all; one might go far as to suggest that there has been a degree of mis-selling here.

So, I support Amendment 105, which calls for a review. We cannot carry on as we are. My experience in my own council work when I was the leader showed that the popularity of this tenure has gone down and down. There is now very low take-up. It is possibly a tenure whose time has passed. But the review could reinvigorate it. There is a case for low-cost housing for people to establish and build capital in their society. With this review, which I support entirely, there is the opportunity to try to get it back on track.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, because the noble Lords, Lord Jamieson and Lord Young of Cookham, have done such a brilliant job of talking about shared ownership, I will scrap most of my speech. We on these Benches have brought up the vexed subject of shared ownership many times, and I know that the Minister understands and absolutely appreciates that. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, who has been a stalwart campaigner for reform. That deserves to be recognised.

If shared ownership is a pathway to home ownership, it is a very rocky one. It is definitely a home owner’s dream that turned into their worst nightmare. I could wax lyrical about automated 1% staircasing, proportional maintenance and a 15% valuation cushion, but I will not. But I am interested in what the Minister has to say, because, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, I do not believe that this is something that has passed; in high-cost areas, it is essential. Therefore, we would really like to hear something about reform or at least a vision of how it might be reformed.

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Moved by

[Lord Fuller]

89: After Clause 16, insert the following new Clause—
“Protections for adapted social housing(1) This section applies where—(a) a dwelling owned by the local housing authority or a registered provider of social housing has been substantially adapted for occupation by a person with a disability or support need, or(b) a Disabled Facilities Grant has been used to fund substantial adaptations to that dwelling.(2) Before such a dwelling is allocated through the general housing allocation process, the landlord must take reasonable steps to offer the dwelling to a person whose needs would substantially benefit from those adaptations.(3) In this section, “substantially adapted” has such meaning as the Secretary of State may prescribe by regulations made by statutory instruments.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this Act may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require social landlords to protect the pool of adapted housing by giving preference to applicants who could benefit from existing adaptations before allocating adapted homes through the general housing allocation process.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am very disappointed that a Bill that purports to protect the supply of new affordable homes fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of homes, particularly adapted homes. We are an ageing nation, we are getting fatter and nowadays many more premature babies survive into adulthood with life-limiting conditions. As a council leader, I spend about £1.5 million a year adapting homes for this ageing and impaired population. I remember that, when devising our local plan, there was a need for 3,500 adapted homes and supported living units; it was about 10% of the total housing need. It is an important issue, but not one you would gather from this Bill. At Second Reading, I explained how councils might install an adaptation so that a resident with an impairment could live comfortably. I explained that it might be a grab rail or a ramp. In one case, in my council, we spent £75,000 on a complete extension that was required to enable that family to live decently.

In preparation for this debate, and in pursuance of that simple truth, I sat down with Kevin Philcox, the officer responsible for housing standards at South Norfolk Council. He tells me that about half the improvements relate to wet rooms. That is important, because poor personal hygiene is a leading cause of infection and hospital admission among the elderly. Keeping yourself clean down there is not just about dignity; it keeps our hospital wards clean. Half the wet room adaptations are combined with wider doors so that someone in a wheelchair can shower hygienically. Together, cleaning and better access represent half the improvements for disabled facilities, grants and aids and adaptations.

Other examples might be a kitchen with low-level worktops—again, suitable for wheelchair use. Typically, it takes between six and nine months to deliver an adaptation: directionally two to three months for the assessment and the report by the occupational therapist, then a couple of months for the specification contracting and then the construction itself. In my experience, our district council delivered about 150 such projects a year at an average cost of about £10,000 each. I would say that one of my best interventions as a councillor was to ensure that a widow who lived in Mill Road in Seething was able to keep herself clean, by expediting the process of creating a wet room in her social home.

I feel that I have laboured the point, but I tell that story with pride because the simple truth is that we just do not have enough of these adapted homes, and that is why the state invests in them. MHCLG distributes yearly funding of over £720 million to local authorities, and some councils, such as my own, and other RSLs top up that allocation still further. I ensured that we reinvested all the profits from our trading activities to top up that money. So, in total, it adds up to about £1 billion a year. That is a large chunk of change, ensuring that people of all abilities can have a home that they can get into and on with, maintaining personal pride and hygiene.

Here is the problem that my amendment seeks to remedy. When, as so often happens, the tenant passes away and the home is re-advertised, no credit can be given for those expensive and hard-won adaptations when a new family moves in. A new tenant can ask for them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy. It is a waste of money, it reduces the pool of adapted homes, and it is bad for everyone, especially the taxpayer, who funds the work twice: once to put it in and once to take it out. I recall one example where we had built a brand new accessible home with wide doors and low kitchen units, perfect for a wheelchair-bound resident. As it happened, the first tenant was really tall, and by and by he tired of bending down to move the pots and pans around the hob, so the council was obliged by law to rip out that kitchen and put in a normal one—oh dear. That is absurd. It should have been let to a wheelchair user in the first place. So I ask the Minister directly: where are the provisions in the Bill to protect the supply of and investments in adapted homes for the ageing population? Why can we not offer rights of first refusal to those who need help to keep themselves clean down there?

