Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Thornhill]

53: After Clause 11, insert the following new Clause—
“Local authority registers of social housing stock change(1) Each local housing authority must maintain a register recording—(a) the number of dwellings sold by the authority under the right to buy in each financial year,(b) the number of new social housing dwellings provided by or on behalf of the authority in each financial year, and(c) the net change in the authority's social housing stock resulting from the figures in paragraphs (a) and (b).(2) A local housing authority must publish its register under this section annually and make it available to the public in such manner as the authority considers appropriate.(3) The Secretary of State must publish a summary of the information contained in registers under this section across all local housing authorities in England.(4) The summary under subsection (3) must identify authorities where the number of dwellings sold under the right to buy exceeds the number of new social housing dwellings provided in the same period.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires local housing authorities to maintain and publish annual registers recording dwellings sold under the right to buy against new social housing provided, enabling public scrutiny of whether authorities are failing to replenish lost stock.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I open this group—which is a considerably better position than we were in on Monday, when I thought I would be closing it—by proposing Amendment 53. This group goes to the heart of the Bill’s central test: whether we are serious about ensuring that right to buy does not continue to deplete our social housing stock faster than we can replace it. Amendment 53 is about the transparency and accountability of that process. It requires annual local authority reporting of homes sold under the right to buy against homes newly provided. We need to look particularly at net loss and net gain. This way both the public—and the public are important—and the Government can see a trend within a local authority over time.

I decided to table this amendment because I was recently asked to speak at a housing conference, and I tried to ascertain information about social homes in Hertfordshire. It was more difficult than it should have been. Data is not easy to obtain, nor is it cumulative, so we cannot see trends. Of course, there is also the dilemma of affordable versus social, which we discussed at length on Monday. If we do not have the quality data that tells us on an authority-by-authority basis what is going on, we cannot know whether a policy is working and, more importantly, the Government cannot determine when it is appropriate to intervene.

It is worth saying that it is very clear that all housing providers are now having to deal with those with far more complex needs, disabilities and mental illness. It is tough having to ration a scarce resource on a daily basis. Housing officers are unsung heroes, in my book.

We went through the statistics at length on Monday, so let us just say that, whichever estimates you look at, we are nowhere near building either the amount or the right type of social housing needed. It is evident that demands for social housing vary considerably from area to area, and that the challenges of meeting those varied needs, with increasing homelessness and families in temporary accommodation, are bringing more councils into a precarious financial position, while others remain relatively unaffected. We believe that the responsibility to meet those needs should be spread fairly, as much as is practically possible, and that every council should take its responsibility seriously. I regret that I do not believe that is the case, which is why Amendment 53 matters. If there is no clear, consistent public record of what is happening locally, it becomes impossible to monitor trends and to direct change.

I turn briefly to the other amendments in this group. While I have some sympathy with Amendment 54 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, I believe it could possibly be unworkable in practice due to land availability, planning delays, and so on—all legitimate reasons for delay—so putting a time limit on it would not be helpful. We would prefer to encourage creative compliance than pinpoint an actual delivery date.

Clearly, Amendment 56 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, is almost a duplication of my amendment; likewise their Amendment 58B. It is interesting that across both Committee days we are going to be looking at collective amendments that clamour for more data of one kind or another. Obviously, it is up to Ministers to know whether they have the data they need to inform policy and make judgments on whether or not a policy is working, and we need that same data to be able to scrutinise it. In my heart, I hope the Minister tells me, “Yes, the data’s actually there, Lady Thornhill, you just weren’t looking in the right place”, but if it is available somewhere, it is probably not publicly or easily.

On Amendment 55, I am interested in what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has to say, but I hope the Government are more aspirational than one-for-one replacement, given the scale of need. But I say again that without knowing what each local authority is actually losing and delivering—hence my Amendment 92 on our first day in Committee regarding conflation of the terms “affordable” and “social” housing—we will not know what is happening on the ground. Trends over time are important, not just averages on a national level but over local authority areas, which, as we have also discussed previously, are going to get much larger. Accountability, in our view from these Benches, therefore needs to be stronger in these new mayoral authorities and the larger unitaries. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I think the figures stated relate to what happens once we have enacted the Bill. As I have said many times, the ambition to deliver more social homes is not just about the replacement of right-to-buy homes. Right-to-buy sales may go down, but we still anticipate that the measures being taken in the Bill will result in a net increase of 18,000 homes over the period; whereas, because the sales were going up, we would have lost 26,000 homes. With the social and affordable homes programme adding to the overall total and the net increase in homes that we are seeing through the right-to-buy programme, which is 18,000 as opposed to a 26,000 loss, we will see an increase in social housebuilding.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I thank the Minister for her response, which was very much as I would have predicted. My main point to make to her was that it was not easy to find that data—on GOV.UK you have to look for a bit here and a bit there. Where is all this information on what is such a major plank for the Government, which we totally agree with? Where is it easy to see who is doing what? Where is the analysis and where is it drawn together? Who are the shirkers and who are the leaders? It is a challenging thing. Without meaningful, accurate and localised reporting, councils cannot be properly scrutinised, which is important, and policy failure is harder to challenge. For example, we actually had net losses last year. Again, you can google that and it will tell you, but it is not easy to see it within the mountain of data. In the meantime, I have to say the magic words: I will withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 53 withdrawn.

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This is not an attack on devolution; it is a defence of it. Devolution cannot mean power without responsibility. It cannot mean taking credit when things go well, which our current Mayor of London is very good at, but blaming others when it goes wrong, which he is also very good at. He never takes responsibility for what is going on. A Government with this power could force him to do so. London councils need help, not rhetoric. London workers need homes, not fancy words. I commend this amendment and will personally be supporting it.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I acknowledge the cogent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Evans. It was his first contribution, but I hope it will be the first of many, and I mean that sincerely.

In principle, we welcome the intent behind this group of amendments because they speak to something that is all too often overlooked in housing debates: not just how many homes we have to build and targets but the condition and use of the homes that we already have. I will do my best to stick to the amendments in front of us, but I hope Conservative noble Lords will forgive me if I suggest there is a pattern running through this group and others today, and from Monday, which is pushing towards more centralisation and, ultimately, more regulation, which we would be instinctively against.

Take Amendment 57 on regeneration, which makes an important point. It asks the Government to bring forward proposals to support the regeneration of estates. There is no doubt that this is vital, but local authorities are already leading regeneration in so many areas, often very successfully. The best examples of those are councils that are not only working with their communities —which is absolutely essential; try doing it without it—but also attracting private sector investment to get a top-notch scheme. I know that it needs both government and local government to undertake such major work, not what is proposed in these amendments.

The regeneration of an older estate is a significant investment and a major project. It can, as the noble Baroness said, take years, and I have experience of that too. However, what I believe it does not need is direction from the centre, with a national strategy or proposal. In my experience, it is usually the other way round: the council saying to government, “Hey, this is what we want to do. We’ve got great plans, we’ve talked to our community, but—help, please”. That help can be with whatever obstacles are in the way, not just money. As I know also from experience, these can be many and varied, and very often local. You need government to act as Dyno-Rod to help you move things forward, as I am sure the Minister will know from her own experience of the regeneration of Stevenage town centre, on which she battled for many years.

Again, in my experience there are significant pots of money for regeneration to access, but they are often in too many different pots, their use is too restricted and nobody is looking holistically at what a council needs to achieve in total. You might get some money for this bit but not for the bit that would really make it add value. I know that work has been done on these aspects so I hope the Minister will update us, because I think the grant applications for regeneration are important.

Likewise, Amendment 83 would require a national audit of existing stock. Noble Lords will know from my other amendments that I believe better data is clearly helpful and necessary, but we should also recognise that councils already have a good understanding of their housing stock, as do registered social providers. They know where the problems lie. The real issue for them is that they have competing priorities at the moment—do they do the safety work? Do they have new build? Do they retrofit or improve existing homes? The real question is: how do we move from knowledge to funded action on the ground? Noble Lords will begin to see the drift of my theme on these and other amendments.

I will say a final word on Amendment 116, on empty homes, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. It is a particularly important issue, and I strongly support the ambition to bring more of these properties back into use. Councils have the powers to deal with this issue; there is no doubt about that. Again, the issue is not the lack of a five-year plan but other barriers to bringing these homes into use. These are well known. They are often around the capacity of the courts and the rights of the home owner, and how they can hold up the process through the courts and make getting one single house back into use take years.

