Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)

My Lords, I support Amendment 117D, tabled by my noble friend Lord Evans of Guisborough, which is about a simple principle: if elected mayors are given strategic housing powers, receive billions in public funding and repeatedly fail to deliver, there must be proper accountability. This is an amendment that challenges the rhetoric. If you take the basket case which is London, the Mayor of London endlessly talks about housing figures and about delivery, has the cheek to use the word “record” quite regularly, yet has failed to deliver on a spectacular scale, to the point where the Government had to step in and ask him to change his figures on the amount of social housing he would ask for on any given development. That was a good idea by the Government, which is why I support this probing amendment. The housing need in London is around 88,000 units a year, as determined by the Government, yet in our best year recently we delivered only 31,000 units. The mayor’s own affordable housing target was 52,000 a year and he failed to hit that by a wide mark, getting to only 32,000. The affordable housing target under the current programme was originally 35,000 starts—just starts. Londoners cannot live in a start; a human being cannot live in a start. I think we need to start looking at completions: that is when a house actually becomes a home. The target was 35,000 originally, and that has been lowered to between 17,800 and 19,000, but in 2024-25, there were only 3,991 affordable housing starts. Again, I refer to the point that we need completions, not starts. That is only starts. Of course, the cost is paid by Londoners, who are living in poor and expensive accommodation. We have over 100,000 children living in temporary accommodation and 210,000 Londoners are actually homeless. I have been homeless. It is an absolute blight on your life. It is impossible to move forward if you are homeless. You need a base to operate from, and that base is commonly known as a home, so when we have mayors who have been given great support by Governments of all colours, they need to be brought before some kind of reckoning if they are not delivering on that. Again, I refer noble Lords to the basket case that is London. London cannot keep its place as a world-leading city if we cannot afford to house people here. If you are a police officer, a nurse, a factory worker, a youth worker—name any job that keeps this city going—you cannot afford to stay here; you are being pushed out. If you are an international employer, you cannot set up in London, because you know staff cannot afford to live in London. So, of course this amendment needs to be supported. Accountability must follow power. Amendment 117D asks the fair question: what happens when mayors fail repeatedly to deliver on social housing delivery? At present, the answer is “Not enough”. This amendment would allow the Government to examine proper thresholds on repeated failure over years and the level of required public support for a recall petition.