I have heard it said, “Well, this is an allocations issue and we’re not going there in this limited Bill”. I profoundly disagree with that. That is why I asked for this debate to be de-grouped so it could have the importance it deserves without being clouded by other issues. My amendment is about protecting the adapted stock. It is about protecting a £1 billion investment— a significant sum that should not be lightly discarded— and it is about dignity for the most vulnerable in society. So I do not see this as an allocations issue, in the sense that preference should be given to an individual veteran or a certain type of local person. This is about protecting the pool of adapted homes, not least because we are all getting older. It is about ensuring that the wider cohort who carry an impairment have sufficient protected stock for them to have a go at, where they get preference, to make the best of their lives and to make their disabilities more bearable. If the state cannot recognise that, what is it for? Casually dismissing this as an allocations issue is wilful misdirection.

We must grab this sufficiency issue now. We are in Committee. I want to probe the matter more deeply between now and Report. Unless we make some progress, I anticipate that this is an issue on which I will seek to divide the House on Report, on the grounds that the Bill aims to protect the social stock for those in need, and my amendment seeks to achieve precisely that.

I have nearly said enough but I want to give Kevin Philcox, my expert on the ground, who has been around a long time in this space, the final word. He told me that, among the dedicated housing standards professionals, protecting the adapted stock in the way that I propose is both the Shangri-La and the holy grail of social housing policy in this country—it is number one on the wish list. That is quite a statement.

The opportunity to protect that £1 billion a year investment and look after some of the most vulnerable people in our society is before us here and now. If we fail to take it, there is no one else to do it in our place. As it is, there are no powers to protect those adaptations or to give those in need first refusal, but there should be. I beg to move.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Fuller for raising the important subject of adapted social housing. As we have argued throughout this day of Committee, we must improve how we manage the existing stock of social housing by making better use of what we have and what is being built. It strikes us as entirely sensible that, where possible and appropriate, homes that have been adapted are then given to applicants who would also benefit from those adaptations. That would save social housing providers money and ensure that we made the best use of resources and housing stock. I look forward to the Minister’s response and any details that she might be able to give us on how it might be implemented.

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I hope I have explained what local authorities are already doing, and I kindly ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments—I will consider them carefully. Perhaps we could have a meeting between now and Report. All I would say is that I do not think things are quite as clear or clear-cut as she makes them out to be, not least because the problem can arise when someone has been allocated housing and has not necessarily made a full disclosure of their needs, and then, once they are in, they can move things out. I think there is a requirement.

I accept the point about statutory guidance, and I will, I hope, talk to the Minister or officials between now and Report, and consider my position. But in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 89 withdrawn.

Moved by

[Lord Fuller]

90: After Clause 16, insert the following new Clause—
“Social purpose of registered providers of social housing(1) The Secretary of State must issue guidance on the social purpose of registered providers of social housing.(2) The guidance must include—(a) promoting tenant wellbeing;(b) effective state management; (c) the prevention and reduction of antisocial behaviour;(d) community engagement;(e) the provision and maintenance of safe and sustainable neighbourhoods;(f) the balance between development activity and social responsibilities of registered providers.(3) Registered providers must have regard to guidance issued under this section.(4) The Secretary of State must lay a copy of the guidance before Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This probing amendment would require the Secretary of State to issue guidance on the social purpose of registered providers of social housing and the wider responsibilities expected of them beyond housing development.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

As part of my ward work last month, I was surprised that a home in Brooke, in my ward where I live, under the Victory Housing banner, is actually owned by part of a much larger RSL headquartered in Gloucestershire. I mentioned it at Second Reading, and since then it has reached out to me to explain that it actually has a local team to manage these properties. That is reassuring, but the truth remains that the shots are called from miles away. It is a close-to-home example of the way in which the RSL landscape has consolidated, as small RSLs have bought up others and then in turn been taken over still further in the name of economies of scale.

I can understand why this has happened, but scale has not been good for tenants. Tenant reps have been excised from the landscape. There is a lack of local accountability, with national RSLs populating their boards with the great and good from out of town, the consequences being that a focus on local matters such as anti-social behaviour has been relegated to the subs’ bench—and I am conscious that the football starts in a minute.

At Second Reading, I suggested that the Bill could be stronger on anti-social behaviour to demonstrate that the Government are on the side of law-abiding residents, but it is not. That is one of the reasons that have prompted me to introduce Amendment 90 to mandate that and other desirable traits so that the social purpose of social providers is enshrined in law.

I explained how there has been a consolidation of actors in this space, but one of the reasons for liberalising certain financial powers in the Bill—which I do not oppose—is that it will drive financial engineering to new heights. It is the intended consequence of the Bill, but the liberalisation must come with strings attached. It should not be necessary, but it now has become so, to state what the social purpose of RSLs is, not least because there is £35 billion burning a hole in the Government’s pocket. Our job, it seems to me, is to ensure that there is conditionality attached to that largesse if RSLs are to be favoured with cheap money and government underwriting in a way that Berkeley, Norfolk Homes or Redrow—others are available—are not.