That brings me to a wider point of capacity. After many years of financial pressure, local government is often operating in a space where it has to be reactive rather than proactive. I believe councils and all their partners would universally want to do more on regeneration, empty homes, illegal subletting—very well articulated by the noble Baroness—and enforcement on landlords in general. But that requires the capacity to get ahead of the problem and not just respond to it.

We respect the sincere intention behind these amendments but feel that the actions asked for are not going to make the significant difference that we would all like to see. Local government knows the issues, and it is often other measures that are needed, which are well out of the scope of the Bill.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government recognise the importance of regenerating existing social housing estates and the potential this can have to improve housing quality, energy efficiency and the overall supply of housing. Following Second Reading, I sent a letter to noble Lords outlining the Government’s intentions in this area; I hope noble Lords have had a chance to look at that.

I will respond first to Amendment 57, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. While I appreciate the intention behind her amendment, we do not consider it appropriate to place a requirement of this nature in the Bill. As she will know only too well, estate regeneration is complex and highly place-specific. Decisions about funding, density and redevelopment are best taken through existing programmes and planning frameworks that can respond flexibly to local circumstances. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, said, it is very important that this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis at local level.

The amendment would also cut across existing policy development and spending decisions, including those taken through the spending review process, by mandating the production of proposals within a fixed timeframe, regardless of wider fiscal or delivery considerations. Therefore, while we share the objective of supporting effective and sensitive estate regeneration, we believe it is better taken forward through existing policy levers and funding mechanisms than through a new legislative duty.

I will make two further comments; first, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham. The social and affordable housing programme supports regeneration where it delivers a net increase in social homes—which I set out some details of in the letter I sent out—as well as introducing wider reforms to standards, designs and quality. We can definitely support regeneration through that programme.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to my efforts around regeneration—the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was incredibly helpful to me during that process, so I recognise his significant expertise in that area.

There was also the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, about the housing action trusts. The noble Lord may be aware of the announcements made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State on Monday this week, on the right to manage and how we intend to extend it more widely and try to promote it to tenants, so that where a landlord is failing, they can exercise their right to manage. I know the Secretary of State is very keen to promote that. That said, I ask that Amendment 57 be withdrawn.

On Amendment 58 from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, the Government are clear that supported housing has a vital role to play in supporting some of the most vulnerable in our society to live as independently as possible. We want to see the new supply of supported housing grow, which is why the social and affordable homes programme allows flexibility on grant rates, to help support accommodation where design and adaptation can result in higher costs.

In addition, the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 places a new statutory duty on local housing authorities to develop supported housing strategies. That will include a delivery plan setting out clear, time-bound actions for implementation. Any new requirement to set out a national strategy on the provision of supported housing will be duplicative of something that—as I see it—sits within the remit of local supported housing strategies. It would lack the detailed understanding that our local authorities have of specific needs in their local areas. For those reasons, I cannot support the amendment.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for Amendments 83 and 107, which both seek to improve the understanding, and strengthen the management, of existing social housing stock. On Amendment 83, a substantial amount of data is already published on the condition and use of social housing, including through the English Housing Survey and the Local Authority Housing Statistics, covering many of the issues raised in the amendment. More broadly, and relevant to both amendments, the Government have already launched a review into how effectively social housing providers are managing and making best use of their stock.

In response also to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, this work is examining underoccupation, overcrowding, long term voids, tenant mobility, and how landlords can maximise the use of the homes they manage. The review is already under way, and we will report its outcomes later this year. In light of that, the Government do not consider it appropriate to legislate now for a further national audit or a statutory strategy.

Turning to Amendment 75, I want to be clear that illegal subletting is unacceptable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, rightly said, it deprives those in genuine need of a social home and undermines confidence in the system. Tenants are responsible for fulfilling their obligations and complying with the terms of their tenancy agreement. They are also responsible for making sure that, when they apply for social housing in the first place, the information they give is accurate. Now that social landlords have much more access to online systems for checking applications on registers, I suspect that they are now rejecting far more applications where the information does not match up with the application concerned. Where a tenant has breached a term in their agreement, landlords may seek a possession order from the courts on the basis that there has been a breach of a term of the tenancy agreement, or housing fraud, or where one of the other statutory grounds for possession has been made out.

Where there are concerns about tenancy fraud, councils and landlords already have strong powers to investigate and take action—I believe that the noble Baroness opposite put those in place. We expect social landlords to manage their stock effectively, and anyone with evidence of a fraudulent tenancy should report it to the relevant local authority so that appropriate action can be taken. The Government are looking at this issue as part of the wider stock management review that I referred to. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, asked me how long properties are left vacant in between tenancies; I do not have that specific information to hand, but I will write to her on that point. We do not think that further legislation is needed here.

I am grateful, as ever, to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for Amendment 116 and his powerful advocacy for it. I fully recognise the strength of feeling around the need to bring empty homes back into use. We do not believe that placing a new statutory duty on all local authorities to produce a detailed five year plan on empty homes is the right approach. Local authorities already have powers to identify and acquire empty homes and to bring them back into use. Many are actively doing so through locally tailored strategies that reflect their housing markets and priorities. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, said, there are many reasons why that takes longer than it should, and we should look at those obstacles. As the noble Lord said, we should not have empty homes while families live in temporary accommodation, and we are working with our councils to make sure that that does not happen.

However, the amendment would risk duplicating the existing planning and reporting requirements and would impose a significant administrative burden, regardless of whether empty homes are a material issue in a particular area. We are clear that progress on empty homes is best delivered through local flexibility, supported by existing powers and funding, rather than through a one-size-fits-all statutory process.

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I will make one final point to support the case—one which has not been made before. If you are on the housing waiting list, the number of new social homes is relevant, and the more the better. But someone in housing need is eight times more likely to be rehoused through a re-let than through a new build. Increasing the number of re-lets is a key ingredient for helping those in need, and a new re-let can be secured at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time of a new build. Focusing our social housing on those in greatest need, to use the Government’s own words, means a good, hard look at how social housing is used at the moment and, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord John of Southwark, asking whether life tenancies are the answer to a question from a different era.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I was busy trying to think of counterarguments; the noble Lord, Lord Young, has caught me there. We feel that what unites these amendments is an attempt to drag social housing policy backwards, and to revive a model of insecurity that simply did not work. We have heard this argument before—that fixed-term tenancies somehow make the system fairer or more efficient—but in reality they created uncertainty for tenants, instability for families and churning communities, without coming anywhere close to solving the real problem, which, as we all acknowledge, is a chronic shortage of social housing.

With the exception of Amendment 70, which we have not heard about yet, and while my brain is still thinking about the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young, these proposals feel less like a serious answer to today’s housing challenges and more like a re-run of policies that were already tested and found wanting. Take Clause 16, the power to give housing providers the right to raise rents as tenants get higher wages. I can imagine the dinner table conversation: “Great news: I’ve been promoted! I’m getting some extra money. We’ll get above ‘just about managing’. It might give us the cushion we need. But wait: won’t they put our rent up if they find out we’re earning more? Perhaps I won’t take that promotion”. We could not support a measure that would dampen self-improvement and aspiration, let alone the logistics of administering it. With regard to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young, how does one logistically monitor those sorts of things within a tenancy?

As Liberal Democrats, we took a very different approach from the Conservative Benches in supporting the renters’ rights reform. We believe that people deserve a secure home, not a tenancy that comes with a built-in expiry date and the constant threat of upheaval. It cannot be right that, just as we strengthen security for private renters, we simultaneously ask social tenants—who, as has been amplified, are those in the greatest need of stability—to accept less.

Of course social housing must be used fairly and responsibly, and we are getting into that dialogue now, but fairness is achieved not by making tenancies more precarious but by building more homes and supporting tenants to move when it is right for them. I know that is tricky, but it can be done. One area where it needs to be done most is in the freeing up of family homes. Usually, this means a widow occupying a three-bedroom family house, when she could move down to a nice ground-floor, one-bedroom flat. This can be done, but we must ensure that the system works with people and not against them.

In our view, these amendments would take us in the wrong direction. They would revive a failed approach and undermine the progress that is trying to be made. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Young, that the people whom we now house are very different. The statistics support that many people in social housing receive benefits, even though they are working. Therefore, I am not sure about what the noble Lord says with regard to private sector rents and whether people’s lives would improve so much that they could pay them in the same area. The cohorts that we are housing now do not seem to bear that out.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I will respond first to the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, to oppose Clause 14 standing part of the Bill. I understand that this is a probing amendment seeking more detail on the Government’s rationale for repealing the powers. It is essential that local housing authorities have flexibility to manage their stock in a way that best enables them to meet the needs of their local communities. Clause 14 therefore removes provisions in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 that would have forced councils to sell their highest-value council homes whenever they became vacant. I say “would have forced” because these provisions were never implemented.

