Housing Supply and Homelessness

Motion to Take Note

13:30:00

Moved by

That this House takes note of the need to increase housing supply and tackle homelessness.

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to highlight again the current housing crisis and the rise in homelessness, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak in this debate. The facts are truly shocking. They are reflected in innumerable reports over the last few years. Charities such as Shelter and Crisis have been sounding warnings for years. Sector bodies such as the National Housing Federation have lobbied hard for an increased supply of homes that can be afforded and are of good quality. The Church of England has produced two important reports re-emphasising the crisis we face, and I am glad that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has chosen this debate to make his valedictory speech to the House. He instigated the two reports and has shown a strong commitment to ending homelessness. I know that the House will appreciate his many valuable contributions over the years and looks forward to his valedictory address. It must be a crisis when millions of people and families in this country cannot find or afford a decent home: a home where they feel secure, where they can thrive and where their children can learn. The Labour manifesto was clear that the housing crisis was a national priority and committed to delivering 1.5 million homes over the Parliament. Beneath that headline commitment is an ambition to provide the biggest increase to social and affordable housing for a generation. As I hope to outline today, a major new programme of social housebuilding is more critical than ever, and the role that supported housing can play as a part of that is urgently needed if we are to make any progress in dealing with homelessness. In the Autumn Budget, the Chancellor promised to deliver not only a £500 million boost to the affordable homes programme but flexibilities to councils when using right-to-buy receipts and consultation on a new social housing rent settlement. On homelessness, additional funds of £233 million were announced—a positive initial step, but these are only foundations on which to build. Demand will still exceed supply even if that target is fully met. Housing has an impact on health policy, education policy, immigration, justice, transport and employment; just about every arm of government has a role to play in addressing this crisis. It is a huge challenge for the Government and for the Minister. I urge the need for a long-term strategy, which will depend on achieving not only cross-departmental support but some degree of cross-party support for long-term policies that can be sustained beyond the lifetime of one Parliament or one Government. I hope the party opposite will agree to play its part in achieving this. The sheer scale is daunting. Over 8 million people in England cannot access the housing they need, with a large portion requiring social housing. National Housing Federation research into overcrowding found that more than 310,000 children in England are forced to share beds with other family members. One in six children is living in cramped conditions—that is around 2 million children. An increase in the number of people facing homelessness has been compounded by the cost of living crisis. The latest official statistics show a 10% increase in the number of households who contacted their local authorities due to being at risk of homelessness. A record number of families are homeless and living in inadequate temporary accommodation, which is disrupting children’s education, undermining their well-being and piling enormous pressure on families. Temporary accommodation, predominantly delivered by the private sector, is often of poor quality and unsuitable for families, who report high levels of stress, anxiety and depression. Temporary accommodation was created as a short-term solution, but the rise in homelessness and lack of suitable social housing means that households can spend years in it, even where social housing is available. The increased need has meant that local authorities have to rely on B&Bs and hotels. This has become a huge financial burden on local authorities, which between April 2023 and March 2024 spent a total of £2.3 billion on temporary accommodation. The number of rough sleepers has also continued to rise to record levels. In London alone, the Combined Homelessness and Information Network has reported a 19% increase in rough sleepers compared with last year. The last Labour Government reduced rough sleeping by more than two-thirds in their first term by taking a cross-departmental approach. Can my noble friend the Minister update the House on the work of the Deputy Prime Minister’s ministerial task force to end homelessness? Will the Minister commit the Government to working with mayors and local government leaders to achieve this? The link between homelessness and health is well known. Unmet mental health needs and lack of treatment for substance misuse are known factors that can trap people in the cycle of homelessness. Health is more than just the absence of disease; it is about people’s overall well-being. Health starts at home, and the housing crisis has had an awful effect on people’s health, with long-term consequences. It is increasing the financial burden on the NHS and costing £1.4 billion per year to treat people affected by poor housing. Housing that is properly adapted to suit the needs of residents and having the right support in place are key to keeping people out of hospital and living independently. The tragic death of Awaab Ishak reminds us that poor-quality homes can also contribute to avoidable deaths and increase the risk of developing asthma and other respiratory conditions. We must commit to ensuring that nothing like this ever happens again. Overcrowding can put a real strain on families. Reduced privacy and lack of space to study or play have been linked to developmental issues and poor mental health in children. Appropriate housing with support where needed can help relieve pressures on the NHS by enabling timely discharge from hospital, preventing readmissions and helping people access health services early on. Will the Minister ensure that the long-term housing policy is integrated into the ambitions set out in the NHS 10-year plan, to ensure that it looks beyond just the number of new homes and addresses housing conditions and types, affordability and support? I referred to supported housing. Homelessness schemes are essential to ensuring that people get the support they need to break the cycle of homelessness. But the sector is facing a truly dire financial situation. Cuts to funding and the financial stress of supplying temporary accommodation have forced local authorities to make some very difficult decisions. This has included decommissioning vital supported housing and homelessness services—a lifeline for vulnerable groups at risk of rough sleeping. Despite the increasing need for supported housing, one in three supported housing providers has had to close services in the past year, and 60% expect to close schemes in the future due to unviability. This will lead to an increase in need for temporary accommodation and residential care, and so increase even more the financial pressures on local authorities. The NAO’s July report argued that: “Dealing with homelessness is creating unsustainable financial pressure for some local authorities”. Funding constraints are undermining local authorities’ capacity to prevent homelessness and invest in good-quality temporary accommodation and other forms of housing. I hope the Government are under no illusions about the scale of the pressure that councils are facing after years of underfunding and increasing demand for services. It would be helpful if the Minister could confirm the steps the Government are taking to reset the relationship with local government. There are some things that can be done quickly. The empty homes round table on 19 November highlighted the urgency of tackling long-term empty homes as part of broader efforts to alleviate housing shortages, reduce homelessness and improve housing sustainability. It focused on the need to improve funding flexibility to enable local authorities to acquire and refurbish empty homes, simplifying enforcement measures such as empty dwelling management orders, and the importance of linking empty homes initiatives to wider national housing, homelessness and retrofitting strategies. Although the NAO report I referred to was based on the legacy of the previous Government, it presents a further challenge for the Government now as they develop their own strategy for dealing with that legacy of homelessness and insufficient housing supply. Local authorities, along with housing associations, are key deliverers of social and supported accommodation. The Government’s commitment to a long-term strategy is essential if they are to ensure a stable and sustainable building programme. The NAO also warned that funding had remained fragmented and generally short term, and it is worth noting that the constant changes in Housing Minister over the last 10 years cannot have done much to encourage longer-term thinking. I hope this Government will learn that lesson. I turn briefly to the private sector, which has a significant role to play in housebuilding but has severe limitations. The private market has rarely delivered more than 150,000 homes a year, and in many years fewer than that. The only post-war period where we have built more than 300,000 homes a year was when we were building over 100,000 council homes as part of the mix. Importantly, this was founded on a firm cross-party commitment to the value of social housing. The speculative private housebuilder model means market homes will not build out quickly enough to deliver 1.5 million homes this Parliament. Boosting social and affordable housing will be vital to the new Government’s plans for housing-led growth and delivery. So I hope the Minister will agree that we need a big uptick in social housebuilding, as well as moving ahead with planning reform that will open up sites over time. I will comment briefly on planning. In recent years, the total number of homes that were granted planning permission fell sharply, from 302,000 in 2021-22 to 236,000 in 2022-23. Can the Minister tell us what the Government are doing to reform the planning system in order to deliver the quality of homes and infrastructure the country is crying out for? I hope these issues will be raised in more detail by other speakers. Let me conclude. We know that building social homes speeds up and stabilises overall housebuilding, as well as increasing the resilience and productivity of the construction sector and boosting growth. The National Housing Federation and Shelter commissioned research which showed that building 90,000 social rented homes a year would add £51.2 billion to the economy. Social housing is not a debt or financial burden on the Exchequer, it is a precious national asset that we need to invest in, protect and maintain. Will the Minister commit to reinforcing this vital message with the Treasury in the forthcoming spending review? Increasing the supply of homes alone will not solve the housing and homelessness crisis. We need investment in our existing homes to improve quality. We need to secure long-term, ring-fenced funding to protect supported housing and homelessness schemes. We should consider the scale of the opportunity as well as the challenge. Every year, social landlords save their tenants £18 billion compared with equivalent rents in the private rented sector, meaning lower-income families have more income after housing costs to spend on essentials. This is a contribution that has been overlooked by successive Governments. Looking ahead to the spring spending review and the Government’s long-term housing strategy, will the Minister urge her Secretary of State and colleagues at the Treasury to ring-fence funding for housing-related support allocated to local authorities? It is also vital we provide more flexible revenue and grant funding, so that supported housing can deliver and develop according to local needs. Fourteen years of austerity and piecemeal solutions have had an appalling impact on housing, but solutions remain within reach. Will the Minister commit to working across all government departments to cover all aspects of housing and ensure that this feeds into their long-term strategic planning?

13:44:00

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for sponsoring this debate and introducing it in such a compelling and moving way. Like her, I also look forward to the valedictory speech from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I pay tribute to the work of the Church under his leadership in raising the profile of housing and identifying some solutions, and, in particular, to the report of his commission on housing, Coming Home, which was published in 2019. I am sure he will want to develop some of those themes in his speech today. This debate follows a similar one in March this year, which I initiated. I started that debate by saying: “I want to outline what steps might be taken in the next Parliament to improve housing outcomes for everyone”.—[Official Report, 14/3/24; col. 2208.] I then outlined a large number of policy changes and, in response to three of my suggestions, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, then in opposition, said: “He raised some important issues around downsizing incentives, incentivising to sell properties from the private rented sector and institutional finance, especially pension funds. That is something we definitely have to look at”.—[Official Report, 14/3/24; col. 2231.] So I will briefly refer to those three initiatives and gently inquire about progress. I begin with the last, as the need for institutional finance for rented accommodation has been underlined by the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill. I support that Bill, as I did its predecessor, the Renters’ Reform Bill, but, as I said then, it must be accompanied by measures to increase supply. All the evidence is that private landlords are exiting the market—a process accelerated by the recent Budget. The number planning to sell is predicted to grow exponentially next year, with a massive 41% of private landlords planning to sell at least some rental properties and only 6% planning to buy. This has an important impact on rents. Recent figures from Zoopla show that there are now 21 households bidding for every property to rent. Recent Budget decisions were branded as “disappointing” by Paul Johnson, the director of the IFS. Referring to stamp duty, he said that “at least part of the consequence will be to reduce the supply of rental housing and so increase rents”. We need to put the private rented market on a much more sustainable basis. Other countries have a different model, which we should progressively adopt. In Europe, long-term institutional finance provides secure, well-managed rental accommodation. In this country, it provides just 2% of the rented stock. We need progressively to reduce our overdependence on the private landlord, who can release this capital only by selling, and get the financial institutions to invest in what historically would have been an even better investment than equities. At the meeting that the Minister was kind enough to hold with me last week, she explained that she was working on this with the Treasury, which also wants pension funds to invest more in the country’s infrastructure—so where better to start than housing? Local authority pension funds have an interest in increasing housing supply, in turn helping the Government to achieve their ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes. We need urgent progress on that front. I turn next to downsizing initiatives. There are 3.6 million homes with two or more spare bedrooms. Many older people want to trade down or rightsize, freeing up their homes for young families. An older person triggers a chain of movements promoting labour mobility and making better use of the country’s housing stock. In the medium term, the planning system should be much more proactive in ensuring the right mix of new build, and we look forward to next week’s NPPF to see whether there is a step in that direction. Professor Mayhew estimated that we need 50,000 homes per year for older people who want to rightsize, but we are producing only 8,000. Finally, on incentivising to sell properties from the private rented sector, many families have to rent but, as I have said, private landlords are leaving the market due to high interest rates, concerns about impending legislation, a less attractive tax regime and new energy efficiency standards. We should say to private landlords that, if they sell to their tenant, no capital gains tax and no stamp duty would be paid. This would be not a right to buy but an incentive to sell. This would have a dramatic effect on home ownership for those who would prefer to own and not rent; it would almost certainly lower their housing costs and enable them subsequently to move up the home ownership ladder. The landlord could realise their capital without having to give notice to the tenant. It would be a win-win policy that I would gladly allow the Government to adopt. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the progress on the three initiatives that she commended only a few months ago.