In too many cases, RSLs just do not grip the anti-social behaviour that blights the lives of neighbours. I know, because I have seen it myself, that others look away when the criminality is committed. We have the nonsense of community gardens left ungrown and untidy in the name of “No Mow May”, which lasts all year. It is lazy and slovenly, and impacts families miles away from the out-of-towners who sit on these boards.

It is telling that in a briefing on the Bill by the National Housing Federation, which explained that it runs more than 2.5 million homes, supporting 6 million people living in 62% of all the social homes in England, there was not a single mention of social purpose, save to say that the federation was driven by it without explaining what it means. Front and centre it certainly was not.

I know why this has happened. Candidly, among RSLs in particular, there has been far too great a focus on development. That has led to the loss of social purpose. The truth is that as RSLs have become overleveraged, they have been caught out by increases in build, finance and land costs, and there is no financial space for the social purpose—an omission the Bill should correct.

We are in Committee, so I have had a stab at defining what the social purpose could be. It is duplicated in Amendment 110. For those organisations that want to take the Government’s shilling in a way that is not available to other private developers, we need to look at the strings attached. My amendment would enshrine six key principles—I will not list them, in the interests of time, but they are there in the amendment—and regulations to codify them, along with success factors, would follow.

Too many RSLs have taken the wrong path. They have strayed from their original purpose. They have lost sight of the social purpose. Instead, they have been hooked on speculation and property development, on the back of cheap government finance, so we need to bring them back on track. If you take the money, my amendment would provide the hair on the deal. It is not too much to ask. If they want to take the cash in a way that is not available to private operators, they need to take their social responsibilities seriously—and if they cannot, they can go to Barclays, NatWest or Lloyds, or any other bank, just like the others. I beg to move.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

I am going to speak very briefly—there are matters of life and death about to start in 10 minutes, and I am not going to stand in the way of that—but I am surprised by these amendments. They have been tabled by Conservative Peers going for centralisation and more regulation. We want better people running housing associations; we want good chairs, good chief executives and effective boards. I have to ask: do you want social entrepreneurial spirit, creative drive and a commitment to efficiency in customer services to be suffocated by overregulation, interference and process? We need a balance. I do not believe these probing amendments aim to provide a balance.

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Finally, I turn to Amendment 115, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. I am not persuaded that this approach is necessary. Since 2024, the regulator has implemented a proactive consumer regulation regime, including routine inspections of large landlords and the introduction of consumer gradings. Mandating tenant-triggered inspections risks cutting across this approach, potentially diverting regulatory resource away from higher-risk providers or issues and undermining the regulator’s ability to act independently. Tenants have clear and established routes to escalate concerns, from the internal complaints procedure to the Housing Ombudsman. The Housing Ombudsman can then refer a complaint to the regulator where they suspect an issue at the level of the landlord. Given these reasons, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for drawing my attention to the guidance published on 9 June. I was not aware of it, and I will look at it closely. However, the title was all about how you deliver more houses. My amendment is not about the number of houses; it is about the social behaviours, because they are not working at the moment. By following the money, we see that, without strings, too many RSLs are focusing too much on development and not enough on doing the right thing. The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, enumerated a number of things. I could not write them down fast enough, but customer focus, innovation and other things were all there. However, left alone, these things are not happening.

I want a light touch, but, ultimately, I want to establish the principle of the deal: if the RSLs want cheap government money to expand their estates, there need to be strings attached, and those strings go with a rededication of RSLs to the social purpose, rather than focusing on financial engineering, because that is not in tenants’ best interests. On the ground, we are seeing that, when tenants do have genuine concerns, they are not being addressed promptly. The well-being of the estates is not at the forefront of the mind, and that is not good for anybody. So, if you want the money, you can have the hair on the deal; otherwise, go to Barclays. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 90 withdrawn.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend in her amendment. I should declare this first time in Committee my interests, as recorded in the register, as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and adviser to other development forums, although all the views I will express will be entirely my own and not attributable to any members of those forums.

We arrived at a position back in 2024 when the Government radically reduced the discount rate for existing tenants. I felt very strongly, as I think my noble friend did, that there were significant legitimate expectations on the part of those who were tenants that they would be saving over a period of time and would have the opportunity to buy at a significant discount. I can see that the Government had the right as an incoming Government to adjust the discount, and they chose to do that, but I think they went too far. I firmly support my noble friend in saying that we want to continue to give tenants the feeling of hope that they will buy and that there has to be a sufficient discount to make it worth their while to do so, especially in many parts of the country where property prices these days are not necessarily increasing. We do not want them to not take the opportunity to buy because they fear that the property they would buy would no longer be of the value they have paid.