Even so, the presence of the provisions on the statute book had a very negative effect on local authorities’ spending plans, since they could not be certain of the income streams from these properties. The policy was intended to raise capital to supply new social homes but would ultimately have led to a net loss in social housing. The last Government chose never to implement these measures due to the negative impact they would have had on local authorities. We are now going one step further by repealing the provisions altogether. That time is now, and Clause 14 fulfils that commitment, so I commend it to the Committee.

I turn to Clause 15 and Amendments 66, 77 and 78. All these relate to the Government’s intention to repeal uncommenced provisions in the Housing and Planning Act 2016, which would have required most new secure tenancies offered by local authorities to be fixed term. I agree with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has just said. The Government fundamentally believe that people, families and communities all benefit from secure homes. That is why we enabled this for private renters through the Renters’ Rights Act. It would be entirely counterintuitive to remove that security from social housing tenants.

The probing amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, explores alternatives to lifetime tenancies, and Amendment 77, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, seeks to clarify that social landlords can continue to grant fixed-term tenancies. Nothing in the Bill prevents local housing authorities from granting fixed-term tenancies where they consider it to be appropriate—for example, to support time-limited resettlement schemes for Afghan and other refugee cohorts. The Bill does not change that. Schedule 3, paragraph 1 repeals uncommenced provisions that would have required most new secure tenancies to be granted on a fixed-term basis. Those provisions were never brought into force, and we are removing them to provide clarity. We want to make it clear that we support lifetime tenancies because they provide stability and security for tenants and help people put down roots in their communities. It is not right to require that most new tenants be offered fixed-term tenancies, as this would reduce their security.

Amendment 78 would require a review of the provisions in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 which would have replaced lifetime secure tenancies with fixed-term tenancies for new tenants. However, as we discussed, those provisions were never commenced, and the Bill repeals them. It is therefore not possible to review the measures. The Government already collect data on new social housing lettings, including tenancy type and length of fixed-term tenancies. We therefore already have an established source of information on how fixed-term tenancies are being used. The stock management review, which we are currently undertaking, is the right place to consider the issues highlighted for proposed review, rather than requiring a separate statutory review of provisions that were never brought into force. For those reasons, I ask that the amendments be withdrawn.

Turning to Clause 16, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for Amendment 80, which would allow higher rents to be charged to higher-income social housing tenants. I note that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has set out her intention to oppose Clause 16 standing part of the Bill. The Government are reviewing both the statutory social housing allocations guidance and how social landlords are making effective use of their existing stock. Taken together, these amendments would, in effect, reintroduce the pay-to-stay policy, which was included in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 but never implemented. In fact, Amendment 80 would go even further than the current provisions in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 by requiring registered providers, as well as local housing authorities, to charge higher rents to higher-income tenants.

As I previously noted, these pay-to-stay provisions were never implemented, and the original provisions in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 received strong objections from noble Lords during the passage of that legislation. Indeed, the previous Government chose not to commence them as the costs outweighed the benefits. Social landlords already have flexibility to run discretionary schemes for higher-earning tenants, and it is right to maintain that approach. I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, said: we want to avoid creating disincentives for tenants to increase their earnings, and avoid curtailing their aspirations and ambitions, through this process. For those reasons, these amendments are not necessary. I ask that they be withdrawn, and I commend Clause 16 to the Committee.

Finally, I turn to Amendment 70, from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. This would require a social landlord to conduct a tenancy review where a tenant is engaged in persistent anti-social behaviour. During the passage of the Renters’ Rights Act, I spoke about the challenges of tackling anti-social behaviour and drew on my 27 years of experience as a local councillor. No tenant should feel unsafe in their home as a result of the behaviour of others. Where behaviour is persistent and has a serious impact on neighbours and communities, landlords must be able to respond quickly and appropriately.

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[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and I support all the amendments in this group, particularly those from the noble Baronesses, Lady Teather and Lady Bakewell, my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lord Jackson, and those on the Front Bench, which support a review of policy and better information for making policy on politically sensitive matters such as immigration and narrowing the eligibility clause.

In seeking information on accessing social housing and the demand for it, such as that arising from net migration and temporary asylum, we should not forget the context in which these demands are made. It is a question at the centre of our national debate, one which has too often eroded trust in politics and democracies. That is not limited to the UK. Right across stable western systems such as France, Germany and Italy, this question is at the heart of the erosion of trust and the changing shape of democratic stability, which many are worried about. That is the wider context for the immigration amendments. We should not brush this issue, and the pressure it puts on the demand for social housing, under the carpet.

In considering immigration and asylum, we are looking at particularly significant demands, which might, in time, come to outweigh current pressures, if the figures we see today are to lead in any way to a demand for social housing. In the year ending September 2025, 58,148 people were granted protection and leave to remain at the initial decision. Where will they live? Will they add to the pressures and burdens on social housing? We need to know the evidence and the figures and not brush this question under the carpet. In addition, 46,497 illegal migrants were known to have arrived in the year ending December 2025. They may end up being granted leave to remain, given that the Government are trying to process many of them as asylum claims, which will pose additional demands.

Then we have the student visa question. Some 443,000 visas were granted last year. Analysis by a Sky journalist recently showed that, in the latest year for which figures are available, the number of asylum claims by people who had originally come on student visas was 14,800 out of a total of 111,000, meaning that student visa holders have been switching to being asylum seekers. For some, there may be good reason. They may have come from countries in which they would be persecuted and seek asylum when they get here. Having a student visa is the only way to get out. However, for others, such as the Indian nationals this report particularly mentions, a scam operated. In one case, the papers were filled in fraudulently for one member of the family—the lady—and she and her husband came on student visas. However, she had no intention of studying. As a family, they had no money—certainly not the bank account figures that were in the papers. The local authority discussed their case and awarded benefits because they simply could not afford to live, and they have now made their asylum claim.

These kinds of hard-luck stories—and nobody denies that they are hard-luck stories—are pushing up the claims and the demand for social housing. We need evidence so that we can have an open and fair debate. For these reasons, I support the proposed prohibition on granting social housing to anybody but UK citizens, as my noble friends’ various amendments propose.

Before closing, I want to comment on the amendments that seek better information on social housing access for veterans, the case for which was very well argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Teather. I referred on Second Reading to the case of a homeless person at King’s Cross Station who lived hand to mouth and day to day because he was evicted from his council house when his daughter was run over by a cab driver, who was accused and convicted of dangerous driving. She was his sole carer. He had served in the Royal Marines for well over a decade, including in Afghanistan, and because of injuries sustained in serving, he had to be looked after all his life. They were in council housing, and he was evicted after his daughter died because she held the tenancy.

I support the amendments on greater information on offenders, who are some of the saddest cases we have. The literacy levels of as many as 56% of prisoners are less than the reading age of seven, meaning that they are excluded from any kind of literate society. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Farmer’s excellent work for offenders, but I also agree that unless we insist that they be given housing priority, they will go back to a life of crime. As much of the evidence shows, they will go back to crime, as the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, explained, or to the people who were part of their previous crime network. They have been abandoned by their families—their husbands, wives, children—and others who looked after them. These are very good amendments and I support them.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My noble friends have outlined their cases themselves, so I will just clutch my pearls and resist having a ding-dong with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—which I could, for reasons that will become apparent in my speech.

I will speak carefully on this group, because I have real concerns. I am not going to go into the detail of the individual amendments, but my concerns are the direction and tone that they take when looked at together. Looked at as a whole, they approach access to social housing primarily through restriction and exclusion, with a strong emphasis on immigration status and migration pressures. I understand the political context in which these amendments are being brought forward, but I do not believe this is a helpful or responsible way to address the housing crisis or solve immigration matters. The fundamental driver of pressure on social housing is not who is applying for it; it is the chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes. Framing access as a competition between groups risks obscuring that reality and diverting attention away from the real task of increasing supply.

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[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.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for her amendments on shared ownership and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for moving them.

Shared ownership has an important role to play in supporting households into home ownership who would otherwise struggle to purchase a suitable property. We had extensive debates on this during the Renters’ Rights Bill and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his work on this. That is why we have committed to continue supporting the delivery of shared ownership via the £39 billion social and affordable homes programme. Through the launch of the programme, we have introduced new measures to support the delivery of shared ownership and to set clear expectations for providers to improve the customer experience that we have heard about this evening.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 86, 87 and 88 in my name address the subject of mayors and their role in social housing delivery. As we know, local authorities have a major role to play in social housing delivery and maintenance. Under this Government, reforms have been pushed to further empower mayors in their areas over ordinary councillors, as we saw in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act. Therefore, it is only right that we question to what extent existing and future mayors should be held responsible for social housing delivery.