13:49:00

My Lords, I first remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for this debate. I agree with her that we need a long-term strategy and that the scale of the problem is daunting. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for his important suggestions around the private rented sector, in particular the potential impact of the increase in stamp duty on rent levels in the private sector. There have been many reports on the housing crisis and how to address it from Shelter, Crisis, the National Housing Federation and the Affordable Housing Commission, which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Best, and was established by the Smith Institute with the support of the Nationwide Foundation. Of course, Homes for All, the Church of England report published earlier this year, rightly talked of our moral duty to ensure that all households have access to affordable, safe and quality homes—and I agree. It is appropriate that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has chosen this debate to make his valedictory speech. All those reports have urged that a national housing strategy and affordable housing—that is, genuinely affordable housing—should be a national priority. Today’s homelessness figures give us a stark warning, with 123,000 households, including 159,000 children, in temporary accommodation. Council spending on temporary accommodation reached £2.29 billion last year, which the National Audit Office said is unsustainable. It is unsustainable, but we cannot solve homelessness without building many more social homes for rent. We should always remember that secure, affordable homes are fundamental in addressing child poverty. We must build capacity in social housing for rent. I acknowledge the immediate help recently offered by the Government for up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes. I also acknowledge the need to protect new-build social homes. The fact is that around 11,000 council or housing association homes are being built every year but, last year, 23,000 such homes were sold off on knock-down. We must stem the loss of homes for social rent. Indeed, some 2 million homes have been sold under right to buy, of which some 40% are now in the private rented sector, with higher rents in that sector pushing up the housing benefit bill. I applaud the scale of the Government’s ambition. They have promised the biggest increase in affordable housing in a generation. I welcome this and hope that it proves true. The Government promise 1.5 million more homes by 2029, but we should bear in mind that the chief executive of Homes England said in a recent message to staff that this would need “two parliamentary terms”, while the Centre for Cities has said that the Government will undershoot by 388,000. In any case, a target is not an outcome. Outcomes need plans, and plans need to be published and debated outside of the spending review. There is a big problem: since 2015, 1 million homes in England and Wales—that is one in three—have had planning permission but not been built. Also, 70,000 housing association and council dwellings currently stand empty—a figure that has been rising. So, as an urgent priority, might the Government address solutions to these two immediate problems? We should also remember that government spending on housing is at its highest ever level, in real terms. Fifty years ago, 95% went into building and improving homes; today, it seems that almost 90% is going into housing benefit, on which the Government are now projected to spend £35 billion a year by 2028. This is clearly unsustainable. On the numbers, lots of ambitious targets have been set by a wide variety of bodies. It appears as though the Secretary of State may be thinking of a number lower than some of those reported by, for example, the National Housing Federation. That, I suggest, is a consequence of their understanding of the significant structural problems with delivering large numbers in the short term. We need to build capacity in councils and housing associations. We need a bigger construction workforce and more planning officers. It is not just the planning system but its resourcing. We should bear in mind that more planners can be self-financing. I welcome the Government’s sense of direction but, with 1.2 million households on local authority waiting lists, solutions have become urgent. Let the Government concentrate on putting in place the foundations we need to address this housing crisis of high demand and inadequate supply. One of those foundations could be that local authorities should be able to buy land at current use value rather than hope value. But the test of success will be that homes become genuinely affordable to those on medium and low incomes.

13:55:00

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for introducing this debate so brilliantly. I am also looking forward to hearing from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has been a consistent champion on behalf of the homeless and the badly housed. There is likely to be almost universal agreement in this debate on the need for a huge increase in genuinely affordable, secure accommodation. I am only the fourth speaker, but I find that I will be repeating what has already been said. Perhaps that shows a unanimity of view on the urgency of the situation. We have heard the figures for homelessness and temporary accommodation; I give special thanks to Crisis for its comprehensive briefing. We know of the impossibly long waiting lists for social rented housing. The Government want the housing associations and councils to build far more new homes, but there is an urgent need for investment in the existing social housing stock. The Grenfell tragedy has highlighted the necessity to spend billions on remediating unsafe buildings. We now have the Social Housing (Regulation) Act, with Awaab’s law, which requires cold and mouldy properties to be treated quickly. It is backed up by an enlarged role for the Housing Ombudsman, so the social housing sector has turned its attention to the need to address its backlog of maintenance and major repairs. Meanwhile, we see the impact of inflation on building costs, land costs and interest rates. All this means that we are unlikely to build nearly enough new homes to meet the pressing demands. A quick calculation of the proportion of the 1.5 million homes the Government hope to see built during this Parliament suggests that less than 10% of those new homes will be affordable for those on average incomes or below. So what can be done to dramatically and rapidly increase output of social rented accommodation, at a time when public funds are so scarce? I will suggest three potential ways forward. There has been no pre-discussion of this, but I find that space for two of my three has already been taken by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I will expound my three. First, it seems quite possible that the huge expense of the land for development may, in future, be reduced where the uplift in value can be captured for the public good; if necessary, backed by compulsory purchase powers. Where land is bought by local authority arm’s-length development corporations—not least those established for the new generation of new towns and urban extensions—a comprehensive master plan can parcel out sites to a range of private and social developers, achieving quality place-making as well as higher levels of social renting. Secondly, we have failed nationally to recognise the opportunities as well as the obligations from demographic change. By building specifically for older people, as noted in last week’s Older People’s Housing Taskforce report, significant financial benefits can be achieved. On the one hand, more suitable accommodation for older people pays its way in postponing or preventing hospital admissions, delayed hospital discharges, home-care costs and moves into residential care; on the other hand, each new home for an older person is likely to achieve two for one by releasing a family home for the next generation. This secures the precious asset of a social rented family home at no cost, while better serving the needs of an older person. Thirdly, a shortcut is needed to secure accommodation for those forced to accept highly unsatisfactory temporary accommodation, and to address the crippling costs of this temporary accommodation for local authorities. An answer lies in channelling funds to the acquisition and modernisation of the private rented properties where landlords want to exit the market, not least under new pressure from the Renters’ Rights Bill coming down the track. The Government could incentivise the outgoing landlords to sell to a social landlord through exemption of capital gains tax. Stamp duty does not work so well because it is paid by the purchaser, and the social landlords will not be paying stamp duty, but capital gains tax presents a real opportunity. This approach, as advocated by the Affordable Housing Commission, represents “Back to the Future” for housing associations, whose main output in the 1960s and 1970s was in buying and improving street properties. It means investing in property rather than paying private landlords exorbitant rents for low-quality, short-term use: bricks, not benefits. I hope the Minister can comment on these three ways of getting a bigger bang for the public buck: capturing land value; addressing unsuitable, underoccupied housing for older people; and, once again, purchasing and upgrading unsatisfactory private rented housing. Now I am honoured to hand over to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I pay tribute to the leadership and inspiration he has demonstrated in relation to the housing crisis.

14:01:00

My Lords, it is often said and it is a cliché to say it—but hey, I am the Archbishop still—that if you want to make God laugh, make plans. On that basis, next year, I will be causing God more hilarity than anyone else for many years, because the plans for next year were very detailed and extensive. If you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary, who has seen weeks and months of work disappear in a puff of a resignation announcement. The reality, which I wish to start with—then pay some thanks, and then talk about housing—is that there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll. There is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough. I hope not literally: one of my predecessors in 1381, Simon of Sudbury, had his head cut off and the revolting peasants at the time then played football with it at the Tower of London. I do not know who won, but it certainly was not Simon of Sudbury. The reality is that the safeguarding and care of children and vulnerable adults in the Church of England today is, thanks to tens of thousands of people across the Church, particularly in parishes, by parish safeguarding officers, a completely different picture from the past. However, when I look back at the last 50 or 60 years, not only through the eyes of the Makin report, however one takes one’s view of personal responsibility, it is clear that I had to stand down, and it is for that reason that I do so. Next, I want to say thank you to so many people in the House. In these 12 years, I cannot think of a single moment when I have come in here and the hair on the back of my neck has not stood up at the privilege of being allowed to sit on these Benches. It has been an extraordinary period, and I have listened to so many debates of great wisdom, so many amendments to Bills that have improved them, so much hard work. I have also found that, despite the fact that I still cannot find my way round this building, the staff here are endlessly patient as I look panic-struck when I suddenly find I am standing on a green carpet, not a red one, and have guided me to the right place. I am hugely grateful, and I am very grateful to noble Lords who have been kind enough to send supportive and encouraging notes over the last few weeks. It has been a great privilege and strength to have that. Housing, as has been said, is one of the key areas of life in any society. When I look back historically—I will not develop the whole history—whenever this nation has taken a huge step forward since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, three things have played a part: housing, education and health. Where they have changed, they have laid a new basis for a healthy society, not just physically but in every way, and I believe that is what we are called to do now. There has been much reference to the two reports that the Church of England has issued, and I am in the same place, as much of what I was going to say has been said. So, I will not say it again and will say something slightly different—but very briefly. The Coming Home report that the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to so kindly, sets out five words beginning with “s” which it decided to recommend as the moral centre of good housing. They are: that housing should be safe, and we have heard and know about the need for that through Grenfell, mould, and the need to improve the safety of housing; that housing should be secure, so that people know they can bring up families; that housing should be stable, as people should not constantly be forced to move without choice—it is utterly disruptive; and that housing should be sustainable and zero carbon. We cannot afford to build tens of thousands of houses which increase the problems of climate change. But I want to add two things. First of all, housing must be affordable, particularly social housing. Social housing is one of the areas which is very inelastic in terms of supply and demand. We need clear criteria for what “affordable” means. One of them should not be in proportion to the average cost in the area, which is the present test: 80% of average cost. I can assure noble Lords that, as we come to the end of our time where we are living at the moment and start looking for a house to buy, 80% of average market cost puts us a very long way away from where we would like to be—and that serves us right, in some ways. Affordable housing needs to be related to income, not to average cost. It needs to be measured against real living wage in a particular area if it is going to be genuinely affordable. Secondly, it is no use building houses unless you build communities. Housing without community sets us up perfectly for the social problems of the future, so, when we build houses, we have to create the open spaces. And I forgot one “s”, which is satisfying. It has to be a place where children can play, where families get to know each other and where—obviously, I would say this—there is a church, or at least a community centre that acts as a church, where people are brought together. Community facilities in most of our new developments are nugatory, nil, useless; we have to do better. My last comment: the Church Commissioners for England hold about 5,000 to 6,000 acres of strategic land, out of the 100,000 acres of the Church Commissioners’ total landholdings and another 100,000 acres in the hands of dioceses, parishes, trusts and so on. I know that they are now working on plans for working with government and local authorities, using the mapping tool developed in the Coming Home report, to see the best places to get together with others and have economically helpful areas with good returns. Look at what the Duchy of Cornwall has done with that: you can look down a street and you cannot distinguish which is social housing and which is non-subsidised housing. That also is part of the way in which we treat people with respect. I look forward to hearing from the Minister. I hope that the Government will undertake to work right across the sector of landholders, so there will be good mixed development that brings people together and sets us up for a better future—and that, as part of that, it is done in the deliberate building of communities before we talk about individual houses. My Lords, I am hugely grateful to have been here. You remain in my prayers and in my deep affection and profound respect for the huge contribution made by this House to our nation, which it usually does not recognise. I am hugely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for allowing this debate to happen.