The discount that my noble friend is recommending in Amendments 14 and 15 firmly puts us in the right sort of territory for continuing to meet, to some extent, the legitimate expectations of many tenants and is sufficient to make it clear that we are not giving them an undue incentive to buy. When you combine my noble friend’s amendments with some of the Government’s amendments and others, which mean the right to buy is able to be established only over a significant period of time, as we have just recently discussed, that is quite a manageable combination. The Government should be willing to entertain that people who have been tenants for a long time, or are tenants for a long period of time in the future, are given a worthwhile discount of the kind my noble friend proposes.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of my noble friend Lady Coffey and to make the simple point that while the Government seem to be trying to reduce right to buy’s ability to give people an astonishingly important way to invest for their retirements, buy a stake in society, provide security for their family and so forth, the key point has been forgotten. Right to buy, when the receipts are recycled, is a very good way of renewing our social housing stock. For somebody who has been living there a long time to buy an older house—and there are provisions in the Bill to lengthen to 35 years the terms under which a new house may be purchased—acquiring it releases incrementally the funds to improve the stock over many years. This is not a bad thing but a good thing.

The purpose of my noble friend Lady Coffey’s amendment is to provide a meaningful incentive but not an overly generous one. It balances the rights of the individual, as my noble friend Lord Lansley said, to save over a long period of time in the expectation that they may acquire the home, which they have previously rented, with sufficient funds, 80% of the value—which is more or less the cost of producing a replacement. It balances that private interest with the public good, and I strongly support my noble friend Lady Coffey’s amendment. It does the right thing in the right way in the right quantum to ensure that there is a source of funding to upgrade and replace that core housing stock. Otherwise, it will fossilise and get old, and that is not in anybody’s interests.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I will stick to my words at the beginning and be as brief as possible and to the point. If the aim is to preserve existing stock, clearly this is a lever you have to pull. We would not disagree with that, even though it is so low, but let us be clear: if the average house price in my area—actually, perhaps the average is not a good way of looking at it, but if the median house price is about £450,000, you are still getting a discount of £90,000. How many of us would say no to that?

The other question we have to ask ourselves is: who pays for the discount? However much detail we want to get into about finances, the bottom line is that a sale does not build another house and that money has to be added. Those are simple reasons why we support this direction in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, on Clause 6, I have a contrary view to that of the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. I start by reminding the Committee that I have a registered interest as a councillor on Kirklees Council, which directly manages council housing in the borough.

The amendment in my name is related only to Clause 6, which is about social landlords’ right of first refusal to buy back properties. My reason for this amendment is that, first, there is wide agreement that there is a national housing emergency—despite what we have heard in debates on earlier amendments—due to a chronic lack of properties at a social rent. As we have heard from my noble friend Lady Thornhill, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches support the principles underpinning the Bill. Although the primary purpose of the Bill relates to constraining the right to buy, there is, unfortunately, very little ambition to rapidly increase the supply. A rapid increase is desperately needed, given the numbers—over 1 million people on housing waiting lists, the increasing number of people who are homeless, and the absolute scandal of over 170,000 children living in temporary accommodation for long periods.

Clause 6 provides a route by which councils can relatively quickly increase their supply of housing at a social rent. The changes it makes to the right of first refusal are significant. By removing the previous 10-year time limit, the Bill grants local authorities an indefinite right to repurchase former council homes every time they are resold on the open market. That is a powerful mechanism to reclaim lost stock and ensure that these homes return to the social housing sector, where they are so desperately needed.

However, a right is only as effective as the resources available to exercise it. Clause 9 helpfully allows the Secretary of State to let councils retain more of their right to buy receipts by modifying pooling requirements. Although welcome, I am afraid that it is but a drop in the ocean. Retention of receipts alone is not enough. For the following reasons, a dedicated additional funding stream is needed to support Clause 6 repurchases.

The first reason is market value realities. Clause 6 allows councils to buy back homes at market value. Homes sold decades ago have appreciated significantly, meaning that the retained receipts from a limited number of current sales under Clause 9 will be insufficient to buy back a meaningful volume of older stock. In other words, there is not enough cash available.

The second reason is that significant financial savings by both councils and the Government can be achieved by investing in repurchases. Local authorities currently spend £1.7 billion on temporary accommodation every year. That figure, which is from two years ago, has increased by 62% in just five years. Providing additional central funding to buy back permanent social homes would drastically reduce this unsustainable cost to local government.

The third reason is to stop the private transfer of homes. Currently, four in 10 homes sold under right to buy end up in the hands of private landlords, which rather undermines the argument we heard earlier. When they are sold to private landlords, rents inevitably rise significantly and support for tenants is much reduced. Without additional funding beyond the provisions in Clause 9, councils will be forced to watch as these homes are sold to the highest private bidder because they lack the immediate capital to exercise their new indefinite right to first refusal—which we support.

