Housing Strategy

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate for the opportunity to discuss on a non-political basis the position of homes and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Greaves, with whom I worked very closely.

What I think about—I have listened very carefully to the debate—is who are these 8 million people who live in homes which are not fit to live in? Many of them are the people who do the jobs which are at the bottom of the pile and yet are so essential to the well-being of most of us. They are people who drive buses, empty dustcarts and sweep the streets, who do the mundane jobs on which all of us depend, and yet it seems we cannot afford to house them comfortably or properly

While I welcome the initiative described in Coming Home, I am worried that, if houses are let go at less than market value, a means must be found of ensuring that those houses remain within the public sector and can be let again to other people rather than that the people who buy them make a lot of profit and the houses become unaffordable to anybody else.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, called for a long-term strategy, as did my noble friend Lord Shipley. It is the only way in which we can come to a new dispensation where the land that is acquired by public subsidy or from charity law is land with social value that must be safeguarded for the future. Otherwise anything we do will be only a short-term solution to our problems. I accept that there are tremendous social problems associated with poor housing. I am sure that the only way out of this situation is the way described in the report, but on a much larger scale because the number of houses that can be built on church land is relatively small, but we can think of lots of other land which is semi-public sector land, for example, land belonging to Oxford colleges. If this is realised, it should carry some sort of social contract with the public that they should get a share of the benefits.

I hope that this report bears fruit and that we will see legislative action. I wish the Church the very best in its endeavours.