Social Housing: Right-to-buy Sales

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I remind the House of the statistic I gave in answer to an earlier question: of those homes, since 2010, 172,600 are for social rent.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, further to the question from my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, perhaps my noble friend the Minister has not quite grasped the root of the problem. We are dealing here with small and medium-sized housebuilders. When they generate social housing to accompany their private sector developments, that social housing frequently comes in penny packets, isolated to one house on the site and so on. There are 13,000 of these now waiting to be built, but the housing associations are not interested in them—they are simply not interesting to housing associations, as they are too difficult to manage. It is unblocking that logjam that I think my noble friend was asking my other noble friend on the Front Bench to address herself to.

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

Indeed, this is where a local authority could step in to deliver more replacement homes. In the current economic climate, councils are able to continue to deliver 50% of their right-to-buy replacement homes as acquisitions each year until 2025, with a focus on the purchasing of new homes. That should help small, medium-sized and large housebuilders.