Clause 6 is a positive change, and Clause 9 provides a helpful start for self-funding, but to truly end the housing emergency and deliver the 90,000 new social homes every year that advocates such as Shelter call for—let alone the 150,000 that the Liberal Democrats want—councils must be given access to supplementary grant funding specifically for repurchases. It would be a win-win. Having the funding to buy back former social houses would rapidly increase desperately needed supply and enable families in temporary accommodation to be housed permanently, which both saves expenditure on temporary accommodation and provides families, and especially children, with the stability of a permanent home, which is very important to young people. I hope that the Minister will provide a positive response and open those government purses so that we can achieve a greater number of former council homes being bought back to house folk who desperately need them.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendment 19, I would like to support my noble friend Lord Jamieson in his promotion of Amendment 25 in respect of rural areas. I have been in enough debates in this House to know how hard it is for the term “rural” to be defined. The lamented right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans entertained us all with a debate about 18 months ago on what rurality meant. There is no definition within the Government or in this country of “rural”. There are a lot of contended assertions that rurality might be this thing or that. So unclear is the term that the Bishop commissioned his own research, and we debated it. I am bound to say that we were no further forward at the end than at the beginning—although last week, in the debate on the rural economy, as the noble Lord, Lord Katz, who is in his place, will recall, I advanced the definition of rural as that place where at 11 pm you cannot get an Uber to take you home from the pub, because in the sticks we do things differently. I make this point because if we are to have the term “rural” in Clause 7, it should be much more tightly defined so that we know exactly what we are getting and it goes beyond, “Can you get an Uber or not? Are you in the town or not? Where does the town begin? Where are the suburbs?”, and so forth.

I have made that point, and I now want to dwell on my Amendment 19. I am trying to be helpful here, because later, on Amendment 52 in the next group, I will talk about the concept of locality and recycling the right-to-buy receipts. It has been said that locality is not part of this Bill, but here it is in Clause 7, where the right-to-buy carve-out exists for social homes in national parks. Those places have some of the greatest housing pressures, as well as restrictions on new build, because new homes are restricted in national parks.

My amendment aims to be helpful, because when we had the ministerial drop-in before Second Reading there was a slip of the tongue. The words “national parks” and “national landscapes” were used interchangeably. I have taken that as my cue, because Clause 7 mentions areas of outstanding natural beauty. I am entirely in accordance with those, but there are only 34 areas of outstanding natural beauty, whereas there are 46 national landscapes. Collectively they make up 15% of England, and there are other places in Wales, such as the Gower, and in Northern Ireland there are about half a dozen, including the Antrim Coast and Glens.

I am seeking to avoid confusion between what I believe is the old term—areas of outstanding natural beauty—and the new term, now preferred by government: national landscape. That is why my proposed new sub-paragraph (1)(aa) would make it clear that where there is a national landscape, which includes areas of outstanding natural beauty, covered in new sub-paragraph (1)(b), it really means national landscape. This small amendment seeks to extend the provisions of Clause 7(3) from national parks, to avoid leaving a gap between them and areas of outstanding natural beauty. This should provide the clarity and certainty to make it consistent with the Government’s new nomenclature.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 20. Before I do so, I must refer to my interests for the purposes of this Committee as a retired member of a Somerset farming family which lets some houses on the farm. I thank noble Lords who have supported this amendment, notably the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornhill and Lady Royall. Unfortunately, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, who is not in her place, was late with her timing so did not make it to the Marshalled List.

At Second Reading I outlined the affordable housing crisis—I do not think that is overstating the case—that has overtaken many parts of rural England, and how rural housing waiting lists are larger, or are growing faster, than their urban equivalents. I explained that rural communities, rural social networks and even rural services have broken down, while the rural economy is stuttering, with businesses finding it harder to recruit their necessary workforce, and how all this is caused by a lack of affordable housing in the countryside. So it is vital that the local authority housing in rural England is protected from the right to buy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to the amendment in my name and that of my noble friend Lady O’Neill. Our amendments are concerned with the governance of capital receipts, and in particular the scope of the Secretary of State’s powers under Clause 9 to determine their use. As currently drafted, Clause 9 confers a very wide discretion, including the ability to vary provisions between local authorities and to apply determinations retrospectively. Our concern is not with the principle of having some flexibility but with the balance of power between executive powers and parliamentary scrutiny, and the need to provide certainty to councils which are seeking to build new social homes to replace those sold through right to buy.

We have had discussions earlier in the Bill about the difficulty of getting new social homes built. From my time leading Central Bedfordshire Council, I can attest that setting up a programme to build new council homes is not easy. It involves building a team with the appropriate skills, acquiring sites to build on and generating a pipeline of projects and the financing to fund it. The key to this is a good degree of funding certainty, and that means ensuring the certainty of right-to-buy receipts. Making these potentially subject to the whim of the Secretary of State could fundamentally undermine any such council housebuilding programme. These amendments, therefore, provide that changes to the use of capital receipts should instead be made through regulation rather than through determination. This ensures that changes affecting local authority finances are set out in a transparent framework, subject to appropriate scrutiny and clearly understood by those required to operate within it.

It might have been better for the Government to put their planned level of capital receipt retention in the Bill so we could debate that today. The Government have chosen not to do so, but I hope that the Minister can tell the Committee at what level they intend to set the capital retention. Will local authorities retain 100% of these receipts, or in future will it be set at a lower level, at the whim of the Secretary of State?

