Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Hyde of Bemerton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is quite overwhelming to speak after such an expert on housing and homelessness as the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I thank the noble Lord for his speech.

I welcome this Bill and thank my noble friend the Minister for her work on it. I have just finished eight years as a councillor in the London Borough of Islington, and I welcome these moves to retain social housing and encourage the building of it. A lot of my casework over eight years as a local authority councillor was trying to help people on a housing waiting list of 16,000. Even with our borough’s country-leading buy-back scheme, through which we had a grant from the Mayor of London to buy back right-to-buy properties and bring them back under council ownership, we still struggled to get those waiting list numbers down. I am delighted that this Labour Government have included right-to-buy reform in this Bill as part of a suite of policies to tackle the housing crisis.

Before I move to my substantive points about the Bill, I want to say this. When I entered your Lordships’ House, I understood that this was somewhere prized as a place of evidence-based scrutiny, robust evidence and expertise. So I have to take note and challenge when I hear casual tropes being deployed. I lived on the Bemerton Estate, a council housing estate, for over 13 years. In that time, I had the honour of getting to know my neighbours, who became my friends, some of whom were incredible Somali women. Time constrains me from telling noble Lords in detail about Mana, Hana, Safia and others; that is for another day. Suffice to say that Mana is referred to by many as the godmother of the estate and by others as the queen of the Bemerton because of her service to generations of residents and her key role in interfaith initiatives. She is a brilliant woman who instinctively builds community. So I implore noble Lords on all sides of this House to err on the side of thoroughness and evidence when speaking in this place.

To return to my substantive points about this Bill, I am proud of this Labour Government and the work of many, both here and in the other place, who have created a plan to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. Working in prisons repeatedly brought me face to face with women who had suffered the most appalling violence and survived it, mostly at the hands of men. Some 68% of women in prison have suffered domestic abuse. Certainly, almost all the women I worked with in my decade of working in and after prison disclosed sexual or domestic abuse as part of their life stories. This has made me a passionate advocate for the survivors of that abuse.

This Government’s ambitious strategy is rightly a cross-government strategy. It cannot just sit in the Home Office, and it is entirely appropriate that this narrowly drawn Bill includes provisions to protect victims and survivors of domestic abuse and their access to housing. At Islington Council, our primary reason for people becoming homeless was parental alienation. The second most common reason was domestic abuse.

As such, there are parts of the country that have been tackling this in innovative ways for many years and taking a whole housing approach for survivors of domestic abuse. Both Cheshire East and Islington Councils have been platinum accredited by the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance for their work in this field. This is a plea, in seeking to refine this Bill, to my noble friend the Minister and the team to make sure that they have thoroughly reviewed the best practice that is already available and make sure that this legislation complements and turbo-charges the work already going on in many local authorities.

To achieve that whole housing approach and the accreditation from DAHA, Islington Council put on extensive staff training. Even if it was somebody coming to repair a light, there might be an opportunity to speak to someone who needed help with a domestic abuse scenario. They made sure that any contact someone had with the council might be a pathway to a safer life for that person. The council also had a collaborative daily safeguarding meeting, advocated for strong and inclusive partnership working with the voluntary sector and pursued robust relocation policies. Staff developed a high-risk move policy, so they could quickly rehouse individuals fleeing violence in addition to providing flexible funding to assist those transitions.

The Bill does many things well, but I want to flag to my noble friend the Minister that she should consider reviewing the grounds required for moving somebody from a joint to a single tenancy. The grounds involve waiting for people to breach an order, rather than just having an order—a non-molestation order, for example. When you have those orders, you already must have proved that domestic abuse has taken place. Perhaps having an order may be enough, rather than putting a survivor/victim at further risk by demanding that the perpetrator breach that order before they are able to transfer their tenancy. This is to ensure that everybody that might need this kind of help to move to a single tenancy or to move home is able to do so without putting themselves at further risk.

As I said, this is a welcome and very long overdue suite of measures to address many of the problems of our social housing stock. The measures around domestic abuse are particularly welcome. These are stronger legal mechanisms that remove perpetrators from social housing tenancies and will enable more survivors to stay in their home, if it is safe to do so, or to move to different accommodation as the sole tenant.

I commend this Bill and the brilliant measures therein to the House. They enable autonomy and independence. They enable the dignity of the individual through the dignity of social housing, including for all those—whatever their country of birth—who are fleeing domestic abuse.