Amendment 86 would require the Secretary of State to carry out a review of what mechanisms are and should be available to hold mayors to account, specifically in relation to social housing delivery. This review would take place within 12 months of the Bill being passed and it must consider the performance of social housing delivery, the accountability of the mayor to local electors in this regard and what accountability mechanisms exist.

So much work to deliver social housing may take place behind the scenes, and mayors deserve credit where they do well or to be held accountable when they are not doing as much as they could or should do. This will also make it clearer to voters how the social housing system works and how performance can be measured and attributed to different actors. Of course, individual mayors are not all-powerful beings, and their performance can be impacted by other factors, but they are being empowered by this Government and so we need to look again at how they can be held accountable.

Amendment 87 calls for a review of the incentives that are there for mayors to deliver social housing—more carrot, less stick, if you will. This review would look again at performance but also assess what financial incentives there are to perform well, what funding streams and accessibility to grants exist, what savings authorities can make elsewhere when social housing is delivered well, and so on. Social housing delivery needs to be supported by a positive policy environment, and this amendment would give Parliament better oversight of what incentives exist.

Amendment 88 would look at mayoral remuneration as a mechanism for holding mayors accountable. Mayors who are not performing well bring into question how much remuneration they deserve, particularly as we see more mayoral combined authorities rolled out over the coming years through the Government’s reforms. This framework would link a proportion of that remuneration directly to the performance of social housing delivery, taking into account their delivery targets.

This is a probing amendment to explore how the changing role of mayors can be clarified and to ask whether the current mechanisms for accountability are sufficient and appropriate. If the Government want mayors to have more powers, there should be mechanisms of accountability and incentives to reflect that. I look forward to hearing from other noble Lords on this subject and I hope the Minister will take these ideas on board to investigate this further.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak a little bit more briefly than I had intended on this group of amendments and will speak specifically to my Amendment 92. I am shamelessly using the Bill to raise an issue and to correct a problem that we in this House have discussed many times. My Amendment 92 would insert a new clause to ask the Government to publish very clear guidance to distinguish affordable housing from social housing. Why? Because it has real consequences for supply policy, credibility and public trust.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a part-owner of rented property in West Yorkshire.

One of the strikingly important things for me, and I hope for all noble Lords, is the positive outcomes for young people exposed to the right-to-buy scheme from the 1980s. This is not wishful thinking on my part; it is clearly shown in research from the London School of Economics. I referred to this at Second Reading, but it is worth reminding noble Lords about.

The right to buy guaranteed detectable, sizeable school performance gains among young people exposed to it, increasing good grades in high-stakes exams. There is also evidence that there is an income effect, which gives more financial stability to households through home ownership, and there is a crime reduction effect from public housing tenants becoming owners of their own home. It is disappointing that such prejudice against right to buy is likely to remove from social housing tenants the opportunities which right to buy has created for so many.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, it is good to kick off our first day in Committee on this important Bill. As noble Lords will know from our comments and speeches at Second Reading, we broadly support the Bill, so I will endeavour not to make Second Reading speeches and to be as brief as possible, given our support for it.

We support tighter restrictions on right to buy—I think the evidence is clear—but we do not believe in its total abolition. As was said over and over by noble Lords at Second Reading, over 2 million houses have been sold this way since 1980 but nearly 1 million more have been sold than replaced. Looking at last year’s figures, 7,500 homes were sold and only 3,600 were replaced. More worrying was the net loss of nearly 4,000 homes last year. Losses outstripped gains. This is not sustainable, yet the need grows. Homelessness rates are growing. The number of families in temporary accommodation is growing. My local authority is now reaching the point that many others have already reached with the impact on their budget of temporary accommodation.

However, we believe that a total ban is not the right answer, which is why we cannot support Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, because housing need is not the same everywhere and local councils understand their own housing pressures best. In some areas, right to buy should definitely be paused; there should be a moratorium. In others, it should be more tightly controlled, but always—in the view of our Benches—with one condition: homes sold must at least be replaced on a one-for-one basis, if not better.

A blanket ban would remove that flexibility. It would replace local judgment with central diktat, and we believe that some transition to home ownership is aspirational and desirable. We are certainly not coming from the same place as Conservative colleagues in it being a holy grail. A healthy housing market should be able to staircase ownership for some people without the significant loss of much-needed social homes—hence some of our later amendments, which I hope will make sense as we go through. Be assured, we do not mean it to enable some local authorities to abrogate their responsibility to provide social housing of all types. We would definitely encourage more than one-for-one replacement. We want reform, not abolition, and devolution, not central diktat.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. I add my congratulations to those offered to the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, on returning to the Front Bench. I thank noble Lords for their contributions on this first day of Committee. This amendment would abolish right to buy altogether, and, in doing so, would remove one of the most significant routes into home ownership available to social housing tenants. The Conservative Government introduced right to buy, which was founded on the simple belief that ownership should not be the preserve of the wealthy or the fortunate few. Conservatives have long believed that people should have the opportunity to own their own home, build an asset, and enjoy the security and independence that home ownership brings. It is a hand up, not a handout.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I want to hear from the Minister about government Amendment 4, to try to understand a bit more about cohabitees. There are other legal rulings which have been made and I am led to believe that the Lord Chancellor will be bringing forward legislation about cohabitees, but the definition is not particularly strong. I want to understand how, in practice, the Government intend to put this in place. The new clause is suggesting that it is somebody who lives with somebody else as if they are married, but there are other benefits rulings where that entitlement was brought in only because of children involved. I want to get a better understanding because, in that particular case, the ruling is that you have to have lived with somebody for only a single day. I hear that the Lord Chancellor may be talking about something like three years. I would be grateful if the Minister, in her final wind-up, would elaborate further on how they will determine accurately whether somebody is a cohabitee.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I have just a few words on this group. First of all, I failed to observe the social niceties and would like to say that I am pleased that I have already had conversations and emails with the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, and I formally welcome her to the Front Bench. Her availability thus far has proved that she is going to be a good colleague to work with. I am also pleased to see the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, on the Front Bench, and I echo the kind words that she missed from the Minister regarding her contribution. The noble Baroness—Jane—was a really positive person to work with and I particularly respected the way she understood and respected political difference, and yet we could still have that cup of tea.

I thank the Minister very much for the email that she sent us recently, containing the appendix which outlined all the things that the Government were doing. I was a bit frustrated and had a meeting with the Minister, asking how this fits here and how that fits there. I was pleased that she responded positively. I still like it in diagram form, I must admit, but it really did help.

I have an anecdote on the eligibility period. When we were losing right to buy quite considerably, I noticed the number of homes that were lost within three to five years. It was significant. It had me questioning how people could afford to get social housing in the first place—do not forget that we are in a pretty high-cost housing area. That led us to look at that and we found that it was to do with the number of children, which seemed to be a main factor rather than any issue about household income and how people could afford to pay. I am pleased that we will look at housing allocation again at some point, because I think there are things to look at.

I can only be awestruck by the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. I have looked through the whole load that he has tabled and I confess that I do not understand most of them. What I do know is that the House has a real expert and champion, and therefore I look forward to the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord.

To put it briefly, we will not support any amendments that are designed to continue right to buy in its current format, given the present crisis situation. We will agree with amendments designed to restrict eligibility and protect any further loss of stock, and thus we completely understand and support government Amendment 4. If someone owns another property, they should not be eligible for right to buy. It is as simple as that.

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[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.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, on her return to the Front Bench. I declare my interests as vice-president of London Councils—I will be there tomorrow morning—and as a part-owner of a rented property in Bexley. I also put on record that my parents had a right to buy. My dad was a bus conductor, and I am proud of that.

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate on what is ultimately a question of proportionality. The Government believe that the current level of discounts is too generous and that they need to be reduced. The question raised by these amendments is whether the reductions proposed in the Bill go further than necessary, and hence we have probed the inclusion of Clause 5. My noble friend Lady Coffey’s amendments do not seek to preserve the status quo; rather, they offer an alternative approach that would reduce discounts while retaining a meaningful incentive for tenants considering home ownership, as my noble friend Lord Fuller said. In that sense, they seek a compromise between the current arrangements and the considerably lower levels proposed by the Government.