14:11:00

My Lords, it is a real privilege to have the opportunity to follow the most reverend Primate. We first met in Durham cathedral. It was a great civic occasion, where I was the appointed preacher and he was the recently arrived—merely, at that time—right reverend Prelate. I preached at him and he blessed me, and it has been like that ever since. A month or two later, in May 2012, the most reverend Primate made his maiden speech in this House. On that occasion, he was still the Bishop of Durham and he toured the heights of his experience, drawing massively on his secular as well as his religious experiences. He has played a large part in the banking and financial sector themes that we have pursued in this House and in Parliament generally. Indeed, he is a towering figure in many other ways. After all, he officiated at the funeral of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth and crowned the brand-new King and Queen in his turn. He has been a great campaigner for women’s consecration to the episcopacy and to see that happen. We cannot divorce him from the achievement of that great step, which has greatly enriched this House. Another of his great themes is on investment that crosses between morality and ethics, on the one hand, and finance performance, on the other. In a sense, I could pursue a tour d’horizon of the great themes that he has taken some part in, but it would not really get to where I want to be. In his maiden speech, as well as proclaiming the virtues and qualities of the north-east—we remember that Newcastle drew last evening with Manchester City; a very good thing—he also championed the issue of loan sharks and people with payday loans at extortionate rates of interest. They were gone within two or three years of him striking that note. From then until now—choosing to speak on housing and homelessness in his valedictory address—that for me is the theme that runs right through this particular Primate’s life and witness, like the word “Blackpool” through a stick of seaside rock. Somewhere along the way, he has espoused the marginalised, the oppressed, the poor people of the land, and internationally too. He has travelled to every province of the Anglican Communion. We can only honour him for his stamina as far as that is concerned; stamina to get there, but holding it together is an entirely different challenge. Somewhere on that parabola he quoted a line from Nelson Mandela which is the hallmark for his particular ministry—that overcoming poverty is a matter of justice, not charity. That is a pretty high bar to set. I honour him for his work. I am reading an enlightening book, which I am enjoying, that traces the history of John Milton’s Paradise Lost through its various iterations and its usefulness around the world. It is truly insightful, but it is called What in Me is Dark. There is not a Member of this House, not one noble Lord or Baroness, who has not had to face the dark at some stage in their lives. We can only feel with the most reverend Primate as he gazes into his, none of us feeling superior as we do so. However, it is a good thing to follow to the end John Milton’s quotation, “What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th’ Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men”. That is nobler than the cut-off title of the book that I am reading at the moment. One last word, if I may, as I have some indulgence on these occasions—it is very dangerous to give such an indulgence to a Welshman, but I will do my best. It allows me to give vent to a long-nurtured secret desire of mine to quote some Latin, as an alumnus of Llanelli Boys Grammar School, to an old Etonian. It is from the Aeneid. In Carthage, Aeneas is looking at a mural of Juno at the fall of Troy and all his friends who died there. He weeps to see them fallen: “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent”— there are tears at the heart of things and the mind is affected by ideas of our mortality. There are tears at the heart of things. I would guess that the most reverend Primate knows that as well as anybody. However, they can be tears of joy. We must hope that the future that he will enjoy with Caroline and the family will be full of joy, that joy will invade the darkness and dispel it, so that the man whom we know will have a chance to be himself again, breathe his own air and stand in his own dignity. Justin, I am going to miss you, and I think we are going to miss your family too. God bless you.

Hear, hear!

And so to the business of the day. I start with the most reverend Primate again. He says somewhere that his beginning—the opening chapter of his life—was messy, and I can say that mine was messy, too. For him, he was three; for me, I was five and a half when everything broke down and darkness descended upon us. I still have the letter from my father’s solicitor to my mother, indicating that she was to take her two boys out of his client’s home within a week—so, my mother, with two little boys, was on the street. For days we were on the street, and a kind neighbour in the little two-up, two-down houses would put us up, but the pressure on their space was great. In the end, my grandparents, who had two rooms as caretakers in a factory, decided they could live in one room so that we could live in the other. I grew up in one room in a brickyard. That was at five or six. What can I say about homelessness? I have decided I want to say a word about the homeless—let others talk about construction, targets and all of that. What can I remember? I will tell you what I remember. I remember my mother’s face, tear-struck. I remember her despair. I smelled her panic. Before the welfare state, how was she going to put food on the table? How could she cope with life and its demands? How would her boys have a chance to wear shoes and underwear? I remember homelessness, and I have refused to call it homelessness ever since; I call it the plight of homeless people, in order to remind ourselves that homelessness is about people, their needs must be paramount, and we must find ways of forging policies that hold them and their well-being in mind. Fast forward 40 years and I have inherited a programme of social work that was begun by Donald Soper, of beloved memory. One of his institutions was a homelessness centre, open 365 days in the year, a brilliant piece of work. The work I did in those few years enabled me to become friends to homeless people. One of them, called Tom, would take me around with him. He spoke Hungarian. He had a PhD. His life had fallen apart. He had resorted to alcohol. All of them have stories. Tom took me to where the IMAX cinema is now, on the Waterloo roundabout—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Bird, knows what I am talking about—where the homeless would gather, often with a fire. They would send scouts from among their own community to the railway stations to see if any children were running away from home and before predators got hold of them. There was an advice centre in the Royal Festival Hall that helped people who were newly homeless to cope. One night—just one—I spent a night in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Tom told me how to wrap my legs and my lower body in newspaper. He told me where to find the best cardboard, outside McDonald’s: there was not so much grease in it, and therefore the rodents would not bother me in the night. In the middle of the night, we were woken up by a soup kitchen that wanted to feed us with sustainable food. I have to say that, when the rain started at 3 am, I was a coward and went home, but I have never forgotten the comradeship of the people in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the jokes and the banter. Homelessness is about people. This debate is about finding ways to solve the needs of people. If we do not do that, then all the statistics, trends, budgets and hopes are for nothing. I am so glad that I am being followed by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who is a more authentic voice than I on these matters.

14:24:00

I thank the noble Lord very much for that wonderful introduction. My family are Irish, and I think they are even more verbose than the Welsh, but we will not have an argument over that. I should explain why I am not going to bamboozle your Lordships with loads of statistics and why I can probably make very little contribution to what we have been talking about. Ten years after I started the Big Issue, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do for the next 10 or 20 years. I said, “For the last 10 years I’ve been mending broken clocks, and for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to try to prevent the clocks breaking”. In 1991 when we started the Big Issue, 501 homeless organisations were with us. They supplied every conceivable thing for a homeless person, from a condom—not a girlfriend, a condom—all the way through to a place where you could clean yourself, sleep and all that. But not one of those organisations ever asked the question that I wanted to ask: when is somebody going to turn the tap off? Why do we often see homeless people as homeless? I have never met a homeless person whose problem was homelessness. I met someone who, like a social iceberg, had homelessness just above the water where you could see it, but underneath I could see all sorts of things—abuse, social isolation, mental health problems. I saw 90% of the people I have worked with, who I come from, inheriting poverty. I was with Prince Charles once, as he then was, at a meeting in our building. He said that anybody could fall homeless. I thought to myself, “That’s not quite right”; I could not imagine him homeless. He was trying to create the idea, as so many people do, that anybody can fall homeless. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned a PhD student who could read Hungarian. Brilliant—I could bring you dozens of them, but I could bring you thousands upon thousands of people who have inherited poverty. Because those people inherited poverty, there is a predictability of failure that none of us has ever really addressed. We tried to address it 75 years ago when we created the welfare state. We tried to address the fact that there were people who were unwell, ill educated, doing jobs that destroyed their bodies and caught in poverty. But did we ever really put the effort, the energy, the drive and the wonderfulness of our intellectual ability into saying, “Why is there no science for breaking people from poverty or a government department especially looking to prevent poverty”, so that we do not have a situation where the only inheritance people get is that they are poor? I believe we live in an age of dunces. Unfortunately, the dunces are the people making the decisions. I am astonished that poverty costs us so much. I reckon that, of every £1 paid by the taxpayer, about 40p goes into poverty. We, in a sense, leave poverty. The Conservatives are great believers in leaving poverty to work itself out because there are so many examples of people two or three generations away from the coalface, or even one generation, so they think poverty should just be sorted out by leaving the system. Then Labour believed in inventing a methodology that created social housing but did not answer the problem. Only 2% of people whose children are brought up in social housing ever get out of poverty. Only 2% ever get to university or even finish their A-levels. In my opinion, we have these big contradictions. Until this House and that House embrace the idea of finding a way of turning the tap off, we will just have a lack of social housing as a forerunner for getting out of poverty.

14:31:00

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick on initiating this debate and making such a powerful speech, ranging across the complex issues that we have heard about. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, reminded me of the terrible situation that homeless families are in and how difficult it is to recover from that. I also thank the most reverend Primate for his powerful speech. His words will be much missed in this House. I turn to a rather more prosaic matter, which is the supply of housing. We have failed over the past 15 years to build enough houses. In fact, as the statistics explained earlier show, it goes back many decades. The Government’s commitment to build 1.5 million houses over the next five years has been widely welcomed, but is it achievable? Within that commitment, can the downward trend in homes available for social rent be reversed to help the less well-off and the homeless? In 2016, the Economic Affairs Committee of this House’s report Building More Homes proposed that 300,000 homes be built each year, with the majority being available for social housing. It was a cross-party committee including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and others. It also recommended that a combination of local authorities, housing associations and private developers should finance and develop those houses. The report highlighted the challenges in achieving that target. The first was the need for significant improvement in the planning resources of local authorities, which had become seriously depleted. The second barrier was the marked reduction in capacity of the housebuilding industry over the previous five years. Large firms continued to thrive, but medium-sized and smaller firms were much thinner on the ground, reduced by retirement, financing problems and a reduction in the supply of skilled labour. In the seven years since that report, housebuilding fell well short of that 300,000 target and, although the data is patchy, the numbers of new homes built for social rent show that there has been a marked downward trend. In 2022-23, only 700 new social rent homes were built. Private providers added around 5,200, which was offset by the loss of 4,500 to the right-to-buy scheme. During those seven years, planning resources have continued to shrivel, and finance, particularly for SME builders, has become much less available. The Financial Services Regulation Committee recently heard that the risk weighting on capital imposed by regulators on lenders wishing to provide to SME housebuilders is far higher than that required for mortgage lending. Unsurprisingly, the provision of mortgage finance has grown apace, benefiting from strong competition, but 60% of the supply for SME housebuilders now has to be found from private resources. That is clear evidence of market failure; the banks are unable to provide it. The supply of skilled labour has reduced, with a failure to boost training and the return of many eastern European tradespeople to their homelands. In her recent Mansion House speech, the Chancellor made it clear that she wanted to see regulators adopting a more pro-growth culture. If that call is to be heeded, it would enable us to reduce the risk weighting for those smaller SME builders, which obviously would increase the supply of affordable finance and housing. Planning departments remain seriously underresourced and are unable to progress applications of all kinds in a timely way. The Government recently set up a new expert delivery group to accelerate the building of homes stuck in the planning system. The expert group should consider setting up regional task forces, comprising experienced planners to support local planning authorities to expedite planning approvals. Housebuilders and developers would, I feel sure, provide funding and help to find professionals to support these task forces. A key responsibility in strengthening the planning system will be to achieve a significant increase in the supply of homes available at social rents. Planning departments must be firm in their resolve to use their powers to ensure that planning consents for home developments include the highest possible number of homes for social rent. This will be helped by the Chancellor’s announcement of £500 million in new funding for the affordable homes programme, increasing it to over £3.1 billion. This Government’s actions to date and their decision to set up mandatory local housing targets and introduce reforms to right to buy to protect the social housing stock, taken together, give confidence that the ambitious target may be realistic and achievable.

