Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is either the market or the state; that seems to be the argument.

In 2017, I went to a city that was having problems with a whole bevy of people. What we did was to try to reorientate the way that local charities worked together. One of the things that really interested me was getting charities working with businesses. I am very interested in the idea that you get businesses to trade with charities so that money does not really pass hands, because the businesses have to spend and the charities have the need.

We identified a housing association that wanted to expand its work. It had gardening facilities; it had painting, decorating and repairing and all that. It wanted to expand but was very limited in this very small town. I went to talk to estate agents—the most evil people on God’s earth, according to some—and I said, “Look, what you’re doing is buying services, because you’ve got 150 or 250 buy to rents. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you bought the services from a housing association? You would pay the same rate”. It would also help the housing association to address a problem that nobody talks about. I have not heard anybody say—excuse me, I have put too much glue in my teeth. I am getting them redone in Turkey soon, so that I will not have the problem.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Anyway, to address the problem which I have not heard anybody mention: why is it that if you live in social housing—if you are the child of social housing—you have about a 2% chance, as a child, of finishing whatever levels you do to leave school and then getting into university or a highly skilled job? I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Best, about this when I first came into the House. The problem we were trying to address in that little city was that 70% of the people living in social housing were unemployed. We have to face that, and I do not see any provision in this Bill for creating the opportunity.

I believe in social mobility, like the noble Lord, Lord Bailey. What I do not like about what he says—forgive me my trespasses; he is a Conservative, so I cannot agree with him, even though we come from the same neck of the woods, up there in Notting Hill—is that the only way you can get social mobility is through a housing purchase by your family. Why is that? I know it is true, and I know hundreds of people who have done it, but why has social housing changed so much from the days when our Minister was moving to Stevenage?

Why is it that social housing is now nothing like what it was? Having been brought up in the slums of Notting Hill, I was stuck in a Catholic orphanage for a few years and then moved to Fulham, where we were in a block of flats and had a toilet that we shared with no one, whereas when we lived in the slums, we had to queue up if we wanted to do our business. We might have had to wait two days for certain services that you would want in a toilet, but there we had our own beautiful piece of social housing. In that block of flats were trainee police officers, trainee teachers, drivers and all sorts of people, including disabled people and those who were old. It was sociable and socially mixed.

Unfortunately, what has happened to social housing is that it is under threat. It is under threat because the bar has been raised by local authorities and now it takes only the most desperate, largely, whereas in the good old days it was a reflection of the working class, the upper working class and even the lower middle class. Until we address the issue of around 70% of people living in social housing not having a job—they are stuck and their children are stuck—the arguments around it will go on, but we need to address the poverty that is thrown up but not addressed at this moment. It is certainly not addressed in the Bill.

I am a great believer in social mobility. I am a perfect example of it; I am as posh as anything now, though I did not start poshly. But I would love to see a situation where social housing was addressed as a place of great opportunity, great security and great comfort, so that it becomes what virtually everybody here today has described as the beginning of a new future. Unfortunately, for too many people it is not a beginning of a new future. It is a place where you and your family are parked for maybe the next 100 years.