Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I will speak to the clause stand part notices and to Amendment 16 from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, to which I have attached my name. Just for clarity, for the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, his reasons and mine for signing the Clause 6 stand part notice are—I think we can safely say—directly opposed. As I have made clear all the way through, all my clause stand part notices are because I was seeking to end right to buy entirely with Amendment 1. I think that is made obvious by my signing of Amendment 16, a buy-back right to buy. This is also known as “buy the supply”, and my honourable friend Siân Berry in the other place has been a particular leader in this area, not surprisingly when you look at Brighton and Hove, which has lost almost a third of its social housing since right to buy came in in 1980. If you look at the figures across England, by the end of this Parliament we are talking about more than 1.3 million homes lost. What we want to do is get some of those homes back—those homes that were very often built with high-quality build standards, good-sized rooms—a better provision of housing, I dare say, than pretty much anything we are likely to build today. We want to get those homes designed for social housing back into social housing. I note also that my honourable friend—who was previously a London Assembly member, and a member of its housing committee—urged for us to be able to buy back those lost homes. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to families in temporary accommodation. Of course, this is a huge issue. It is everywhere, but particularly so in London, where we are seeing often very vulnerable families shipped out of the city very far away to produce huge profits for private landlords in far-flung parts of the country. If London could buy back the supply, that would be potentially transformatory, either for permanent homes or for being able to buy back temporary accommodation. It is also worth noting that my honourable friend—for those noble Lords who have not seen it—has a zine out urging us to buy the supply. It is a lovely, cheerful cartoon publication that noble Lords might like to look up. I want to make one other comment about the state of where we are now. We have, of course, a struggling housing market. Broadly, the average price of homes in England did not change from March 2025 to March 2026. In fact, there has actually been a decrease in the price to May. I note one market commentator said that we were in the strongest buyer’s market we have seen in years. Surely this is a great time for local councils to be able to be the buyers, to start to reverse some of the damage that has been done. The structure of the amendment reflects the limitations in your Lordships’ House of what we can do in terms of directing the Government to spend money. I will put this on the record here to note that my honourable friend in the other place will be going further, but I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has given us a very good start.