14:37:00

My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing this debate, which has been so well attended by noble Lords. When we talk about housing policy, what is really noticeable is that the Government’s focus is on supply. For the Green Party, the focus is on what kind of homes the homeless need and how they will get them. We can all agree that fixing the current crisis of homelessness is a crucial priority for our society. It not just the people we see right here on our doorstep, on the streets of Westminster and in the Tube stations, sleeping increasingly uncomfortably and at danger to themselves, as winter draws in. There are also—and what damage is this doing?—the families in temporary accommodation. For England, the numbers are at the highest level since records began 22 years ago, with a 15% increase in the year to June. There are also the young—and not so young—people forced to rent a room in overcrowded shared housing. They are inadequately housed, with no realistic hope of future improvement, as reluctantly tolerated couch-surfers or in homes with several households squeezed in to them. Yet when we hear the Government talk about housing, the focus is always on housebuilding. The milestone that Sir Keir Starmer set out with much fanfare this morning was “building 1.5 million homes”. The talk was about foisting homes on unwilling communities, with planning “reform”, despite the fact that a third of homes receiving planning consent are not being built. That means that more than a million approvals handed out since 2015 have not resulted in homes. Had all those homes which were granted planning permission been built, the previous Government would have hit the target of 300,000 new homes a year in eight out of the past 10 years. So why are these homes not being built? They are mostly large-scale schemes of a handful of mass-market developers, whose entire aim and whose legal responsibility to their directors is to maximise profit. Their responsibility is not to build homes. What generally makes the most profit? It is so-called executive homes, often free-standing and wasteful of the scarce resource of land, built to poor energy-efficiency standards on greenfield sites without public transport provision, and feeding into already congested roads. What will those do for the homeless people on our streets, for the families crowded horribly into B&Bs without housing facilities, and for young people who have moved back home with the family, for want of a rental deposit? The Government are applying the theory that suitable housing will eventually trickle down to those who need a decent, secure and affordable place to live. But, just as trickle-down economics has been a total failure, so has trickle-down housing policy. We need to build, or repurpose and refurbish, genuinely affordable and high-quality homes close to transport and other facilities, that meet the needs of people rather than focus on the profit for the market. Of course, relying on an underregulated and non-competitive monopoly in the private sector to supply housing has not resulted just in a failure of housing numbers. The Grenfell tragedy exposed, in a huge disaster, the deadly failure of quality and safety. The campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal estimates that 600,000 people in Britain still live in homes at a heightened risk of a fatal fire, and 3 million own homes that they cannot sell, for fire safety reasons. Since Grenfell, more than 15,000 people have been forced to move out of their homes indefinitely. What is the story behind that? I go to an account from James Meek in the London Review of Books of the now infamous Skyline Chambers in Manchester. The building was completed in 2007 by a company called Space Developments UK, which was bought by the multinational Ireland-based housebuilder McInerney. When it went down in the financial crash, Skyline was picked up from the creditors by Wallace, a company owned by an Italian investor sometimes styled “Count di Vighignolo” in official documents. It is a Cambridge-based network of companies owned by a Gibraltar-registered company, Perseverance Ltd, which in turn is owned by the Guernsey-registered Hauteville Trustees. That is what is supposed to supply housing. What do we need to do to tackle homelessness to reshape our housing policy and our society, so that they work for people and the planet, rather than human needs and planetary essentials being ground down by the demand for profit? We need to shift our understanding to housing primarily as homes—affordable, secure and quality places for people to live—rather than simply as financial assets. We need to tackle the financialisation of our housing supply, just as we need to tackle the financialisation of our public services and our whole economy. The Government are starting to demonstrate, just a little, that they realise that these old 20th-century economic models are not working. In Sir Keir’s speech this morning, we saw something of a shift, as previewed by Politico’s London Playbook, starting to realise that just talking about growth provokes the question: who is it for and who benefits from it? The same question must be asked about our housing supply.

14:43:00

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe on securing this debate and on her powerful opening speech. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and to have been here for the valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his brilliant description of why housing is so important to society. It was also a pleasure to hear the tribute from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port. I am a newbie to this House, but, having heard the most reverend Primate’s speech, I can absolutely see how much his contributions will be missed. I will focus on the plight of young people facing homelessness or struggling to get on the housing ladder and, in doing so, I pay tribute to the work of the organisation Doncaster Housing for Young People. I was patron of the organisation when I was an MP and saw at first hand many of the challenges faced by young people in Doncaster, which were exacerbated by cuts to local authority budgets and a shameful lack of social housing, not just in Doncaster but nationwide. That is why I particularly welcome this Government’s strong focus on a cross-government homelessness strategy and commitment to build 1.5 million homes in England, which was reiterated by the Prime Minister this morning, with a focus on building new social homes for rent and protecting existing social housing, driven through by the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner. A cross-government approach is so important because the experience of people such as Stuart Shore and Michéle Beck from Doncaster Housing for Young People is that so many problems for young people start if they grow up in poverty and have little family support around them. Growing up in poverty, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, does not necessarily mean that people will inevitably become homeless, but virtually all the young people who Doncaster Housing for Young People supports come from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is why the Sure Start programme of the last Labour Government was so valuable and why the emphasis on pre-school support to families under this Government is going to be so important, bringing in with it the Department for Education. Doing poorly at school and lacking skills has long-term consequences. It reduces employment prospects, which inevitably leads to difficulties in getting affordable and stable accommodation. Access to breakfast clubs, mental health support, mentoring support to equip young people —as the Government have promised through the Departments for Education, Health and Business, through the newly created Skills England agency—are absolutely crucial. The DWP goal of “earning or learning” might seem a tough message but is, in my view, essential. As we follow the journey of a young person, we then come to the world of work. Too many young people are employed in low-paid jobs, often part-time, on zero-hour contracts with fluctuating incomes, which leads to them facing huge challenges not only in gaining tenancies but in maintaining them. The problems they face with instability of this sort are compounded when it comes to accessing universal credit, for example, which leads to further insecurity. That is why I welcome the changes to zero-hour contracts and increasing job security, as these will be vital to giving young people security at work and helping them get into rented accommodation or on to the housing ladder. For many young people, navigating systems such as the jobcentre can be particularly daunting due to the reliance on online platforms. A young person who loses access to the internet can lose access to their universal credit portal, leading to sanctions, delayed payments and mounting rent arrears. That is where I think an enhanced role for jobcentres, as proposed by Secretary of State Liz Kendall, is absolutely right. There has been some very good work done in Doncaster to give wraparound support to young people, tailored to their individual needs. Again, that is incredibly important, so, if that role of jobcentres can be expanded, it would be very welcome. We have to recognise that single individuals under 35 face significant housing challenges with the capping of the housing benefit for under-35s. I know that this is a matter for the Treasury, but I hope the Minister will consider this in developing the homelessness strategy. My noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, in his tribute, gave some erudite quotations. My quotation is from a musical that I think might well have been written by some Member of your Lordships’ House: “All I want is a room somewhere Far away from the cold night air”. I fear that, for too many young people at the moment, this is out of their reach. But I firmly believe that, if the Government work across departments, they can, and should, make a difference that will benefit not just young people but all of society.

14:50:00

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register and my membership of the previous Government’s London housing task force and the Older People’s Housing Taskforce. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for securing this very important debate on the genuine housing crisis that we face. I also thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the great work he has done in this area. I really appreciated his speech. There have been many statistics, and normally I throw out lots of statistics, but I am going to try to curtail that today. Homelessness is a genuine scourge for this country. For most people, that is perceived as rough sleeping, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, mentioned, is a very complex issue. But I want to deal with the rest of the iceberg that people do not see—the temporary accommodation, the sofa surfing, the overcrowding and the cost to families and their budgets, limiting their ability to pay for their energy bills and food bills and support their children. This is a genuine housing crisis and it is simple: we are not building enough houses in this country. I shall compare us to, say, France. Between 1983 and 2021, the UK built 7.3 million homes. France built 13.5 million homes. It is no surprise then that the real increase in house prices in the UK since 1970 has been 400%, whereas in France it has been 170%, and elsewhere in Europe prices are now substantially lower. Build more houses and houses will cost less. It is relatively simple. This is exacerbated in the UK by our very uneven demand. Demand is very much focused on the south, particularly in London. London is the issue I want to focus on. It is where we have the biggest housing crisis, with 300,000 people on the housing waiting list, 70,000 children living in temporary accommodation, local authorities spending more than £1 billion a year on temporary accommodation and rents representing more than 50% of average gross earnings. House prices are approaching £20,000 per square metre in central London. In my authority or the authority of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—Stevenage—the figure is more in the region of £3,000. That has a massive impact on availability. The ripple effect of London is impacting homelessness and the cost of housing outside. London is not doing well on delivering houses. It is down at 32,000 in the last 12 months, 30% below the figure of a few years earlier. The rest of the country is also down, but only by around 10%. The risk is that, this year, London will deliver even fewer houses. The London Plan suggests that we should build 52,000 homes. The latest government figures suggest it should be 80,000. The previous Government suggested 100,000. Whatever the figure, it is genuinely far more homes than are being delivered today. And it is not because of a lack of opportunity. The GLA identifies that there are sites for more than 1 million homes in London. Anecdotally, this could be increased significantly through regeneration of housing association and council housing estates, densification and the use of industrial land. It is not unreasonable to suggest that we could build 2 million homes in London. Why is this not happening? As I speak to developers, they constantly tell me that it has got harder and harder to build in London. There is more and more regulation, more and more legislation, more and more consents: it is just too difficult and the planning system is incoherent. Many housebuilders are no longer prepared to build in London unless they have the full co-operation of a local council. The London Plan is one example of this, and while there are many admirable aims in that local plan, its 133 clauses were described to me by one developer as “133 reasons not to build”. There is not one clause in the London Plan that actually makes it easier, faster or quicker to build a home. That is why, when I was on the taskforce, we recommended that there should be a strong presumption in favour of granting planning permission on brownfield land where the local authority in question is not meeting its housing targets. This was adopted by the previous Government. Will the Minister also commit her Government to this?

14:55:00

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing this important debate. I declare my interests as president of the Rural Coalition and vice-president of the LGA. I offer my thanks to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for his valedictory speech. During his tenure, he has been a champion of housing, and we have already referred to the Coming Home report, which is pertinent both to today’s debate and to His Majesty’s Government, with their very good and ambitious targets to build more housing. I hope we can assist the Government in achieving that. Homelessness and rough sleeping are on the rise. Government statutory homelessness figures, released last week, reveal that 159,380 children are now homeless and living in temporary accommodation, a 15% increase in a year and the highest figure since records began in 2004. More particularly, the November 2023 CPRE report on the state of rural housing showed that rural homelessness has increased by 20% since 2021 and 40% since 2018-19. There are a number of particular challenges around the housing crisis in rural areas which are often overlooked in national policy, and that is where I want to focus my remarks. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, particularly in smaller rural communities. Only 9% of the housing stock in parishes with a population of under 300 is social housing, compared with 17% of the housing stock in urban areas. Between 2019 and 2022, rural local authority affordable housing waiting lists were up by 31%, compared with an increase of 3% in urban areas. There are still not enough affordable housing developments being delivered on rural exception sites. Very few affordable houses are being provided in settlements with a population of under 3,000. The impact on rural communities is immense and often overlooked. I turn to the difficulties in planning policy that are holding back the development of rural affordable housing. In 66% of smaller rural communities, the National Planning Policy Framework prevents local authorities taking an affordable housing contribution from small sites. Will His Majesty’s Government respond favourably to the calls from many rural organisations to allow local planning authorities to seek affordable housing contributions from sites of fewer than 10 dwellings in communities with a population of 3,000 or fewer? There is also the untapped potential of rural exception sites. The rural exception site policy, as it stands, is poorly implemented. There is a lack of consistency in its application and a number of risks and costs associated with its development. Between 2021 and 2022, only 17% of local planning authorities used the rural exception site policy. In 2023-24, 56% of rural exception site completions were in only two local authorities. There is a really great opportunity here, and we need to work out how we can develop it. Can the Minister say whether the Government will introduce a national development management policy for rural exception sites, as well as a bespoke planning passport, so we can speed up delivery? Defra’s evaluation of the Rural Housing Enablers programme has allowed people to return to their communities, maintain support networks, provide care and support for the elderly and vulnerable, and help with childcare. RHE programmes have been supporting community engagement on housing developments, funded by Defra, for the past two years at a cost of just over £2 million annually. This was a great initiative by the previous Government, and I commend them for the work that was done. Such work has led to an increase in schemes in the pipeline, with the potential to deliver over 2,000 new affordable homes, but this is in jeopardy as the funding is due to end in March 2025. Can the Minister update us on whether there are any plans to renew that funding? I have just one more request of the Minister. Developing rural affordable housing involves a number of challenges specific to the rural context. Will she therefore commit to ensuring that the housing strategy contains a positive rural element—rural proofing—so that we can include delivering more affordable rural housing in order to increase the level of sustainability in the countryside?