Noble Lords have referred to the importance of preserving the viability of the scheme. That is a legitimate concern. If discounts are reduced to the point where the financial advantage of exercising right to buy becomes marginal, there is a risk that the policy ceases to operate as intended. The issue before the Committee is therefore not whether discounts should ever change but whether the Government have adequately justified reductions at the scale proposed in the Bill. Having listened to the debate, I am not yet persuaded that they have. For that reason, I hope the Minister will give further consideration to a more measured approach to better preserve the opportunities that the right-to-buy scheme has offered to many tenants over the years.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to the clause stand part notices and to Amendment 16 from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, to which I have attached my name. Just for clarity, for the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, his reasons and mine for signing the Clause 6 stand part notice are—I think we can safely say—directly opposed. As I have made clear all the way through, all my clause stand part notices are because I was seeking to end right to buy entirely with Amendment 1. I think that is made obvious by my signing of Amendment 16, a buy-back right to buy. This is also known as “buy the supply”, and my honourable friend Siân Berry in the other place has been a particular leader in this area, not surprisingly when you look at Brighton and Hove, which has lost almost a third of its social housing since right to buy came in in 1980.

If you look at the figures across England, by the end of this Parliament we are talking about more than 1.3 million homes lost. What we want to do is get some of those homes back—those homes that were very often built with high-quality build standards, good-sized rooms—a better provision of housing, I dare say, than pretty much anything we are likely to build today. We want to get those homes designed for social housing back into social housing. I note also that my honourable friend—who was previously a London Assembly member, and a member of its housing committee—urged for us to be able to buy back those lost homes.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to families in temporary accommodation. Of course, this is a huge issue. It is everywhere, but particularly so in London, where we are seeing often very vulnerable families shipped out of the city very far away to produce huge profits for private landlords in far-flung parts of the country. If London could buy back the supply, that would be potentially transformatory, either for permanent homes or for being able to buy back temporary accommodation. It is also worth noting that my honourable friend—for those noble Lords who have not seen it—has a zine out urging us to buy the supply. It is a lovely, cheerful cartoon publication that noble Lords might like to look up.

I want to make one other comment about the state of where we are now. We have, of course, a struggling housing market. Broadly, the average price of homes in England did not change from March 2025 to March 2026. In fact, there has actually been a decrease in the price to May. I note one market commentator said that we were in the strongest buyer’s market we have seen in years. Surely this is a great time for local councils to be able to be the buyers, to start to reverse some of the damage that has been done. The structure of the amendment reflects the limitations in your Lordships’ House of what we can do in terms of directing the Government to spend money. I will put this on the record here to note that my honourable friend in the other place will be going further, but I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has given us a very good start.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, indeed I agree that my noble friend Lady Pinnock has given us a very good start, and she was quite passionate in what she was saying. I did tell her there would be a “but”, but it is only a very small one. We absolutely agree in principle that the right of first refusal should apply in perpetuity, but I have concerns about how this would work in reality, and I have raised these with the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, outlined some very serious questions and points that I think we would all appreciate being answered, just about the sheer logistics of how this would actually work for buyers as years go down the line. I am worried that there would be unintended consequences and I am looking forward to the Minister’s answer.

My fear is that in reality this will actually be less effective as a means of getting social housing than we might wish it to be. If a council does have a buy-back fund, there absolutely is no reason why it cannot buy houses on the open market, as indeed I did when I was Mayor of Watford. I just think this one sounds like something that is really going to be good and should happen—and I do believe that; I just think there may be unintended consequences, the logistics might be difficult, and it might not be the silver bullet. But because I believe in retaining social housing stock, I will hope that I am wrong about that.

I want to just pull together a few thoughts about the rural amendments, because one thing I think that we have all noticed in relation to the Bills that we have done—first with the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, and now with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage—rural housing and rural issues do not seem to be given the importance that they absolutely deserve. I am an urbanite but I sit here, time after time, listening to those who know better than me, and colleagues on my own Benches who feel very strongly about this, and I guess my message to the Minister is that the nettle must be grasped on rural issues. I think we would all appreciate seeing a real improvement in that, which is why I found that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and the noble Lord, Lord Best—as ever—brought clarity and expertise to this group of amendments that I cannot better.

Amendment 20 is actually a modest, targeted fix to stop the right to buy quietly hollowing out our rural communities, which is happening; but I am also going to be a bit controversial, because one thing that I follow very closely with my housing brief is planning issues, and I note that there are very often major planning disputes. In fact, councils have changed control over rural communities’ campaigning: “Stop the housing development in our village. We do not need this sort of housing”. It is really worrying to me that that is often the case, and it is evidentially the case. The nimbys are absolutely going bananas. There is no doubt about that, and I think that somewhere, we need some leadership around those areas. If you do not have a housing estate that has homes for children, then the local school will undoubtedly die.

There are real issues for regenerating our rural communities, and I think that, unfortunately, they are being hollowed out. I feel very much that the need is greater. Somebody mentioned that phrase in relation to rural communities, but I would also say that the consequences of not doing so are of greater significance; for example, the young people who cannot get to the college in the nearest city or big town. The issues around rurality are huge.

Turning briefly to Amendment 17, I think “warden” is a horrible word. I absolutely agree that the Government should change it. I am not sure about “manager”, because I am not sure of the context, but I absolutely understand why they do not want wardens.

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[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

There are a lot of amendments in this group and I do not intend to comment on them all. To me, this group is less about the principle of right to buy and more about what happens to the money raised from it and, more importantly, who controls it. The amendments from the Conservative Benches broadly move in one direction: towards greater transparency, clearer rules through regulations rather than determinations, and more involvement of local authorities and receipts spent locally. Therefore, I hope it is not surprising from these Benches that we have some sympathy with that approach. We particularly sympathise with Amendment 52 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller; his argument about the SHMA is something I would be willing to engage in further.

We believe that decisions about receipts should be transparent and properly scrutinised, and that local authorities should have a meaningful voice in how they are used. These are the principles we would naturally support. However, we are equally clear and would exercise caution in that we should not over-constrain flexibility or make it harder to use receipts effectively to deliver new homes—those of us who have tried to do that know there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip and some schemes can take a lot longer to build out than others. We particularly know there is a need for mixed tenure in order to make schemes stack up. Therefore, a degree of flexibility is clearly required.

The real issue to us is not just process; it is about outcome. This is where—spoiler alert—my Amendment 53 speaks directly to this group. It is not enough to argue about how receipts are controlled, although that is important; we must be able to show what they actually deliver. We can refine governance, tighten rules and improve consultation, but unless we can see, year-by-year and authority-by-authority, whether receipts are translating into new social housing, we are still in the dark.

Transparency about process is important, but transparency about outcomes is essential. So, yes, let us discuss how receipts are managed, but we would prefer to have strong checks on whether these receipts actually replace the homes we are losing.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I was not planning to speak in this group, but, after listening to my noble friend and other noble Lords, and after reading Clause 9, it is clear that the Government are intending to take a power to reduce the amount that is payable to the Secretary of State under the regulations. I am not clear why that power is being taken and for what purposes? Under what circumstances would that payment be reduced? Clearly, there is going to be a method for making a determination, but I do not think we know what it is. It would be jolly helpful if we were told what it is.

In particular, it would be helpful to know why the Localism Act insertion into what is currently Section 11(6), which allows the Secretary of State to enter into an agreement with the local authority about this, has been taken out. An agreement of that kind is exactly the sort of way in which the Secretary of State might want to enter into a means of supporting particular use of capital receipts in particular local authorities.

Affordable Housing: Young People

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Thornhill]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to increase the amount of affordable housing for young people.