Amendment 30 is particularly important. It would remove the ability of the Secretary of State to apply different provisions to different local authorities through determination. Quite clearly, if a council is seeking to build homes in its area and putting in all the effort, and potentially funding, then the last thing that it would want to see is right-to-buy receipts transferred to another authority. While we recognise fully that housing pressures vary across the country, the principle remains that differentiation should be achieved through considered and published frameworks, not through ad hoc determinations decided solely by the Secretary of State. Consistency of framework is the foundation of fairness between authorities.

Amendment 33 introduces a requirement for consultation prior to determination. That reflects a basic principle of good governance: that local authorities, whose financial capacity and housing delivery are directly affected, should have the opportunity to contribute before decisions are made, not simply respond afterwards. Amendment 34 provides for a review of the impact of the Act on home ownership rates. This is a sensible accountability measure: if the policy is intended to support and sustain routes into ownership, Parliament should be able to assess whether it is achieving that objective in practice.

Taken together, these amendments are not about constraining government unnecessarily; they are about ensuring that significant financial decisions in the housing system are taken within a framework that is transparent, consistent and properly accountable to Parliament, and about providing greater certainty for councils seeking to establish their own council housebuilding programme. I look forward to hearing the insights of other noble Lords on this subject. I beg to move.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 52. Before I do so, however, I am sure my noble friend Lord Jamieson misspoke when he referred to Amendment 34, which is actually in the next group.

At Second Reading, I explained that I had a bit of previous in the delivery of social housing; when I was the leader of South Norfolk Council, we consistently delivered more than 1% of the entire national social housing stock in each and every year of the 2010s. We built more affordable homes than the rest of Norfolk put together: it can be done. We were able to do that because I welcomed the way in which receipts received by a council can be recycled by that council in pursuance of the replacement principle. That method—when a home a sold, a new one is built—allows us to refresh the stock of social housing in general.

I have concerns, however, that the Bill will prevent receipts in one authority being applied to a neighbouring one, even if they are in the same housing market assessment area. Let me explain. When my neighbour, Norwich City Council, could not spend its right to buy receipts in time, they were transferred to me, as their neighbour, and new social homes were built in my district, but no more than a mile from the city boundary. My reading of the Bill—and I am quite happy to be corrected on this—is that this desirable substitution behaviour would be left to chance. This is an omission that would see receipts that could really help a local area being grabbed by Ministers instead.

Separately, councils aside, we know that RSLs can allow homes to be acquired but, sometimes, those RSL homes are lost too. My amendment, therefore, would ensure that, for both councils and RSLs, the receipts should be applied to a replacement in the same strategic housing market area, the SHMA, by default. The SHMA is a technical study used by planning authorities to understand current and future housing needs; it evaluates population growth, economic projections and market trends to inform the local plan and housing policies. The SHMA is a thing, and it exists over a housing market area rather than respecting the administrative boundaries of individual councils. SHMAs provide the natural canvas over which people live their lives.

If you are in the housing or planning game, you know what one of these is. Your plan is based on the boundary of the SHMA, not necessarily the administrative boundary of the council, and the numbers for today and tomorrow are predicated on it. I was therefore grateful to the Minister for the drop-in where she explained that it was very difficult to define these territories. I disagree. It is easy: it is in the SHMA. That is how we define housing need. In the previous group, we heard that the Government have defined place-based carve-outs for national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, so it is not that hard to define these territories after all.

My amendment would ensure that receipts must be recycled locally by default in a cascade: initially within the council and then between neighbouring councils before being snaffled by the centre; and, in the case of the RSL, within that area. As part of my ward work last week, I was surprised that a home in Brooke in Norfolk, in my ward, where I live, is now managed or directed from Gloucester. The freedom to move receipts from Norfolk to Gloucester within the RSL estate does not really help local people at all. Unless we protect stock in local markets, a large provider may focus on where it is cheaper, not where it is needed.

So we should recognise that protecting the stock cannot just be a national numbers game and that housing is more local than that. There is a sense that housing is not just part of a place; it defines the place. Ensuring that recycled right to buy receipts are recycled within the place that is defined by the strategic housing market assessment, which all the players in the housing market and planning market know—you can see why my amendment is so important.

The Building Safety Regulator: Building a Better Regulator (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, whom we know has unparalleled expertise of not just the regulator but the service, in defence of safety and security in London. I declare that I am a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee, but I joined after this report was published. Nevertheless, I manage a residential block of flats in Norwich.

Self-evidently, a building should be sufficiently safe for not just residents and occupiers but visitors, tenants and everybody else. We have all seen the consequences when things go wrong. When I was a member of the fire service pension scheme, we had a meeting on the morning of the Grenfell fire in the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade. None of us really knew the gravity of what was unfurling before us; those horrors came later. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has given us the chronology, so I will not detain the Committee with it.