15:00:00

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, on leading us in this debate. It is an absolute honour to speak along with so many noble Lords who have dedicated their lives to this issue. In a way, my disappointment is that we are still here making the same case. For me, it is reminiscent of when I first started working at the charity Shelter in the 1990s. Our aim, and that of all who had tirelessly campaigned in this area before us, was simple: to create the circumstances in which we were no longer needed. So it is with a slightly heavy heart that I see this noble group of housing warriors getting the band back together again. In the past, we have been tantalisingly close to making some forms of homelessness a distant memory—once under the stewardship of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and once during Covid. Of course, both times the Government of the day had the not-so-secret weapon of the noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock. Both these experiences, though, tell us that solving this is possible, so we have to believe that the aim—to end homelessness—can be achieved. As many noble Lords have said, the current situation could not be more shocking for a G7 nation. Right now, today, each night, just under 160,000 children go to bed in often appalling circumstances in temporary accommodation. Again, this was brought down before, so we know it can be done, and at relative speed. Select Committees at both ends of this building have been clear and have reported again and again that one of the primary causes of homelessness is the severe shortage of social homes for rent. Social homes for rent are the absolute, healthy bedrock of our mixed-tenure system. The rest of the system cannot exist without them, as was explained so eloquently by my noble friend Lord Shipley. That is why we put in our Liberal Democrat manifesto a target to build 150,000 social homes a year for rent, some delivered through garden cities but above all, through thousands of small-scale community-led developments. Like others, we worry that setting a target and imposing it without engaging communities and bringing them with you will mean that these laudable aims to build will inevitably fall short. In councils that we run, such as Eastleigh, Cambridge and Portsmouth, we have shown that it is possible to work with communities to deliver, at scale, social housing for rent. In Kingston last year we celebrated the first council flats being built in over 30 years. That is the case across the country—council flats being just a badly remembered thing of the past. That was overseen by the council’s housing lead, Councillor Emily Davey, working with the community and delivering sustainable housing—and not a retrofit needed in sight. Housing associations have expressed their concern about reaching the Government’s new target. Peabody, for instance, has welcomed the extra £500 million for the current affordable homes programme in the Budget but makes clear that this will not allow the sector to deliver large-scale new homes at the pace required. Last year, Peabody alone spent £500 million on new homes. That gives a little perspective on the current allocation. When it comes to homelessness, the policy platform we fought on at the last general election was to set and agree long-term measures that cross-cut Whitehall, and we welcome that initiative now. We want to include exempting homeless people from the shared accommodation rate, which makes housing unaffordable for many. We also want to see local authorities given proper funding so that they are better able to deliver the Homelessness Reduction Act. We would introduce a new “somewhere safe to stay” legal duty, which would give people emergency accommodation with an assessment of their needs. So many of the briefings we received for this debate have identified the lack of social housing stock as the critical problem. Right to buy has played its part in the diminution of stock. That is why the Liberal Democrats would give local authorities the power to end right to buy in their area based on their local need and their local knowledge. Above all, we called for, welcome and look forward to the ban on forced evictions under Section 21, which all research suggests is a major underlying cause of homelessness today. The woeful snail’s pace of delivery of this change in the law, first promised in 2019, has left in its wake countless individual stories of eviction and homelessness. Crisis estimates that there have been as many as 110,000 evictions since that promise was made. As well as long-term and lasting solutions, there are some quick fixes that organisations such as Crisis have suggested. I particularly ask the Minister to respond to some of the proposals that have come forward to bring empty homes back into use and to take a look at the Welsh Government’s experience of having delivered that using enforcement officers. I again congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, on securing this debate. I am very hopeful that when we next meet, progress will have been made.

15:07:00

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for calling this important debate. There is a crisis, and we need a national discussion. I will speak about land for housing. In March 2016, in a debate on the Housing and Planning Bill, I set out the case for the purchase of land at agricultural prices for housing development. When we want to build public infrastructure, we can use powers under the Land Compensation Acts. Compulsory purchase orders are issued and signed off by the Secretary of State. Land is acquired at market rates plus uplift to cover an occupant’s losses and possible land replacement. Added to that is an allowance for fees and taxes, disturbance costs and adjacent development effect losses. These costs are marginal compared with the CPO land costs—the CPO justification being set out in the legislation where a CPO is justified only if it promotes the “improvement of the economic well-being of their area” and the “improvement of the social well-being of their area”. Denning went on to opine that: “Parliament only grants it, or should only grant it, when it is necessary in the public interest”. The truth is that in the public interest we need more land for development at the right price for the millions in need. The latest Valuation Office Agency estimates the average arable land in 2023 at £11,000 an acre. The same land with permission can fetch anything between £300,000 and £1 million an acre, and much more in the Home Counties. But there is another way. Why not look at developments in Nijmegen in Holland, where 11,000 houses are being built on agricultural priced land? Similar developments are happening in Hammarby in Sweden? Why not do the same here in the United Kingdom? I fully recognise the implications for existing house prices. The answer is: sell under a new title, such as crownhold or covenanted freehold. Under such arrangements, the local authority identifies land for housing, purchases the land under my described formula, designates the land for housing and enters into a joint venture with the developer. Post development, the joint venture sells the housing under the new title. The housing is subject to a form of ground rent—10-year renewable, perhaps—payable to the original land vendor. However, the home owner is free to buy the freehold under a simplified enfranchisement arrangement. Equally, the home owner is free to sell their title, whether it be the acquired or the enfranchised title. Of course, depending on the scale of implementation, there are implications for wider house prices. House price deflation in an area could be detailed against a background of the distinction entitled. The question is: how can we lock in the reduced price advantage on subsequent sales? Under crownhold or covenanted freehold, in areas of housing stress or high traditional land prices, large margins might exist between the new titled property and the traditional freehold title. I believe that in those circumstances we could justifiably introduce a restriction on sale prices so as to avoid unreasonable speculative gains and to lock in price advantage. It could be based on a locally determined price cap based on the area’s average price inflation, with specified house improvements compensated for. We already have restrictions in planning law concerning age qualification, agricultural employment, national park residency and disability—no doubt there are other areas of which I am unaware. They all influence price. There has to be a way of locking in the price advantage; I am open to ideas. I have given a much-abbreviated description of my proposal. We have a real problem in national housing provision, with a massive deficit in supply and a generation of people, many of them in hardship, struggling under excessive housing costs and too often bearing exorbitant rents or mortgage payments. Many people do not want to rent; they want to buy. Our task is to make house purchase affordable and stress free. Finally, can I say how much I enjoyed the contribution today from the noble Lord, Lord Best? I found it most interesting.

15:13:00

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for bringing forward this important debate. My experiences, and those of people I know, of social housing, the private rental sector and the housing crisis in Wales drive my interest in this debate. YouGov polling shows that young adults see housing as one of the most important issues facing the UK. This rings true, as housing is also a top concern raised by young people in schools and colleges time after time when I run sessions with them. They tell me that they fear they will never own their own home. Some also fear that they will not be able to move out of their family home due to soaring rents in the private rented sector. The situation for private renters is no cause for optimism either. According to the ONS, average rents in Wales rose by 8.5% in the past 12 months, and the median monthly rent in Wales for 2021-22 represented 23% of the median gross income of private renting households. However, for people on the lowest income, even the cheapest houses represented 31% of their income. Most young people I know who have been able to move into rented accommodation cannot afford to save for a deposit to get on the housing ladder. The idea of owning a home is becoming increasingly unrealistic. According to analysis from the ONS, a full-time employee in Wales can expect to spend 6.1 times their earnings on purchasing a home in the local authority area in which they work. This is the reality of many young people across the UK, and it is not good enough. I raised the issue in my maiden speech when I joined this House—that although housing is a devolved subject area, social security is not. The interplay of these two dimensions is of critical importance to the people of Wales. I share the view expressed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that solving the housing crisis has to be achieved through poverty prevention. I also echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, that “homelessness is about people” and that we must not let people down. The most recent statistics show that more than 11,000 people in Wales are in temporary accommodation —poor-quality accommodation, as was noted earlier. More than 2,000 of them are aged under 16, and there are more than 139,000 people on social housing waiting lists. Plaid Cymru campaigned to end the scandal of the housing revenue account subsidy scheme, which saw local authorities send council house tenant rental income to Westminster rather than reinvesting within local housing. As a result, 11 local authorities now have the opportunity to build their own council housing once again, and they and housing associations should be supported to develop further housing as quickly as possible. These statistics and lived experiences speak for themselves. Therefore, how can His Majesty’s Government address this housing crisis? Plaid Cymru believes that everybody has the right to a safe and affordable home in their community and that this should be the purpose of the housing system. We believe that introducing a right to adequate housing will underpin this. This right should be more than aspirational; it should be enforceable, providing citizens with a legally backed guarantee that their homes will meet acceptable standards for health and safety. Such a transformative approach is needed to truly address the needs of low-income households and struggling communities. This would reinforce the belief that housing is a fundamental human right. To address the issue of soaring rents in the private rental sector, His Majesty’s Government could introduce rent controls, which could safeguard against unjustified rent increases and housing insecurity. Rent controls should be progressive and based on the residual income measure, ensuring that no rent leaves tenants unable to meet essential needs. This measure should apply to the cheapest 30% of rental properties, capping rents at local housing allowance rates; for the remaining 70% of rental properties, rent controls could be linked to housing quality, encouraging landlords to improve property standards. This could be modelled on systems in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, also pointed to those countries as examples. I add my support to the calls made by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, on changes to eligibility for housing allowance for under-35s. We could have a whole other debate on the impact that the current housing crisis will have in the long term, especially on declining birth rates. It will impact future generations. To close, I ask the Minister to address in her remarks at the end of the debate her views on enshrining a right to adequate housing into law and on introducing rent controls. Have His Majesty’s Government looked outward to see what we can learn from other countries that have them in place? Our communities deserve real solutions that deliver safe, affordable homes. Diolch yn fawr.

