Housing: National Tenant Body

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question and for championing this issue on behalf of tenants. I have met with G15; I went to its parliamentary session and had a look at its very good report on social housing stigma. I agree that we need to make sure that the tenant voice is heard. I have also met with the regulator of social housing twice, I think, since I took over the regulators. The social housing regulator is looking very carefully at how to increase the emphasis on the tenant voice. It is very important that this national body, whatever it is going to be, is tenant-led. I am happy to meet any tenant groups to move this forward. We all want to see tenants having a powerful voice in designing social housing policy.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I wonder whether I can support the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. A lot of work is being done already in the social housing sector by the NHS, and in the private-rented sector by Shelter, Generation Rent, Acorn and the NUS. It is very important that all types of tenants are represented in this national body. There are a lot of organisations involved here. Is my noble friend prepared to go a little further and suggest that the Government have a role—maintaining distance, obviously, because that is clearly needed—in setting this organisation up, perhaps with a little seed corn to supplement the rather meagre resources that many of these organisations have?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her question. The important thing is that we get the balance right between ensuring that tenants feel this body is genuinely tenant-led and doing what we can to help convene the right people around the table to bring this forward. I will continue discussions with all the relevant housing organisations and bodies to make sure that we are doing all we can to help move this forward. It is time we had some real action in this area.