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

My Lords, the Government have committed to delivering the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation, and young people will benefit from this. The £39 billion social and affordable homes programme aims to deliver around 300,000 new social and affordable homes, including at least 60% for social rent. For young people renting, the Renters’ Rights Act has capped rent in advance and ended unfair bidding wars and no-fault evictions. I am also working with the sector to simplify the buying and selling process and make that more accessible.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I thank the Minister for her positive response, but—and it is a big but—how does the £39 billion pot actually help if, on the one hand, as charities tell us, her departmental bidding processes and rules exclude, in effect, the smaller youth charities from actually applying for grants and building vital transitional and move-on accommodation for young people, but, on the other hand, the Government’s own planning guidance lacks the strength and clarity to allow planners to give permission for what is becoming known as the stepping-stone accommodation model, to enable the building of such accommodation? Please could the Minister look into both these obstacles, currently mentioned by the charities, to ensure that these smaller providers can actually deliver the affordable homes that young people need and can afford?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I recognise the noble Baroness’s concerns, and I welcomed the opportunity to speak to her on this matter during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act; I subsequently went to visit one of the schemes she had mentioned to me. The nationally described space standard sets minimum standards for internal floor space of new dwellings and is suitable for application across all tenures, but that standard is not mandatory, and it is at the discretion of local planning authorities to adopt it locally by reference to the standard in their local plan policies. As part of our consultation on updates to the National Planning Policy Framework, we have sought views on whether changes are needed to make sure that affordable fixed-term accommodation, such as stepping-stone accommodation, is better supported, with particular reference to space standards. We are in the process of analysing the responses to that and we will be confirming our response in due course.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister particularly for her very clear and personal introduction to the Bill. I feel I will be the first person to stand up and say that I was not brought up in a council house, but I looked with envy upon those who were. When we were evicted from our home in Wales, we came up north to my father’s family in Preston, where we lived in a house in which the sink was on bricks in the kitchen. It still had what I called Bunsen burners—gaslights—on the side, and there was no plumbed-in bath. There was the luxury of one toilet outside, just for us. I made friends with people at my primary school who lived on the Larches estate, which was a real exemplar of brilliant council housing at its peak. If we had had one of those houses, my father would have used the right to buy—I am absolutely convinced of that.

I am grateful to follow all the contributions. I started off making notes of what people were saying, because the seven minutes has given us time to get some detail and some quality. I will not make a list of everybody, but I will quickly go through some thoughts outside the scope of the Bill that are quite interesting. I will kick off by saying that I was quite troubled—I echo what the noble Baroness on the other side said—by some of the comments made in the Chamber, particularly around who the “true” people who need social housing are and about the most vulnerable people in society being “state dependent”. I want to register that that has made me feel really uncomfortable.

However, I was greatly enlivened by the noble Lord, Lord Rook, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who brought together housing injustice and poverty, and of course most poignantly by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. The connections between health, housing and poverty were ably brought out by my noble friend Lady Teather, the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and the noble Lord, Lord Babudu. They are inextricably linked, and as people in this world we absolutely know that.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, my noble friend Lord Stoneham and the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, brought out the importance of the regeneration of estates and neighbourhoods, which is totally missing from the Bill. I hope the Minister will tell us where it is because it is important that, when people open their front door, they feel they live in a safe, clean and green neighbourhood. I think we would all aspire to that.

Let us throw in rural issues—raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and others. This keeps coming up all the time, does it not? It is clearly an area that we are neglecting. Of course, on environmental issues, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friend Lord Russell. I can see that this Christmas tree will have lots of baubles hung on it. The noble Lord is shaking his head—we will have to see how we go. But there was certainly real quality there.

As several colleagues have said, there are elements here that we on these Benches really welcome, particularly the provisions intended to strengthen protections for tenants experiencing domestic abuse—the final comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hyde, were really pertinent to that intention—and the steps to slow down the loss of much-needed social housing stock.

However, context is everything. The Bill sits within a wider and, in many respects, ambitious programme. The Government’s decade of renewal is backed by significant investment—the most for a long time—and a commitment to expand supply at scale, alongside reforms to the private rented sector and to housing quality and standards. So, to give credit where it is due, taken together this suggests a Government seeking to grapple seriously with the housing crisis, which has occurred over decades and under Governments of all stripes.

The crisis that we have heard expounded on by many is profound, with over 1 million households waiting for social housing, more than 134,000 in temporary accommodation, and the eye-watering cost of that to society. There have been decades of undersupply, combined with the steady depletion of social housing stock. I think we are very clear on these Benches that this is not a moment for incremental change; it is a moment that demands systemic delivery—that is going to be a word that I use a lot.

When we turn to the Bill itself, however, we encounter something a little bit more limited—some might say tame—and deliberately so, it would seem, from the Minister’s introduction. This at best is a fragment of a much larger cloth. The strategy, however, speaks of scale, delivery and renewal over a decade, and the Bill speaks largely of frameworks, adjustments and protections. These are relevant, but not sufficient to meet the challenge—and this was a theme that was echoed by many noble Lords, not least of all my friend Lady Pinnock, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to name but a few. I would say that, even judged on its own terms, the Bill could and should be stronger.

We are not going to get a consensus on everything. Let us take right to buy. I was particularly struck by the explanation from the noble Lord, Lord John of Southwark, of right to buy, which really nailed it. The times they have a-changed—and who was it who famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind”? That is absolutely what has happened with policy, and it is what noble Lords have been saying about how council housing has really changed from what it was to what it is—so we have to change our policies.

The reforms here are really sensible. They recognise the long-term damage done from the loss of social housing stock, with millions of homes sold and not replaced. Let us look at last year’s figures: 10,000 homes for social rent built, give or take a few, but a net loss of 4,000 after sales and demolition, against a recognised need of 90,000 a year. The core problem remains unresolved, which the Bill is genuinely trying to address. We have a system that allows homes to leave a sector in acute shortage without any reliable, enforceable guarantee of replacement.

The Local Government Association has said that the Bill could go further, so we want to strengthen this Bill in Committee by giving councils greater flexibility to exempt properties based on local need and with the tightening of the link between homes sold and homes replaced, which has been mentioned by several noble Lords, moving much closer to a truer one-for-one requirement. Protecting stock must mean actually protecting it.

I totally agree on the domestic abuse provisions—time is flying, so I will be quick—and the intent here is welcome. However, as was said, we really need to listen to the people who work in this area, because there are things that we can do to make that even better.

But still, for us, the fundamental issue is that this Bill does not deliver any single home. The wider programme is focused on increasing supply, but this just protects it—it clarifies, it adjusts, but it does not build. That matters, because delivery depends not just on policy intent but on the capacity, capability and the workforce. I am surprised that nobody really went into today the fact that we are facing a serious skills shortage in construction, with tens of thousands of vacancies and a need for hundreds of thousands of additional workers. Without a credible skills pipeline, we simply will never deliver the houses that we have all said today that we need. I will be very interested in the Minister’s answer to that.

I loved the conversation about money, with the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, having completely different perspectives; I am sure that we will go into that even further. There were recurring themes about the ability to deliver at pace and scale and for certain sections, most forcefully put by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, in his usual inimitable style.

We do not oppose the Bill; it moves in the right direction and contains sensible provisions. I look forward to us getting into the detail in Committee. As we all know, it is the social housing blockage at that end of the housing crisis that we need to unblock to move people on. We will support the Government as far as possible, but, of course, we will push them to go faster and further, because that is our job.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 26th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook. There is near universal agreement that a “brownfield first” strategy is the right one. Not only does it save green fields but new developments benefit from existing infrastructure, homes are delivered where they are needed most, it supports regeneration and, finally, it is better for the environment. However, greenfield sites offer the potential to landowners and promoters of huge planning gain, from a few thousand pounds an acre as agricultural land to hundreds of thousands once planning permission is received—hence their willingness to push and challenge the system. Once planning permission is received, building on it is so much easier for developers. As a result, in effect we have a default “greenfield first” approach, losing precious green belt and productive farmland.

If the current crisis has taught us anything, it is that we cannot be dependent on imports; we need to grow our own. Yesterday’s announcement on local government reorganisation, with urban areas expanding into their rural hinterland, will only encourage building on green fields rather than focusing on the urban footprint. For years, Governments of all colours have tried to prioritise brownfield first, but guidance alone is simply not enough; we need something more forceful. We need it in legislation. If we make this a requirement of strategic plans, mayors and combined authorities will need to address the issues facing brownfield in their areas up front, to make it easier to speed up and deliver brownfield development. Without it, greenfield will continue to be the default, the environment will suffer, more money will need to be spent on infrastructure and we will continue to lose valuable agricultural land. We will also fail to deliver the homes we need where they are most needed, continuing the housing crisis, with young people unable to afford their own home and increased homelessness.

In Committee the Minister raised a concern that this would be used as an excuse to delay development of sites. In fact, the very opposite is the case: this is all about getting more sites and more homes faster and where they are needed most. When we are facing a housing crisis and we are failing to build, and that failure is biggest in urban areas such as London with the greatest need, it can only be right that we build more in urban areas through gentle densification and repurposing of redundant sites. I beg to move.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I will say a few words in general support of the principle of this amendment. We supported it during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act, so it would make sense to do so here.