15:19:00

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, who speaks with real eloquence. Her voice is important in this Chamber. I say of the right reverend Primate that whenever I have him speak in this House, he has done so with passion, conviction and authority on some of the great social inequalities and issues of our day, and he will be missed. For far too long, Governments have left it to the market to tackle Britain’s housing crisis, and it has not worked, leaving a chronic housing shortage which has been pushing up house prices and making private rents unaffordable, creating mammoth waiting lists for social housing and driving up the annual housing benefit bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out earlier. The 2010-15 Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government committed to spend only £10 on building new homes for every £100 on housing benefit—virtually a reversal of 40 years ago, when, of every £100 we spent on housing, £80 was invested in bricks and mortar and £20 was spent on housing benefit. Even Labour’s ambitious and admirable commitment to raise housebuilding to 300,000 homes a year during this Parliament still leaves a gap, with millions of families on council waiting lists and millions more adult children staying with their parents because they cannot find or afford a home of their own. The average home cost 3.5 times average earnings in 1997. By 2023, it cost more than eight times. How can young couples be expected to climb the housing ladder when it is impossibly expensive for them to find a place on its lowest rung? Oxford University Professor John Muellbauer has found that in the UK, on average over 70% of the value of homes is in the value of the land on which they are built. He urges central government and local authorities to work together in using public funds to buy development plots, in effect to establish a national land bank, for subsequent sale with planning permission to private developers at a profit to the community. He argues that such a radical move could transform housing supply and that similar initiatives have succeeded in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong in accelerating urban development and in making housing more affordable. It is important to recognise that the state—much derided and denigrated by right-wing think tanks—has played a major role in promoting economic growth ever since the Industrial Revolution, fulfilling basic functions such as promoting public health, housing the homeless, educating the young, supporting the old, caring for social casualties of all kinds, enforcing the law, defending the nation against threats from abroad—and periodically saving the banking system from itself and protecting the real economy from a slide into slump. Increasingly since the Second World War, and especially in capitalist economies such as the US, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Taiwan, Germany and Brazil, the state has done more than just fix market failure by funding the basic research that leads to discovery and invention, educating young people and providing the infrastructure on which the market economy depends, including housing. The Conservative vision of individual empowerment through private markets and private property ownership simply has not worked. It was given a strong run from 2010 to 2024, with savage public spending cuts and economic incompetence typified by Liz Truss’s disaster, provoking a massive public backlash which ejected them from power. Remember also Margaret Thatcher’s popular capitalism, which in the 1980s seemed to capture the mood and was electorally successful, especially through selling council properties—but the fatal flaw was not reinvesting the revenues in building new council homes. The result has been a chronic shortage of affordable housing for both rent and purchase. Through heavily discounted council home sales and cut-price share offers in privatised utilities, Conservative rhetoric promised each individual a stake in capitalism. Despite the fact that home ownership was more widespread for a time, it has since declined to a modern low. Official statistics showed that the proportion of homes lived in by owner occupiers in the year 2023–24, last year, had dropped to 65%, down from 71% under Labour in 2003 and its lowest level for 35 years. New social housebuilding has also plummeted, leaving calamitous shortages of affordable housing for rent or sale. The neoliberal mantra has not worked. As a mechanism for delivering adequate housing, the free market has failed abysmally, which is why public investment is now more vital than ever before to clear up this appalling housing mess.

15:24:00

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend on securing it. There have been so many really interesting proposals and ideas to come out of this long debate. I come to this from a building and engineering background. I am stuck on that figure, which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also told us, that one in 20 houses in this country are empty. Where are they, who owns them, and should they be empty? Of course, the reasons are very varied. Spending a lot of time in Cornwall, I see all of the second homes and wonder, well, people like second homes, and some of them may be unsuitable for owner-occupiers, some of them may be totally unsuitable for being what we like to call affordable, but on the other hand, they could be rented out for half the year when the owners are not there, so people who live in these villages—of whom I know many—would have somewhere to live. There needs to be some financial incentive to achieve that. There is another issue that worries me. My next-door neighbour when I live in London had a flat but, sadly, died two or three years ago. The flat is owned by the council and has been empty ever since. It is damp and it could do with a refurb, but it is a flat, and it could be made affordable but is not because the council is doing nothing about it. My worst example is from spending a lot of time in the Isles of Scilly, where I see a number of people who do not have proper accommodation. They are there because they are working; they have jobs to keep the economy going. They quite often try and rent their accommodation from the Duchy of Cornwall, and I pay tribute to Prince William—or the Duke of Cornwall—for what he is trying to do to improve housing, particularly in Cornwall. However, he is not doing so well in Scilly, because there are, I think, seven empty houses on one island which are waiting for builders to come in. Unsurprisingly, you cannot get builders on islands. You can get a few of them on the mainland, but you have to accommodate them, because they cannot commute by sea every day. The obvious thing is for some of these empty houses to be allocated for builders to come there, certainly in winter. But it is not done, so these houses remain empty, and you cannot even get builders in there to do whatever has to be done. I do not know what the answer to that is. The Duchy of Cornwall makes a profit of £22 million every year, and you would think that they could invest some of that into the houses that the workers there need. The other problem which one comes across is the lack of tradespeople to do this work. It is very easy to say that we have not got any carpenters, bricklayers or anything else, but unless we train them—through our education system, particularly in the countryside, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—we cannot use them. It is really important that we have a good stock of tradespeople in all parts of the country, so they can do this work and hopefully improve the stock of housing. To conclude, I congratulate my noble friend on her wonderful introduction to this debate. With all the ideas we have heard, let us hope that the Government, in the next year or two, can develop some of them, so that we can deliver affordable housing to those who want it. You meet many of them and they are all on the council list, but we need to do something for them.

15:29:00

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for initiating the debate. I also acknowledge the Library staff’s briefing paper explaining the obligations of local authorities towards those seeking help with homelessness, including tables of statistics about the number of people in England seeking such help. It is clear from these tables that, between 2020 and 2024, there has been a steady increase in the total number of applicants assessed by local authorities, which owe a duty to prevent homelessness for households threatened with it or to provide relief for those households which are already homeless. In 2020-21, the total number was 270,560; it has been increasing each year, culminating in 324,900 in 2023-24. In considering these figures, one must bear in mind that they reflect households which have sought help from their local authority and which have received a positive assessment. The scale of homelessness is much worse than these figures suggest, because they do not include what homelessness charities define as “core homelessness”. Core homelessness includes people sleeping rough, living in homeless hostels, placed in unsuitable temporary accommodation, sofa surfing and living in other, non-conventional accommodation, such as cars, tents or boats. The number of people in this category is also increasing. In 2012, the estimated number was 206,000, and it rose to about 242,000 in 2022. It is obviously unsatisfactory that we do not know the full extent of the problem, and I invite the Minister to consider what arrangements could be made for the inclusion in local authority quarterly returns of the number of people in its area identified by charities as being in the category of core homelessness. However, even without the inclusion of this additional group of homeless people, there is an urgent need to increase the supply of affordable housing to address the issue of homelessness. The National Audit Office’s report The Effectiveness of Government in Tackling Homelessness identified that there was no overarching government strategy or targets for reducing statutory homelessness. It also highlighted that the then Government were falling behind on key programmes to improve housing supply. The promise in the Labour Party manifesto to develop a cross-government homelessness strategy, and to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, was a welcome response to the NAO’s report. The scale of the need was identified in reports in 2020 and 2024 by the then House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, which advocated for the construction of 90,000 new social rent homes per year. It is now for the Government to deliver on these manifesto promises. I acknowledge the steps taken by the Government already include the measures in the Budget to increase the supply of social and affordable homes and to create the cross-government task force to tackle homelessness. I also recognise that it is intended to facilitate the granting of planning permission for housebuilding, without the delays that have hitherto blighted development. However, I counsel Ministers to take steps to ensure that housebuilders in receipt of such planning permission deliver houses without delay and do not simply add the consented land to their land banks, to be developed when it suits the housebuilder to maximise the return on investment when property prices increase. Such steps might include the need to alter the definition of the commencement of development to keep alive a planning consent. At present, the digging of a trench might be sufficient to establish that development has commenced and does not guarantee the delivery of any homes for many years, because the five-year period of the consent has been extended indefinitely. Consideration should also be given to including agreements linked to the planning consent that stipulate the development programme that must be achieved, failing which the consent will be revoked. Such agreements should also ensure that the affordable homes are constructed towards the beginning of the site development, instead of the practice of many developers leaving their construction to the end and seeking to vary the planning consent by reducing their number or excluding them altogether. It is also essential that the newly constructed affordable homes are available as such for future generations of lower-income families. They should remain as part of the public sector housing stock and should be excluded from the right-to-buy legislation. Otherwise, the public sector housing stock will be depleted of its most modern and attractive houses and the issue of homelessness will once again be exacerbated.

15:36:00

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick on tabling this debate and on her speech, which was so relevant and comprehensive that I feared there would be nothing left for anyone else to say once she had sat down. This is certainly a subject which has involved both sides of the Chamber and which plays an important role in the lives of people in this country. I shall refer to a report published last week by the Home Builders Federation, Close Brothers Property Finance and Travis Perkins, all of which will be well known to noble Lords in this House. Under the heading “Planning Delays, a Lack of Providers to Take on Affordable Homes and NIMBYs Top Concerns for SME Home Builders”, the introduction stated: “Delays in the planning process, the Conservative government’s anti-development approach to housing and planning policy, and difficult economic conditions have made it harder to be a small developer today than it was five years ago, say two thirds of the nation’s SME home builders”. It went on to say: “For the fifth consecutive year, planning continues to be the largest obstacle to delivery, with delays in the system and under-resourced local authority teams cited as the major barrier by 94% and 90% of respondents respectively. Rising to third position this year is ‘Local and/or political opposition to new development’ which is now seen as a major barrier by three-quarters (78%) of respondents, up from 69% in the last report”— which was a year ago. The average person stopped in the street and asked about the housing shortage is apt to agree that something must be done and that it is unfair, particularly on the younger generation, that house ownership has become so difficult. Stop the same person 10 minutes later and ask them whether they would be in favour of a development close to them, and you might get a slightly different answer. We seem to have moved in this country from nimbys, with whom we are all familiar, to people I call bananas—“build anything near anybody not allowed”. The fact that there is so much local opposition to developments in the housing field is a worry and a concern for all of us. During my time in this House and the other place, I think I have sat on around five different committees on five different hybrid Bills, where people can come and give evidence to Members of one or both Houses about developments that directly affect them, and we have moved from that sort of person coming to give evidence to a much wider area. During my recent time on hybrid Bills, I have learned that every copse is a wildlife refuge and that, although creatures such as natterjack toads are supposedly very rarely found in this country, they are always around when a development is applied for. It is a similar story with great crested newts—over the years, I have become an expert on their mating habits. To be honest, I have never actually seen one, but I guarantee that, in every hybrid Bill committee I have served on, someone has come to say that the development cannot go ahead because of this unusual wildlife. Here is my worry. The right to buy in the 1970s was referred to by my noble friend Lord Hain, who said the fatal flaw was that the receipts from the right to buy were not used to build social housing. Well, it was a fatal flaw indeed, but it was a matter of policy of course by the Conservative Government at the time. Mrs Thatcher believed, rightly or wrongly, that council estates were a hotbed of socialism and that the sooner people became owner-occupiers, usually by a massive discount, the sooner they would cease to vote for a political party: the party I belong to. Whether she was right or not, I will leave to posterity, but it certainly meant that not replacing those sold houses has led directly to the shortage that we have at the present time. After the Second World War, the Attlee Government, despite all the problems facing this country, built 1.2 million largely social houses between 1946 and 1951. The policy was continued, to their credit, by the two successive Conservative Prime Ministers. Only in recent years, with the disbandment of the direct works departments of most local authorities and the policies to which I have already referred, has public housing fallen by the dramatic amounts that it has. I conclude by saying this: two-thirds of the houses sold under the right to buy are, of course, now in the hands of private landlords. As a former council tenant myself in the 1960s, I occasionally visit the area that I represented in my local authority where I lived. The decline in the overall standard of public provision is obvious since two-thirds of those houses fell into the hands of private landlords. I conclude by asking my noble friend the Minister to give us a guarantee that we can at least try to emulate our forebears so far as the building of social housing is concerned—and, even if we cannot make it to 1.2 million, we will do our best to get it up from the pathetic figure that it is at the present time.

