Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I first declare my interest as a retired member of a farming family who still rent out some domestic property.

I cannot say how much I welcome this Bill. For over 40 years now, I have been struggling against the almost total lack of affordable housing in rural areas and trying to limit the damage done to our rural communities by the right to buy. It has been obvious to me for some time that however much we allow for the building of new homes in the countryside, we will never get to the point where less well-off rural families will be able to buy their own homes. Why should they have to buy? Why can they not rent?

The answer to that, at the moment, is that there are hardly any houses to rent in rural areas. There are some housing association rentals but very few private landlords—usually farmers with spare cottages. As rural house prices soar ever higher than their urban equivalents—research shows that a village house can cost over 50% more than a similar urban dwelling—the sale of these rural rented houses becomes ever more likely and puts them ever more out of reach of local working families.

As I have said many times in this House, the answer lies in the provision by local authorities of affordable housing to rent. Council houses really worked. I stress the very real need for more rural council houses. Currently 17% of the population live in rural areas, but they receive just 7% of any new affordable homes. Rural council houses were among the first to go under the right to buy in the 1980s—who would not want to live in the countryside? There are hardly any such houses left now. There are currently 306,000 families on rural housing waiting lists, and Defra research indicates that council house waiting lists in mainly rural areas increased by 32% in the four years to 2023, while in the same period there was no increase in predominantly urban areas.

The effect of this has been disastrous for rural England. It has led to rapidly ageing communities, a loss of local services, a breakdown of social networks and a complete absence of the necessary vigour that young families give to any community. Lack of housing has also undermined the rural economy, making it harder for businesses to find a good workforce and ultimately making it harder for any remaining workforce to find businesses.

The rural housing crisis—I emphasise that word—is now of epidemic proportions, and this Bill could be like the arrival of the long-awaited first ambulance at a rural motorway pile-up. Note that this is the first ambulance; there is a lot more to be done.

I will briefly run through some of the Bill’s clauses. Extending the qualifying period from three to 10 years is good. I would have gone for 12, but 10 is good. Reducing the discounts available is good. Extending the period from five to 10 years when a discount given to a purchaser can be reclaimed from a subsequent sale is also good.

On Clause 6, I approve of the right of first refusal up to 20 years. While we need more of all types of housing everywhere, it seems right to allow social landlords to retain what was social housing within the sector. Rural England attracts rich retirees buying into the market whenever and wherever they can, so such a right of first refusal will be very useful.

Clause 7, exempting all our national landscapes from the right to buy, is good. I hope that the reference to exempting areas designated as rural by the Secretary of State applies to any community with a population of under 3,000, as in the 1996 Act. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that and am happy if she wants to write.

Also in Clause 7, I was surprised that the exemption for new housing is as high as 35 years. That would seem a bit long if you are at all interested in any form of social mobility, but I understood it when I got to Clause 9—if there had been any doubt that the local housing authority would not be in receipt of the sale proceeds from the right to buy in the future, it will need a long time to get some return from its new housing investment. To me, Clause 9 is the weak point of the Bill. I detect the obfuscatory hand of the Treasury all over it.

There was—and is—nothing wrong with the right to buy. There was just no long-term thinking about the way it was introduced. By far the biggest problem with the old right to buy was that all the sale receipts went to the Treasury and the local housing authority never saw the money. It could therefore never reinvest; it could not waste council tax money on building council houses, only for them to be bought out below cost, at a discount, a few years later. Clause 9 is a golden opportunity to definitively put this right.

I am not convinced by the anti-hypothecation arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Young. There is no right to buy in hospitals or nuclear power stations, to use his examples. We will not lose those assets from their use by society as a whole, but we have lost all our council houses from society as a whole. If we are going to replace that loss, we need to change the way that we do things. We do have a housing crisis.

I am assured that all receipts from the right to buy will, in future, go to the local housing authority—so why not just say so? Clause 9 is so hedged about with ifs, what-ifs and what-nots that it appears that the Treasury is keeping open the right, in future, to once again steal money from the local authority housing budgets, as it has done for the past few decades. I know that that is rather simplistically put but, if we are trying to solve a long-term housing problem, please let us think long term. We must state firmly in the Bill that all receipts from the right to buy belong to the local housing authority or the housing provider. They should be ring-fenced for future local housing investment.

To sum up, I approve of the Bill, but only if it leads to widespread investment in rural council houses in the future. I am for ever hopeful.