It was good old John Prescott who first promoted “brownfield first” and, ever since then, councils have been encouraged to promote it, for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, has just outlined. But brownfield alone cannot meet our housing needs, and that is the real issue I have with this. Brownfield development is more costly. Decontamination and development costs alone make it much more costly. There is a fear of lopsiding development, and I would be interested in further discussion—but clearly not here now—about how we square the very emotional debates we have had over the last day on Report with rural issues, the lack of housing in rural areas and how people need it, for all the reasons given. This amendment squarely says, “Leave the green areas alone”, so I have a little problem with it, although we on these Benches absolutely support the overriding principle.

Given the large area of combined authorities, there will clearly be a massive range of sites, covering all sorts of greenfield and brownfield sites, so I will leave the Minister with the thought that perhaps the Government need to give more incentives to develop brownfield first. There are lots of ideas that I am sure she is aware of that would encourage that more, but the key thing is that brownfield alone will not meet housing needs. Rural areas need more housing, but clearly we need strong protections for our green belt and our countryside.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for Amendment 121 about brownfield land. I agree that we should always use brownfield land wherever possible. As succinctly articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, one reason for promoting the development of town centres and cities is that there is more brownfield land there. We are trying to promote that kind of development as part of the reorganisation process, but there will always be a need for some development in rural areas. We have a rural housing crisis that we must tackle, and there are other uses, such as data centres, for which it might also be appropriate.

Once the relevant provisions of the Planning and Infrastructure Act are commenced, combined authorities and combined county authorities, including those with mayors, will be required to prepare a spatial development strategy. These strategies will provide the framework for local plans and will identify broad locations for growth, key infrastructure requirements and housing targets for individual local authorities, but they will not allocate sites for development. In preparing a spatial development strategy, authorities will be required to have regard to the need for consistency with national policy.

The effective use or reuse of brownfield land is strongly encouraged in the current National Planning Policy Framework, which expects substantial weight to be given to the benefits of developing suitable brownfield land within existing settlements. The revised National Planning Policy Framework, mentioned earlier, goes further still. New proposed policies on development within and beyond settlement boundaries are designed to promote a more sustainable pattern of development by directing growth to appropriate locations, maximising the use of suitable urban land and taking a more selective approach to development outside of settlements.

Mayors will also have the ability to grant upfront planning permission for specified forms of development on identified sites through mayoral development orders. We want the legislation to be sufficiently flexible to allow mayors to use these powers across a range of uses and land types in line with their ambitions for growth. It is right that we continue to promote the effective use of previously developed land. However, we should be cautious about introducing overly rigid legal requirements that may not be appropriate in all circumstances and could risk constraining the growth that this country needs. While I understand the intention behind the amendment, it is for these reasons that I do not consider it to be necessary or proportionate. I would ask the noble Lord to withdraw it.

Renters’ Rights Act: Definition of Court Readiness

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I do not know how many times I am going to repeat this, but I will carry on doing so. We are working very closely with the Ministry of Justice and HM Courts & Tribunals Service to prepare county courts for implementation of the tenancy reforms. These are very important reforms for landlords and tenants; landlords do not want to see the actions of bad landlords helped and tenants want to make sure that they are secure in their tenancies. Existing possession processes will be updated to reflect the reforms in the Act and we will ensure that sufficient capacity is in place for the courts to handle new cases. There is an increase in capacity, including an additional 115 court staff, in anticipation of the increased demand for hearings under the Section 8 claim process. Staff managing possession claims are receiving detailed training, supported by refreshed training materials and process guidance. Working practices have been reviewed and best practice shared in readiness for 1 May, and the Judicial Office is taking forward judicial training on the new legislation.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, as the Minister has mentioned, the First-tier Tribunal clearly has a critical role to play here. Ministers have continually said that they will act if it is “overwhelmed by increased claims”, yet I was surprised to find that the MoJ does not even collect the data needed to assess its case loads. How can the Government credibly promise intervention without the basic monitoring information required to trigger some action? When will they begin collecting and publishing monthly data on rent appeals so that Parliament can assess mounting pressure? If the tribunal becomes overwhelmed, will Ministers commit to using the backdating safeguard immediately?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Data is collected and published—otherwise I would not have the figures for the current situation. MoJ statistics, as I said, tell us both the median time from landlord claim to repossession and how many possession claims progress to bailiff stage. Data is available. On the noble Baroness’s other point, the Government decided to put in place a proportionate safeguard if the tribunal system is on course to be overwhelmed, as we discussed during the passage of the Bill. That involves the creation of a new power for the Secretary of State to make regulations to enable the backdating of rent increases following determinations by the tribunal in respect of new rent amounts.

Birmingham City Council and Unite: Refuse Workers’ Pay

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The commissioners are reporting regularly to the Secretary of State. They are independent of government, but they are carrying out valuable work in Birmingham. In their most recent report, they highlighted that the council has made very positive progress in key areas, including in service delivery. They also noted that the waste dispute has diverted attention and that the council has significant work to do to meet the best value duty. The commissioners are providing good support to Birmingham City Council, and I am sure they will continue to do so.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, my concern is that for a whole year, the residents of Birmingham have had to endure worsening public health conditions. What additional public health powers are Ministers prepared to use if the situation deteriorates? How bad do things have to be before the Government intervene? A year is far too long.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Throughout the dispute, the Government’s priority has been the residents of Birmingham. During the worst disruption, in spring 2025, the Government provided intensive support to local partners to respond to the public health crisis that was arising then because of the all-out strike action. The result was to establish a regular contingency waste collection service, despite the industrial action. While the contingency service delivers basic services, there have been periods of missed collections. We continue to monitor the situation and the associated impact on local communities, but for the moment the contingency service is delivering a service to the people of Birmingham.

Stamp Duty: Periodic Tenancies

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am very pleased to give the House an update on the social and affordable housing programme. We have now published its prospectus, and the Government have put in £39 billion of funding to kick-start social and affordable housebuilding at scale across the country. The core objective of that new programme will be to maximise supply, with a target to deliver at least 60% of the homes under the programme at social rent. That will be around 300,000 social and affordable homes over the programme’s lifetime. We published the guidance in November 2025, and we are now calling on all registered providers to review the details confirmed and to prepare large and ambitious proposals. We want to see the social landlord sector really embrace this. The bidding process opened in February, and we look forward to receiving some good bids.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, the Renters’ Rights Act places the full weight of delivery and its success on two public bodies—the courts to provide timely justice and local authorities to provide enforcement. Can the Minister please reassure the House that on 1 May, when these additional rights are switched on, both the courts and councils will have sufficient capacity and resources to deal with this additional workload, given that, at the moment, court delays are still long and council enforcement capacity varies according to your postcode?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We had much discussion about this during the passage of the Act, and we are working very closely with colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to implement the reforms. Work is progressing well to ensure that the courts and tribunals have the resources and capacity they need to handle the additional workload that the reforms may generate. Work is also progressing on the new digital end-to-end service for resolving all possession claims in the county courts in England and Wales. Ultimately, the Act should reduce demand on the county courts, because possession claims will be able to be brought only where there is a valid reason for the landlord to do so.

The noble Baroness is quite right about local authorities. We are helping councils to build their enforcement capacity and get ready for implementation. We have provided new burdens funding, and we have funded the Operation Jigsaw network of local councils to deliver bespoke training on the Act.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th March 2026 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Thornhill]

243: Clause 74, page 70, line 20, at end insert—
“(3) In performing its functions, the Local Audit Office must pay immediate regard to and investigate any issues concerning risk management identified by audit committees established under section 33A.”

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 250 in the name of my noble friend Lord Shipley, who regrets that he is unable to be with us today. We on these Benches absolutely understand why the Government have created this new entity of the local audit office in the Bill, but we will still listen with interest to the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, on Clause 74. However, I believe that our concerns are different. These amendments speak directly to a problem that the Committee fully understands all too well: what happens when power runs ahead of scrutiny.

Amendment 243 is an early warning: it would require the local audit office to take immediate notice of serious management concerns raised by local audit committees. This is not an abstract concern. We have seen authorities where internal warnings were repeatedly raised about governance, liabilities or control systems, yet decisive action was delayed until failure became unavoidable. Audit that intervenes only after a Section 114 notice is not an oversight; it becomes a post-mortem.

I speak from bitter experience. When I was a councillor in opposition, we had our accounts disclaimed for two years on the trot. Apparently, this had never happened to any local authority before; we were not aware of it and we did not even know what the word meant until the auditor himself took the unprecedented step of breaking the story to the local Watford Observer—hence my passion to make this system work.