15:43:00

My Lords, I declare my interest as yet another vice-president of the Local Government Association. I begin by acknowledging the very personal valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. His wise but often challenging contributions will be missed. As ever, it has been a stimulating, knowledgeable and important debate, but I confess that it has left me feeling a bit depressed. Noble Lords’ excellent contributions have shown that, yes, there is a consensus that we have a housing crisis—no surprise there—and, yes, there are lots of reasons why it has come to pass: noble Lords have cantered knowledgeably around the course, covering almost all of them. We also seem to agree that this is not new: it has been brewing for decades and the many and various attempts to build more homes have been, by and large, unsuccessful—hence my depression. But I am looking forward to the Minister’s response and I hope she can lift my gloom, because this is one area where we all want to see change, and radical change at that. It is a sign of the quality of the debate today that noble Lords have given the Minister many suggested solutions that give us hope. As a result of the many and varied barriers to building more homes outlined in this debate, homelessness has risen, along with the number of families in temporary accommodation. It is also evident that the private rented sector is not coping with the increased demand, so in times of scarcity rents rise and tenants get evicted. All these points were amplified by many noble Lords, but I particularly enjoyed the contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. This vicious circle was clearly outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, in her thorough, informed and compelling introduction. The contributions from the noble Lords, Lord Griffiths and Lord Bird, highlighted the very human consequences of people living without a home. It is about people and about poverty. The causes of homelessness were very well outlined, particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, when she turned her attention to the young. That is where our attention should be too. These causes include restrictions to benefit entitlement, rising living costs, mental health issues, relationship breakdown and, of course, the number one: eviction from the private rented sector due to increasing rent prices, which have risen by almost 9% in the past year alone. We look forward to working with the Minister on the forthcoming Renters’ Rights Bill to ameliorate some of these issues. One of the inevitable consequences of an undersupply of homes is indeed increasing rents, but the reason for this is irrefutably the significant decline in the availability of social housing, which to these Benches is the big lever to pull to unlock the logjam, as analysed by my noble friends Lord Shipley and Lady Grender. That social housing has declined to the massive extent it has was well outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I loved his “bricks not benefits” slogan, which we should adopt. It is inescapable that this decline has contributed significantly to the problems we have now. The figures speak for themselves: a net loss of over 11,000 homes in 2022-23 and a quarter of a million over a decade. You cannot remove that amount of supply without it having a significant impact, and it has. That is why these Benches see a substantial increase in the building of homes for social rent as the key route out of the vicious circle. This must and should be subsidised, and all builders—particularly local SME builders, who have been squeezed out of the market—should be incentivised to build homes for social rent. I seek reassurances from the Minister that Homes England is being directed to fund homes for social rent and in places of greatest need. How can we incentivise more SME builders back into building more? Is it too much to hope that the new planning Bill and attendant National Planning Policy Framework will set clear expectations that local planning authorities must assess their need for social housing, and state their targets for all tenures according to local need? This would send a very strong signal to developers that this is not negotiable. We have had a decade of it being negotiable. Local planning authorities have to give greater priority not just to the numbers and targets but to providing more social housing. Perhaps we also need to seriously incentivise private investors to invest in social housing schemes in those areas. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young, about getting financial stability into the private rented sector. Noble Lords may notice that I have not used the term affordable housing. I believe it is a misnomer that has come to be meaningless in so many contexts. If our friend Lord Stunell were still with us, he would certainly be holding forth on this whole issue of affordability and how we should address the problem. He would probably have agreed with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Hain, proposed. As the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, outlined, we also have ample evidence of a declining and ageing workforce to build the homes we need. Where is the workforce strategy to deliver this number of homes? Targets and tough talk will come to naught if we do not have the capacity to actually build the homes, regardless of who builds them. Among our many excellent briefings, one that jumped out at me concerned the number of empty homes, which was also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Shipley. Nearly 700,000 homes in England are unfurnished and empty, and 265,000 are classified as long term. From experience, I know how difficult it is to gain possession of an empty home, and I hope that this Government will make it easier for councils to do so and will consider incentivising sellers by exempting them from a percentage of capital gains tax. I am deeply concerned about councils’ ability to find suitable temporary accommodation. Anecdotally, I know they are really struggling. Councils spent £1.74 billion last year supporting 104,000 households in temporary accommodation. Worryingly, there is growing evidence that some landlords are leaving the long-term private rented sector in order to supply this much sought after temporary accommodation at—guess what—much higher rents. We also know that it is stretching some district councils’ finances to breaking point, and there are fears of Section 104 notices being served. The planning system is often cited as a barrier to building. In my view, this is overstated, usually by developers. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Councils are required to identify a five-year land supply, and 1 million planning permissions have been granted but not built out. Councils have no power to compel developers to come forward to develop these sites or to build out sites to which permission has already been given, yet they are judged and punished by the Government’s housing delivery test. Perhaps this Government might consider more powers for councils, such as being able to charge developers full council tax for every development that is not built out on the agreed time scale. However, what certainly does deter developers is our NIMBY culture, as forcefully raised by the noble Lord, Lord Snape. Politicians of all stripes have pandered to this, to the detriment of more and quicker housing delivery. This is not new. The 1947 Act gave rise to the notion that development needed to be restrained and resisted as an antidote to urban sprawl. I note that, even back in those days, when the Minister with responsibility for housing visited existing residents on the site for the new town of Stevenage, he was driven from the meeting with shouts of “Dictator!” ringing in his ears, only to find his car tyres slashed and sugar in his petrol tank. I have received only online abuse, which lets me off lightly. I hope the Government have a genuine new take on how to overcome this visible and negative impediment to development. We need to somehow change the narrative to “YIMBY” at both national and local level, and that takes real leadership. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, that we support a long-term cross-party strategy because we know this is a complex issue. It will take years, following the impact of decades of failure, to change the market significantly, yet the reality of people’s lives is that change cannot come quickly enough.

15:53:00

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for her success in the ballot to obtain this debate. It is also an honour and a privilege to be closing after the valedictory speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. The fact that he chose this debate to be his last tells us a great deal about his values and his care for those in need. I believe I speak for these Benches and the whole House when I say that we wish him well for the future. Home is where the heart is. A home is something we all need, and we should have grave concerns that we are a nation where not everyone has their own home. Homelessness should have no place in this country, and we must do everything we can to help those in need. But homelessness is a complex issue with a wide range of underlying causes and contributing factors. There is no one silver bullet. The causes and contributing factors are numerous, including affordability and population growth pressure, but there are also more personal and tangential causes of homelessness, including mental health crisis, domestic abuse and relationship breakdown. It is therefore crucial that any policy proposed to tackle homelessness targets its multiple root causes if it is to have any chance of success. Supporting people through a mental health crisis is an immensely challenging task and we pay tribute to our phenomenal NHS staff, who care for people when they need it the most. In their times of crisis, our NHS steps up and delivers to the absolute best of its ability. The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan from 2023 set out an ambition to increase training places for mental health nursing by 93% to over 11,000 places by 2032, starting with an increase of 38% by 2029. Furthermore, the NHS Long Term Plan included targets to expand NHS talking therapies, perinatal mental health support and 24/7 crisis services. Unfortunately, veterans of our amazing Armed Forces are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. It is a cruel price that they pay for keeping us all safe during times of geopolitical unrest and danger. In March 2021, we announced the Op Courage service, creating a single point to access mental health services and support for veterans. This includes support to recognise and treat early to advanced mental health problems and substance misuse and addictions. Op Courage also liaises with other organisations to address wider well-being needs and support Armed Forces families affected by mental health problems. As of June 2024, Op Courage was actively supporting 2,700 veterans. Nobody should have to choose between facing abuse and sleeping on the streets. In government, we allocated an additional £2 million to help people fleeing domestic abuse. This includes a one-off payment of up to £500 to give those without the means the ability to leave their abusers. This payment is to help cover the cost of essentials, such as groceries or baby care, or be put towards new accommodation for themselves and their children. Victims can also apply for a further one-off payment of up to £2,500 to help secure a sustainable independent future, such as by putting down a deposit for rental accommodation. This helps people move on with their lives and goes some way to preventing homelessness or the pressure to return to abusers because of financial strain. We very much hope that His Majesty’s Government will continue this support along with universal credit, the simplified system that we introduced through which people can claim assistance for a range of challenges, including support with housing costs due to relationship breakdown and related issues, which are unfortunately another cause of homelessness. We understood that building more quality housing in the places where it was needed most was one of the best ways to reduce homelessness. Indeed, 2.5 million homes have been built by Conservative Governments since 2010; over a million were built in the last Parliament. We appreciated that putting more money in people’s pockets was another essential way to prevent that homelessness. Almost half of the homes in England are now in energy efficiency band C, up from just one in seven in 2010. This has the direct result that people need to spend less of their hard-earned money on heating and utility bills. Reducing barriers to entry into the property market is another step that we took. Stamp duty was reduced to zero for properties under £250,000 or up to £425,000 for first-time buyers. This move saved aspiring homeowners thousands of pounds, helping them to buy a house and create their own home. We also brought forward Awaab’s law, ensuring that social housing tenants are not forced to reside in properties which are dangerous to their health to avoid homelessness. Going forward, new homes must be affordable, must not do unreasonable damage to the local environment, must be built where they are most needed, must be adequately looked after by public services and must have proper means of transportation. None of this is easy, but all these requirements are essential. According to Nationwide, the price of a typical UK home rose by 3.7% last month versus the previous year. As house prices continue to rise, the Government must take urgent steps to ensure that the most vulnerable and in need are not excluded from the dream of owning their own home. Council leaders say that the cost of temporary accommodation is now the greatest threat to district and borough councils’ budgets, and indeed to their very existence. The Government must build thousands more social or affordable housing units. Is the Minister still committing to building 1.5 million new homes by 2029? Can she inform the House—she should have the data—how many homes have been completed this year and how many will be started this year? Do we have enough electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and roofers to build 300,000 new homes every year? Research suggests that we do not. Everyone wants to end homelessness, and His Majesty’s Official Opposition will work tirelessly with the Government to bring this about. But achieving such an incredibly important goal will require policy that is sensible and well thought out. We need action, we need to start building yesterday and we need to address the other root causes of homelessness as a top priority.

