Housing Crisis: Rural and Coastal Communities

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, like other speakers, I thank the right reverend Prelate for introducing this debate. I think I agree with everything that has been said so far, particularly with the preceding remarks about the important role of council housing.

I want to add something about rural district councils. They are long gone but they should be our heroes today, for they showed us what needs to be done. However, they have been betrayed. Their housing legacy is there in many or most of our villages. Little remarked and too often forgotten, often set in green spaces, semi-detached or short terraces, good-sized front and back gardens: three-bedroom family homes. Typically simple in design, they provide just the sort of house in which people would like to live—joyous family homes. They are distinct and a distinctive part of rural life, and they were created by and for local people, often replacing what could have been described only as hovels. It was the rural districts that achieved this at a time when local government was more truly local.

The betrayal to which I refer comes of course from the destructive impact of right to buy, or, more specifically, the way it was implemented, with the deliberate intention, along with other measures, of destroying council housing on ideological grounds. The result has been that those houses, built by the community, were removed from the social sector with no replacement, as has been explained. Once sold off, they are now, whether owned or rented, usually out of reach of local people in need of social housing. Instead, too often, they are second homes, or homes for retirement or short-term lets.

None of these things is wrong in itself but in excess, as previous speakers have explained, they have destroyed local communities. My question for the Minister is how she can justify that lack—that loss—of good-quality social housing when we know what works. Local government did it between the wars and in the 1950s and 1960s; it should do it now.