Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I begin with an apology for not taking part at Second Reading. My fellow Green Peer, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, took part but is unable to be here today so we are doing a little tag team effort. I am afraid that I will not be here on Wednesday, but I expect that she will be back on Report. I also begin with a little bit of explanation, because the groupings today are technically complicated. Clause 1 would abolish the right to buy. To introduce that involves me opposing various clauses in some subsequent groups. I am opposing Clauses 1 to 9. This is all for technical reasons. I have not pulled this out as a separate group. That is how it was arranged. That is why we have this slightly odd-looking arrangement—it is for technical reasons. Clause 1 provides for the abolition of right to buy. This is heading in the direction that the Government propose for the Bill but going further. Others who are opposing other elements in the Bill are seeking to reverse the Government’s direction, but to be clear: I am aiming for us to go further. The case for abolishing right to buy is not some theoretical proposal. Scotland and Wales have already done it successfully. We have a central question here: should social housing be treated as a long-term public asset or continue to be sold off during a housing crisis? In Scotland, right to buy ended on 1 August 2016. It has been estimated that since then, 15,500 social homes in Scotland have been saved for the public. That is a lot of housing—a lot of households living in their community and children being able to continue to go to the same school. The sort of stability that social housing has provided has continued in Scotland, but here in England we continue to see families torn out of their communities and a continual turnover. In Scotland, Dr Mary Taylor, the CEO of the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, said: “SFHA is delighted that all forms of the right to buy policy in Scotland have now come to an end and this hasn’t come a moment too soon. Right to buy has had its day and has no place in modern Scotland”. Wales came somewhat after Scotland with the Abolition of the Right to Buy and Associated Rights (Wales) Act 2018. The Labour Welsh Government said that these sales were increasing waiting times for social housing and reducing the access to affordable housing, which is a statement of the obvious. Ministers also argued—I acknowledge that the Government are doing something about this—that councils and housing associations had the confidence to build without fear that they would immediately lose that housing. The Labour Welsh Housing Minister at the time, Rebecca Evans, said: “By protecting the stock of social housing in Wales, we are ensuring it is available for the long term to provide safe, secure and affordable homes for the people of Wales”. This is no longer an experiment. It is established policy across much of the UK. We discussed the negative impacts of the right-to-buy policy extensively at Second Reading. I do not intend to go over all the same ground but will highlight a couple of points. I draw first on the public wealth aspect of this. A report from the Common Wealth think tank, Wrong to Sell: How Right to Buy Gave Away Billions in Public Wealth, described right to buy as one of the largest giveaways in UK history. It has led to a situation where one in six private tenants in England rents a former local authority home, with much greater cost and often worse maintenance, without the democratic oversight that you get with council housing. Considering the overall value of that, the report estimated that homes sold by English local authorities through right to buy are now worth £430 billion in 2024 prices. This is only part of the great privatisation, but this estimate says that this a bit more than the £400 billion that we have lost by selling off public land into private hands. This has also meant a structural shift towards higher-cost private renting. We know how much the cost of private renting is affecting so many households—so many communities—particularly the young. There is also increased long-term housing benefit expenditure. I hear from my right a lot of concern about the welfare Bill—this is one of the very significant drivers of it. There is also the exposure to market volatility.