16:01:00

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond for the Government on such an important issue. I grew up in social housing and I was very proud of my new-town pioneer parents who allowed me to do so—that was the housing of the 1950s and 1960s, referred to by my noble friend Lord Snape. I have campaigned on housing in general and social housing in particular for over 30 years, and this is the first Government I have known, in all that time, to show the level of ambition that we need. I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for her ongoing work on housing and homelessness and for leading this debate today with her extremely powerful and thorough speech. One thing she said was that the facts are truly shocking, and shocking they really are. It has been a great privilege to listen and respond to a debate in which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury gave his valedictory speech. He was present at one of the most terrifying experiences I have had since I joined this House. He has been a great champion of housing, as many noble Lords have said, and introduced the Homes for All report, which had a good launch in your Lordships’ House. I thought I was just going to attend, but I arrived to find my noble friend Lady Warwick asking me whether I would speak. As I walked into the room, he was already speaking and I had to quickly gather my thoughts together and make a speech there and then. The most reverend Primate has done such fantastic work. His deep and thorough knowledge of the banking system from his earlier career enabled him to speak out powerfully in 2013 against payday lending, which was a great passion of mine as well. He launched a campaign in favour of credit unions as an alternative. The annual Archbishop’s debate, under his watchful eye, has seen him raise the following areas: banking standards, soft power, reconciliation, education, British values, housing, freedom of speech, migration and families. His book Reimagining Britain, published in 2018, set out his thoughts on areas for specific social change and reform, including social care, housing and families—issues on which he and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York founded policy commissions. The most reverend Primate also has extensive knowledge of overseas issues through his travel around different countries and has made informed contributions in debates on foreign policy, including on Sudan, Afghanistan and Israel and Gaza. Of course, in the 12 years that the most reverend Primate has been the Archbishop of Canterbury, he has offered spiritual counsel to six Prime Ministers and overseen many significant royal events, presiding at the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III and delivering the sermon at the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He has also baptised Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, and married Prince Harry and Meghan at Windsor in 2018. During his great speech on housing this afternoon, the most reverend Primate spoke about affordability, which I will come to later. He also spoke about community and building places for people, a topic that is very close to my heart in terms of planning. I thank him for the way that he has steered the Church Commissioners, if it is possible to steer them—he says no; I thought that was probably the case—because I believe there are extraordinary opportunities now regarding Church land. The Government welcome the opportunity to have that dialogue with the Church Commissioners. There is no doubt in my mind that in my parish, as elsewhere in the Church, safeguarding is infinitely better than it was before his time as Archbishop. While we understand his very honourable reasons for resignation, I know that this House and the Church will miss him greatly. I can do no better than to quote his own words back to him: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten”. I thank him. I turn back now to the important issues of our debate. The causes of England’s housing crisis are multiple, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, but among the most important is our failure to build enough homes for decades. We see the impact of this in rising rents and housing costs, with 35% of private renters and 43% of social renters living in poverty after they have met their housing costs. There are, as many noble Lords mentioned, 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, while millions of low-income households are forced into insecure, unaffordable and, far too often, substandard private rented housing. We know that homelessness can have a devastating impact on those affected. At the sharpest end of the crisis are the 123,000 households, including a record 159,000 children, in temporary accommodation. This is unacceptable. Everyone should have access to a safe, decent, affordable and secure home. The sheer scale of the housing crisis demands a radical response. That is why this Government have committed to delivering 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, including the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. It is why we are committed to a new generation of new towns, and it is why we will get back on track in Britain by ending homelessness. Both my noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, spoke about homelessness. I will speak in more detail on homelessness later on, but it is why we will produce a long-term housing strategy in spring 2025. We know that addressing these issues will take some time, but we have taken the first decisive steps and are committed to taking the long-term action needed to tackle the scale of the challenge we face and to get Britain building. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, of both my and the Secretary of State’s intention to create a revolution in social housing. The noble Baroness made the point that I often make: we must stop conflating the terms “affordable” and “social” housing. They are different things. We will be asking local planning authorities to consider the tenure of the homes that they are allocating as part of their planning processes. I am grateful for the support of the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for the work we are doing, but the housing crisis we inherited has given us an enormous task to tackle. He raised the issue of capacity for building in the system. I answered that in my response to an Oral Question earlier today, but there is a great deal of work going on to build that capacity and we are very grateful that the industry itself has produced £140 million to help start tackling the skills crisis. I thank my noble friends Lady Warwick and Lord Hain, the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Young, Lord Shipley and Lord Hollick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for comments and questions on housebuilding and housing supply. We know that our commitment to building 1.5 million homes is an ambitious one, but we are already taking action to ensure we can deliver it. Only historic levels of housebuilding can begin to drive the changes we need to see. We have already announced the new homes accelerator to unblock stalled housing sites and have committed to a new generation of new towns. A critical part of that building is reforming our planning system, which too often holds back development. We have already taken steps towards reversing the damaging changes to the National Planning Policy Framework that had undermined our growth ambitions. We aim to publish the new framework by the end of this year. I am told that that will be before the Christmas Recess, so let us keep our fingers crossed. It will include updating the standard method, reintroducing mandatory targets, releasing more green and grey belt land, where it meets our golden rules, and seeking views on a “brownfield passport” to ensure development on brownfield sites is straightforward to approve. We are also giving local authorities the capacity support they need to drive forward the delivery of new homes. At the recent Budget, we announced over £50 million of new spending to expedite the planning process by recruiting an additional 300 planners and boosting local planning authority capacity to deliver the Government’s wider planning reform agenda. Next year, we will introduce a planning and infrastructure Bill, which will play a key role in promoting economic growth, unlocking a new scale of delivery for both housing and infrastructure across the country. Alongside reform of the planning system, we must also see reform in the market. The current speculative development model, referred to by many noble Lords, dominated by a few big builders, has led to slow build-out and lack of competition. We will support SMEs, work with industry to grow mixed tenure models and ensure we have the right skills and supply chains. I know the Secretary of State has already spoken to Homes England to request that it breaks down some of its developments into smaller packages that are suitable for SMEs. At the Budget, we provided an additional £3 billion of support for SMEs and the build-to-rent sector in the form of housing guarantee schemes, allowing developers to access lower-cost loans and support the delivery of tens of thousands of new homes. Our commitment to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation is a critical part of our housebuilding strategy. At the Budget, we made a down payment of £500 million to the affordable homes programme in 2025-26, increasing the annual budget to £3.1 billion, the biggest annual budget for affordable housing in over a decade. We will go further, with details of new investment to succeed the 2021-26 affordable homes programme to be provided at the spending review. Alongside our direct investment to build new homes, the Government have launched a consultation on a new long-term social housing rent settlement of CPI plus 1% for five years. That will give the sector the confidence to build tens of thousands of new social homes. We are reducing maximum right-to-buy cash discounts to pre-2012 levels, allowing councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales. That should ensure that we are investing in new supply to replace the stock sold—something that, in my humble opinion, should have been done right from the start of the right-to-buy programme. I am afraid I just do not agree with the assertion of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we intend to put quantity before quality, that we are ignoring the importance of community and place making or that we are not providing for diverse needs. This Government’s reform of the planning system, reforms to private renting and leasehold, remediation acceleration action plans, the future homes standard, et cetera, are part of what we are doing to just get on with the job. I turn now to some of the specific points made by noble Lords. I am sure I will not get to all of them in the few minutes I have left, but I will try to cover as many as I can. I think I have covered the points on housing supply. Key points were made by my noble friend Lady Warwick, the noble Lords, Lord Shipley, Lord Young, Lord Best and Lord Jamieson. The Government have already taken swift action to kick-start the delivery of the 1.5 million homes, including the NPPF consultation, the accelerator and the new towns task force. We are seeking views now on a “brownfield passport” to ensure that suitable projects get swift and straightforward approval for development. We are working together with industry, including housing associations, local authorities and developers, to unlock economic growth and give the country the homes it needs. Working with mayors and councils across the country, we have set up a dedicated interministerial group, which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs, bringing together Ministers from across government to develop a long-term strategy that will put us back on track to end homelessness. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke powerfully about the affordability of homes, and that is a key issue for us. Our work in tackling the housing needs of the country includes making housing more affordable for all. The most sustainable long-term method of achieving that is to help people into home ownership and increase the supply of housing generally; that is why we will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housing. However, we recognise that new supply alone will not address the issues of affordability that face us today, and that is why we are strengthening rights for those in the private rented sector. In addition to increasing the supply of new homes of all tenures, the Government are committed to helping more people into home ownership by introducing a permanent, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme, and to giving first-time buyers the first chance at new home developments. My noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Young, raised the issue of the planning reforms that are taking place. Local plans will have to identify specific housing for special needs, such as supported housing, and the package announced in the Autumn Budget is the next step. To meet these planning requirements, we will provide billions in government support and certainty for investors. I am hopeful that the new National Planning Policy Framework, which will be published shortly, will have the potential to deliver the uplift in housebuilding that we need. On social and affordable housing, points were raised by my noble friends Lord Hain and Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who gave out the killer fact of 2 million homes being sold under right-to-buy, which is a shocker—it would not have been, of course, if they had been replaced, and that is the point. The Government want everyone to have a place to call home and are taking the necessary steps to fix the economy so we can get on with building. We have introduced the changes to planning policy and have set out the details of an immediate one-year cash injection of £500 million to top up the affordable homes programme, which will deliver up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes. On social housing targets, the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, referred to the commission on social housing. Many of the points raised by the commission have already been considered by the Government and steps are being put in place to tackle the issues it raised, and we are very grateful for the commission’s work. My noble friend Lord Hain and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, made points on the right to buy. I have already set out the Government’s plans to change right-to-buy. It is an integral way for social tenants to get on the property ladder, but the point is that councils are losing homes to right-to-buy more quickly than they can be replaced. We are also looking at removing discounts for new homes, so, when a new home is built, there has to be a period of time before it qualifies for right-to-buy. There were some very powerful contributions to this debate on homelessness, and I am very grateful to all those who made them: my noble friend Lady Warwick; my noble friend Lord Griffiths, who gave a powerful personal testimony on homelessness; the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who spoke about rural homelessness; and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the noble Lord, Lord Hardie. I say to the right reverend Prelate that we do want to encourage rural exception sites and we will be looking more closely at that. The housing strategy is not in draft yet, but it will come out in the new year. I am sure that the point that he made about it having specific issues in it on rural housing will be taken on board, so I thank him very much for making that point. There is no doubt that homeless levels are far too high, and that this has a devastating impact on all those affected. We want to take a long-term approach to this, working with mayors and councils across the country. That interministerial group which the Deputy Prime Minister chairs will bring together Ministers from across government to put us on track to ending homelessness. We have put in additional funding of £233 million for this for next year, and that increased spending will help prevent rises in the number of families in temporary accommodation. Not only is it a tragedy for those families in terms of their family life, but it puts a huge burden on local authorities, as we have heard. We are also tackling the root causes of homelessness, which is the delivery of further housing. With the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Bill to Parliament, we will abolish Section 21 no-fault evictions, preventing private renters being exploited and discriminated against. In my experience as a councillor, Section 21 was one of the biggest causes of homelessness, so we need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, mentioned the fact that mental health services are very important in dealing with people who find themselves homeless, and I agree. In my own town, we put together a housing-first package which includes support for complex needs. We need to look at areas of good practice and encourage others to participate in those. The noble Earl also spoke about veterans, and I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s announcement on veterans recently. I knew I would not get through all the points. Great points were made on temporary accommodation, on older people and homelessness and on youth homelessness, and particularly on rough sleeping and poverty from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I will write to all noble Lords who I have not been able to respond to in the debate. But that is an indication of just what a wide-ranging and thorough debate we have had this afternoon, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. I ask noble Lords to please be assured that our Government are committed to tackling this issue. We have made huge strides since we assumed office, but we will not be able to solve the housing crisis overnight. In the long-term housing strategy and the homelessness strategy, both to be published next year, we will set out our vision for a housing market that works for all, and how we will get back on track to ending homelessness. Together, we will ensure that everyone has a place they can call home. I thank all noble Lords for their support in doing that, and particularly thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for instigating this debate this afternoon.

16:23:00

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very comprehensive and indeed very encouraging response. I will not attempt to summarise the debate—indeed, my noble friend did it rather splendidly. But I do not think the Government can be in any doubt that there is support on all sides of this House for speedy action, as well as for a long-term strategy. I simply join in the tribute that she made to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the work he has done, and I think that was reflected in all the comments made around the House. I must say that I was very impressed: I almost wondered whether I should come up with a quote. But, having been given them from as wide a range as Aeneas, Nelson Mandela and Eliza Doolittle, I felt that would be inappropriate. We have had a passionate and very committed debate today, with some extraordinary personal contributions. They root us in the reality of people’s lives and what we are really trying to deliver here, which is homes and communities. I thank everybody who has made a contribution in this debate and I beg to move.

Motion agreed.