I have no wish to criticise the regulator or anybody who works within it. They have had to get going under the glare of publicity. There was the move from the HSE to Marsham Street; the regulations had to be revised; delays were inevitable and staffing changed. Let us not rehearse all the difficulties. Our challenge is to look forward and get these issues fixed in a proportionate manner so that we can get Britain building again.

Back in about 2019, I sat in the office of the then Secretary of State when the Building Safety Act 2022 was being mooted. He made a powerful observation that stuck with me: some felt that the Act, if implemented, could in some way prevent fire. That misdirection by some was a delusion, because fires will happen. The first purpose of the Building Safety Act should be to enable people to get out quickly. Clearly, there are ways to prevent fire, slow its spread, compartmentalise and raise the alarm in the event of a conflagration. Nobody wants to see a building burn, but too often the regulations that have flowed from the Act have placed too great a focus on the purist approach to preserving a building’s fabric rather than saving lives. We must restate the balance between protecting the building and getting people out more quickly.

The regulations have spawned a huge amount of work. Approaches have inevitably created a bureaucratic monster, especially for older buildings. I think it is fair to say that, historically, there have been unrealistic assessments of risk—blind to cost and burdened by process delays—which have stymied desirable works while making homes worthless in the meantime. Counterintuitively, in some cases they have reduced safety, with refurbishments abandoned, increased risks to residents and the open-ended costs of waking watches and unsellable homes. Success was never meant to be like this.

Obviously we need to focus on the highest-risk buildings—those that are hardest to get out of—but this bureaucratic mission creep has blighted otherwise safe buildings. The fault is not necessarily with the regulator, the builders, the landlords or whoever is directly involved with a premises. Other actors have contributed to the misdirection that has blighted buildings and stalled lives. The mission creep has led to many cases of 11-metre buildings, for example, which are much safer and easier to get out of—and in which, if fires occur, they are much easier to fight—being needlessly tainted. A practical example of this misdirection sees uninformed conveyancers, egged on by mortgage providers, estate agents, valuation surveyors and insurers, demanding unnecessary EWS1 inspections at a specimen cost of £25,000 each, because inevitably intrusive investigations—with scaffolding and making good—will be required. Legally unnecessary, these EWS1s then need to be repeated every five years. It is pointless and counterproductive, and diverts from the risks of addressing the needs of the really high-rise, high-risk buildings.

I am not making the case to ignore unsafe buildings, but excessive delays over specification and costs are keeping people in unimproved buildings that could be made safe for longer, so that they cannot move; it takes too long to buy a home and sales fall through. Housebuilding itself has collapsed in London and, because what happens in London—where there is a disproportionate number of high-rise buildings—follows elsewhere, we are just gumming up the national market. That is why it is important to get this right and to get a grip, not least because we will see perverse consequences if we make it all too difficult for freeholders to do the right thing, especially if the regulatory costs exceed the costs of doing the work. They will just collapse their firms, leaving the leaseholders—those least likely and able to afford it—holding the baby.

Molior reports that new starts in London developments have fallen from a peak of 33,774 in 2015 to just 5,547 in the first quarter of 2026. Getting this wrong in a city that houses 10 million people is never going to grow the economy at the rate we need to.

How do we improve? I am grateful to Berkeley Homes for telling me that, within the regulator, we need to streamline the move from gateway 2 to gateway 3 as an application moves from idea to reality, and we need case officers to be passported through on the same application. Sometimes—we have heard the reasons why—case officers change, with their different views, interpretations or prejudices, which adds to delays, risks and costs. It would be helpful if we fixed the reinvention of the wheel, where lessons learned from one application cannot be passported to another similar development of a common design.

We should celebrate innovation, but we must turn against the notion that anything new is intrinsically high risk and is tipped into the lottery of the bucket of most complex cases. Such Ludditism will never get roofs over our heads. We need to recognise that the building levy, which is £90 per square metre in Fulham, is killing building for little purpose save to sustain the bureaucracy. It is not entirely clear how, in the case of Fulham, which is a high-value area, that figure was calculated in the first place. Elsewhere, the surveyors, mortgage providers, conveyancers and the rest need to stop demanding legally unnecessary tickets with impossible burdens of proof that are collapsing sales and trapping people in their own homes.

It would be churlish if we did not recognise the enormous strides that have been taken with the move from the Health and Safety Executive to Marsham Street, but we need to recognise that we have to get better—from the 22 weeks we have heard about down to the 12-week deadline, and so forth. I am grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Roe, explained that, in order to increase confidence, which is really important, regular data releases are needed to show progress. It is important to show that trajectory; it will get developers off the pot and starting building, which will in turn get the economy moving. Something as simple as that is so welcome.

My main point is to restate the purpose of the regulator and the regulations, which is to ensure that, if a fire happens, we get people out quickly. Creating a counsel of perfection, where every single minor detail is fettled to the nth degree regardless of cost, is not helping either the system for new builds or, more particularly, older buildings that are crying out for refurbishment. Unless we get this balance right, especially in our capital city, we will not build new homes and people will not be able to get on with their lives.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Fuller Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have previous experience in the delivery of social housing. During the 2010s, when I was leader of South Norfolk Council, we consistently delivered 1% of England’s entire affordable housing every year. My council built more homes to rent than the rest of Norfolk put together. Every home lost to the right to buy was replaced and then some. After my nearly 20 years as council leader, the number of affordable houses in south Norfolk had gone up from 4,188 to more than 7,000.

