Social Housing Bill (Third sitting)

Deirdre Costigan Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 29th October 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Gideon Amos]

It is a pleasure to serve on the Committee under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. New clause 1 would require a strategy for the provision of 150,000 new social homes a year in England, which is the Liberal Democrat target. We welcome the Government’s commitments so far to funding and supporting the delivery of social homes, which are of key importance—in fact, we welcome those proposals a lot more than some of the planning system proposals for private housing development, but the focus of the new clause is on social homes. However, we need a significant target. So far, the Government have not set a statutory target, or indeed any clear target at all. The National Housing Federation and Shelter estimate that 90,000 more social homes are needed per year. Why did we go to 150,000? Because social homes should not be for just the most excluded, desperate and challenged in our society; they should be for working people in low-paid jobs.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

I hesitate to ask the hon. Gentleman a slightly difficult question so early in the proceedings; he is a very nice man and does a very good job. He has previously said that national housing targets should not be dictated by Whitehall, that the Government’s housing targets are over the top and that a targeted approach to housing is unreasonable. Does he not agree that what the Government are doing is in line with his previous comments, and that it will achieve more social and affordable housing by overhauling the funding mechanisms for housing and by breaking down the planning barriers? That is a better approach, as he would previously have agreed himself.

[Gideon Amos]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s question about the details of Liberal Democrat policy, upon which I shall be delighted to expound. The challenge I was making is that the Government’s overall target for homes is mainly for private homes, so we have situations in Taunton where thousands of homes will be imposed on a community that will not be able to afford them or have any access to them. They will not be for local people.

Those targets come alongside the planning reforms, which seem to celebrate a confrontational approach—I think the Labour party called it a “blockers versus builders” approach. The notion that that will somehow lead to more community acceptance of housing development is wrong-headed. That is why we believe that the overall housing target needs to be based on household projections, as it once was, rather than on the current standard method. However, we would stick rigidly to our target of 150,000 social homes.

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[Deirdre Costigan]

Hear, hear.

[Gideon Amos]

I almost echo the “Hear, hears”. However, that money would struggle to add about 1,000 social homes per year to the current 18,000, which is the closest thing to a target that we can divine from the Government’s policy announcements—about 18,000, 19,000 or maybe 20,000 a year. We need a whole lot more than that. The National Housing Federation and Shelter believe that we need at least 90,000 a year. The current level of ambition really is not high enough. I encourage the Government to focus their attention less on issuing thousands more planning permissions. We need planning permissions to keep coming through, but since we already have a million plots with planning permission not built for private housing, they should focus their attention instead on the delivery of social housing and on setting a target—if not this one, a target of some sort.

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[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I rise to speak to my new clause 34. I regret that my pointing out that the Bill will not create a single new social home appeared to get under the Minister’s skin on Tuesday, but the fact is that the Bill does not create any extra housing. That is not a surprise, as it comes from a Government who have built just 26% of their target in nearly 50% of their time in office. None the less, it is simply not good enough.

Moreover, in the places—few and far between—where the Government have tried to get Britain building, that has nearly always come at the cost of green belt protections, despite the fact that research from the Campaign to Protect Rural England shows that a large proportion of the Government’s lofty housing target could swiftly be met using brownfield land that already has planning permission. The CPRE estimates that up to 1.41 million homes could be built on existing brownfield land in England, based on data from local planning authorities’ brownfield land registers up to 2024.

[Deirdre Costigan]

The hon. Member talks about the importance of building on brownfield land first. That is certainly the policy of this Government. Would the hon. Member agree that although the previous Government professed to want to focus on developing brownfield land, they did absolutely nothing to make that viable, whereas this Government are putting money into the brownfield land release fund, which will help to clean up that land? Those are steps that the previous Conservative Government absolutely failed to take.

[Gareth Bacon]

The hon. Lady makes a reasonable point, but we are looking forwards, not backwards.

[Deirdre Costigan]

Ah!

[Gareth Bacon]

The hon. Lady says that the Government are making brownfield land development more viable. Where are the signs of that? There is no development happening. Development in this country has ground to a standstill under this Government. That malaise did not start under this Government—I will accept that criticism—but it is most certainly being exacerbated by this Government. They are doing nothing to turn back the tide. In fact, they are pushing it further.

Those 1.41 million starts would amount to 93% of the Government’s manifesto pledge. That is why I have tabled new clause 34, which seeks to require the Government to publish a strategy for prioritising brownfield land for social housing development.

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[Gideon Amos]

I am grateful for the opportunity to move the new clause, which stands in my name and in the name of my Liberal Democrat colleagues. Regulatory inspection of housing associations is particular to where there has been bad practice or responses to tenants have been poor. I acknowledge that most housing associations do an excellent job and fulfil a vital role in delivering the social homes that we need. However, where they are particularly bad or fail to deliver an adequate level of service and repairs to tenants, the Regulator of Social Housing may eventually carry out an inspection, but only years after tenants have been disadvantaged and not served.

[Deirdre Costigan]

The hon. Gentleman’s new clause 3 is very similar to the official Opposition’s new clause 53, which I believe they describe as a probing amendment. I have a probing question for him. How does he see things moving beyond the changes that the Government have already brought in, on a cross-party basis? Awaab’s law will allow tenants to report problems with repairs and have them dealt with by their housing provider within a very short timescale, and it will enable them to sue for breaches or go to the ombudsman. On top of that, there is the new right in the Bill to manage provision, which will allow tenants to get rid of the repair provider completely and bring in their own. How does he see his new clause moving things beyond that? What gap would it fill?

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Lady makes some excellent points about measures that we have supported; Awaab’s law is one of them, as is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. We certainly welcome the new standards to which tenants will have access. The import of this new clause is that it would cover a much wider range of poor practice: across a whole estate, for example, rather than individual dwellings, or indeed across all of a registered provider’s homes.

The regulator already inspects registered providers, but, as I say, its inspections tend to come after the scandal is all over—after things have been running for years and after tenants have complained, had recourse to complaints mechanisms and so on. Our new clause would allow tenants, where a reasonable percentage of them have signed up, to trigger an inspection by the regulator at an earlier stage. That would make it a proactive power of inspection, rather than making tenants wait until the end of the process for the regulator to look into it. Of course, there are details to be worked out, such as what we mean by an estate, which is why we made provision in the new clause for regulations, to be approved in this place, to set out those more detailed arrangements.

Fundamentally, this is about giving social housing tenants an extra lever: a power to bring in the regulator, where that is justified, to carry out an inspection in a proactive way. It is a constructive new clause and is tabled for that purpose. I am delighted that the Conservatives have followed suit with something similar; we could even be persuaded to vote for their new clause in the unlikely event that the Committee does not agree to ours today. Our new clause stands on its own merits. It would give an extra lever to social housing tenants, some of whom are really badly served by their housing associations. I commend it to the Committee.