Analysing all those past failures, I find that they were not accidental. They were often accompanied by a pattern of executive overreach. Major decisions were taken at pace, scrutiny bodies were sidelined and challenge was treated as obstruction rather than protection. In some cases, significant financial commitments were entered into through mayor-led vehicles with limited transparency, optimistic assumptions and weak democratic oversight. In others, scrutiny committees raised concerns only to find themselves ignored, overridden or marginalised.

Amendments 249 and 250 are to deal with what happens next. They would ensure that audit scrutiny extends not only to money already spent but to how resources are planned to be used. They would allow serious findings to be made public where the audit committee considers this to be in the public interest.

Past failures were not hidden in the accounts; they were embedded in business plans, regeneration strategies and commercial ventures that were never properly stress-tested. Audit that cannot interrogate those plans early and that cannot speak publicly when necessary is simply too weak for the system that the Bill is creating.

This brings me to the local audit office itself. Done well, it could be a real asset. It could provide consistency, expertise, early challenge and a clear line of sight across a fragmented audit landscape. It could join up intelligence, spot emerging risks and give local leaders, mayors and central government the confidence that problems will be confronted early, rather than quietly managed until they explode.

We must be honest about the starting point—where we are now. The current local audit system is not working as it should, and I am absolutely certain that the Minister is aware of that. Audits are delayed, capacity is stretched and expertise is uneven. Serious concerns too often circulate without traction. The danger is that we create a local audit office in name but not in reality—an institution with responsibility but insufficient muscle.

This is now coming to the heart of our concerns, and this is what makes it more pertinent. The new system deliberately concentrates power in the hands of directly elected mayors over strategic planning, major investment decisions, long-term borrowing and delivery bodies operating at arm’s length. That concentration of power may deliver momentum, but it also magnifies risk when challenge is weak.

--- Later in debate ---

I have set out the reasons why the Government will resist these amendments. I hope that noble Lords will feel able to withdraw or not press them.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I am going to be very honest and say that the Minister packed one heck of a lot into that response. I struggled to keep up with her and really understand the ramifications, because this matter is technical and detailed. I will revisit Hansard. I know that my noble friend Lord Shipley and I will have some detailed questions, which it did not seem appropriate to ask here but which we would like the Minister to go through with us. For us, this is about early, robust and public challenge. I am not sure that, with the Bill as it stands at the moment, we can be assured of that in the face of catastrophic failures that are shameful to local government, as well as this imbalance of power. The Minister knows that I want this to work, but I believe that it will work only if the scrutiny is as balanced as the powers of the new mayoral authorities.

With that caveat, in the hope that we will be able to have some specific discussions—and with the aim of reading the Minister’s detailed response in Hansard, perhaps tomorrow—I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, which was tabled by my noble friend Lord Shipley.

Amendment 243 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

We have tabled this amendment and these stand part notices because the evidence from legal practitioners, investors and the sector points overwhelmingly to the same conclusion: the blanket ban on upward-only rent reviews proposed by the Government is a blunt instrument with the potential to cause significant harm to the commercial property market, local regeneration and the very businesses that we all want to see thrive. If there is to be any reform in this area, it must be built on evidence, in partnership with the sector, with a commitment to economic stability.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Your Lordships will be pleased to know that I have taken a scythe to my speech, so it might come out a bit disjointed. The short version should be directed to noble Lords at the other end of the table: I understand their position because turkeys do not vote for Christmas. It depends on which lens you look at this through.

So it is no surprise that I rise to oppose the stand part notices for Clause 85 and Schedule 34. They are the mechanism by which the Bill ends upward-only rent reviews for new and renewed commercial releases. Removing them would preserve the system that has been quietly hollowing out our high streets and small businesses for years. The noble Lord talked about evidence and there is plenty of evidence to show that. The real-world effect of upward-only rents is very simple: when trade is good, rents go up, and when trade is bad, rents go up. Rents do not come down. That might look neat in a contract but, on the ground, it has meant businesses paying yesterday’s rents in today’s economy.

We have all seen what that looks like: a shop where footfall has dropped, but the rent is still set at pre-pandemic levels and is going up; a café that has survived lockdowns, energy shocks and staff shortages, only to be hit by a rent review that moves in one direction regardless of takings; or a small local business doing everything right but that is forced out because the lease allows rents to rise but never to reflect reality. I confess to my hairdresser being exactly in that position: after 40 years of work in Watford, she is no more. “The rent rise”, she said, “was the final straw”. This is real.

Clause 85 matters because it allows rents to move down as well as up, so that they can reflect what is actually happening on a street, in a town centre or in a local economy. Markets work both ways and leases should be able to do the same. If we remove Clause 85, we are not defending the market; we are defending a one-way ratchet that has already failed our high streets.

I will blot out a big paragraph here. That does not mean that we should ignore the risks. Markets will adapt and some landlords may try to push the risks elsewhere through higher initial rents or shorter leases. This is why scrutiny, monitoring and review matter, but they are arguments for refining Clause 85, if necessary, not for removing it altogether. Perhaps the Government might consider this on Report.

Likewise, a small caveat: this is a broad reform applying across all commercial sectors, not just retail and hospitality, where the effects and problems are most visible. I would be interested to know what work has been done to understand the impact of this change on commercial property investment, particularly in struggling town centres and regeneration areas. How do the Government justify the big-bang breadth of this measure? Have they considered whether a more targeted approach might have achieved the same aims over time?

If we are confident that this is the right direction—we believe it is—we also have to be confident enough to measure its effects. Therefore, we have some sympathy with Amendment 254 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, but we feel that 12 months would not be enough time to measure the true effects of this significant change.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for Amendment 234. I will start with the stand part notices for Clause 85 and Schedule 34.

Upwards-only rent reviews have been a long-standing issue for businesses throughout England and Wales. The British Independent Retailers Association and UKHospitality gave evidence in the other place about just how damaging the practice is and why they have campaigned for decades for the Government to take action. The practice of upward-only rent reviews has an invidious effect on the efficiency and accessibility of the commercial property market—not to mention the impact on our high streets and town centres that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, outlined. It is designed to ensure that landlords and investors are insured against market conditions, but there is a cost to this, which falls chiefly on the business tenants left paying excessive rents when they are already stretched to breaking point, unable to invest or improve their productivity, or, in times of hardship, to keep the lights on or pay their staff wages.

Ultimately, these clauses make running a business less viable, damaging the competitiveness of the economy. Alongside reform of business rates, banning these clauses will help make commercial rents fairer and more efficient, help businesses invest and give them greater resilience to economic conditions. In recognition that these clauses can provide some security to investors, we have committed to consult on how caps and collars could be used. I reassure noble Lords that the Government intend to work carefully and closely with the property industry and others to implement this policy, help manage risk and maintain confidence in the market, without relying on one-sided mechanisms such as upwards-only rent review clauses.

I turn to Amendment 254. I understand the desire to consider the impacts of legislation once it has passed. However, 12 months is too limited a period to see the ban fully implemented and the market adjusted. The Bill’s impact assessment also finds that the ban is likely to have a net positive impact on the UK economy because it will make the commercial property market more efficient, reducing rents for tenants who can instead invest in their businesses and help keep consumer prices low. For those reasons, I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I am grateful to both noble Baronesses for their comments. There may be a slight misunderstanding here. Our key point is that this is a very significant change to the commercial property market, and it has not been done with the industry. The Minister said that she would “work carefully and closely” to implement it. It would have been better to have worked closely and carefully with the industry in developing it. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. Our issue is with a blanket ban rather than looking at how we can come up with a potential system that works better for all parties. I am glad that she is more supportive of our amendment.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I am dreadfully sorry; I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. Can we have that officially minuted? I share those concerns. The key point is that we need something that works.

I wish to point out that upward-only rent reviews are nowhere near the biggest problem facing businesses up and down the high street. They are contending with devastating increases in business rates and are facing increased regulation, increases in national insurance charges and the effects of changes to the minimum wage. Although we would all like a higher minimum wage, it must be affordable.

The Government’s solution—tearing out a long-established market measure without proper consideration, without careful engagement with the sector and without understanding the consequences for investment and lending to commercial markets—is a high-risk strategy. The question today is not whether commercial tenants deserve fair terms—they do—but whether the proposal before us is the right one. There are too many uncertainties and risks that have been left unaddressed.

We will seek to revisit this issue on Report. I hope that, by then, the Government will have reflected on the concerns raised today and will come forward with proposals grounded not in assertion but in evidence, balance and economic reality. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my clause stand part notice.