I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, that the amount of social housing is not a finite resource; it can be built. We had an ambitious plan that could be delivered through development proceeds from a position of negotiating strength. The Planning and Infrastructure Act and the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act have weakened that power but, when I was leader of the council, I held all the cards. Now those cards are held by developers, on undeliverable housing targets under the five-year land supply, so the Government have made their task harder. The irony is that this Bill has never been needed more, since the private rented sector was decimated by the Renters’ Rights Act, which turbocharged rents to new highs. Who knew?

That said, I welcome the measure for a 35-year lockout for new homes on right to buy. The probability that brand new homes could be acquired under right to buy has chilled new investment and spawned no end of avoidance structures from within local authorities, which is diverting.

In some respects, it is shame that the right to buy will be diluted. It should be stated clearly and loudly that the ability to buy your own home has been one of the most empowering success stories of the last 40 years. Done right—as I did, as leader of the council— a social home that is bought houses two families: the family who bought the house and another one in the new house which replaces it.

This plays to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron: I have concerns that the Bill will prevent receipts in one authority being applied to a neighbouring one, even if they are in the same housing market area. When my neighbour Norwich City Council could not build houses or spend the receipts, it lent the money to us and we built some affordable houses within a mile of the city boundary. My reading of the Bill is that this desirable behaviour would be banned, and that is crazy.

This leads me to the subject of locality. I understand that the Bill is limited in scope, but protecting the stock cannot be just a national numbers game. Housing is more local than that, but that is not envisaged in the Bill, as I read it. There are general freedoms for social providers to recycle funds, not within a specific area but across their entire estate. As part of my ward work, I was surprised last month when a home in Brooke, in the ward where I live, was under the management of Victory Homes but being managed from Gloucester. The freedom to move receipts within the RSL without challenge, from Norfolk to Gloucester, does not help local people at all. Unless we protect the stock in local markets, a large provider may focus on where it is cheaper, not where it is needed. The RSLs are different from the councils.

I was grateful to the Minister for the drop-in before the Recess, when she explained that it is very difficult to define territories. From one ex-council leader to another, she must know that that is incorrect. We both developed local plans based on housing market areas. They are defined; they exist. It is just not the case that area management is not part of the Bill. The principle of locality is established and there are welcome carve-outs for national parks. I just wish that it would go further on national landscapes. In Committee, I will seek to probe how receipts can be recycled locally by default before being snaffled by the centre.

None of this would be necessary had social housing providers not become so large. Scale has not been good for the tenants. It has led to a lack of local accountability. National RSLs populating their boards with the great and the good, acting as pound shop developers on the government dime, has seen tenant reps excised from the landscape. The consequence is that the focus on local matters, such as anti-social behaviour, has been dropped, as I know from my own ward casework. This Bill could have been stronger on anti-social behaviour to demonstrate that the Government are on the side of the law-abiding resident, but it is not.

Candidly, far too great a focus on development has led to a loss by these RSLs of the social purpose of providing social homes. RSLs cannot even sell houses they developed initially for the private market to be used for social use, and that is wrong. Instead, one of the effects of the liberalisation of certain financial powers in this Bill may be to drive financial engineering to new heights. The truth is that as RSLs have become overleveraged, they have been caught out by the increase in build costs, finance and land costs. Quite simply, there is no space for the social purpose of these organisations. That is an omission this Bill should correct but does not.

I am disappointed that the Bill purports to protect the supply of new homes but fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of adapted homes. I spent about £3 million a year adapting homes for an ageing population. In some cases, it might have been a grab rail or a ramp. In one case, a £75,000 extension was required. When, as so often happens, the tenant passes away and the home is re-advertised, no credit can be given for those adaptations. The new tenant can ask for them to be removed, and they do. It is crazy. It is a waste of money. It reduces the pool of adapted homes. It is bad for everybody, especially the taxpayer, who has to pay twice, once to put the adaptation in and again to take it out. Where are the provisions in the Bill to protect the supply of adapted homes for the ageing population? I have heard it said that this is an allocations issue and we are not going there. I say: why not?

As I warm to my allocations theme, where are the protections for veterans? Where is the assertion that those with local needs should be prioritised? Where is the preference for the indigenous population? Where are protections for local needs, for affordable housing in our villages—small developments in places such as Bergh Apton that local people campaigned for, not against? Where are the stronger fiscal incentives for people to downsize from the family home as they age? This Bill is deficient in that it does not even look at the totality of the supply and certainly fails on the demand side. Partial supply without looking at the demand is no solution at all. The Bill is incomplete. It looks only at the home, not really at the people who live in it. It does half the job, and in Committee we will attempt to make it whole.