Baroness Gill (Lab)

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, on securing this debate because for a generation across Britain the dream of owning a home has felt entirely out of reach. It is not because they lack ambition but because they have been trapped in an adversarial stop-start system designed to benefit speculators rather than communities. Having led housing organisations providing both social housing and homes for sale right here in London, I know first-hand the delicate balance needed to make a city liveable. I know that a healthy city needs mixed-tenure communities where social rent, private sale and affordable home ownership co-exist seamlessly. Our mission must be to structurally rewrite the rules of British housing to enable those families and others who want to transition out of renting permanently to do so. To understand how this Government are addressing this, look at how buyers were locked out. First, there was the deposit wall. Lenders routinely pulled high loan-to-value options during economic dips, meaning a young couple could work hard and save diligently only to find the goalposts moved overnight under the previous Government. I welcome that this Government solved this by launching the Freedom to Buy scheme, transforming a temporary set-up into a permanent government-backed guarantee. By removing the risk for high-street banks, we changed lending behaviour. Lenders now confidently offer 95% mortgages through all market cycles, meaning that if you can afford the monthly payments, a 5% deposit is permanently enough to secure your foundation. But fixing finance does nothing if buyers are left competing for non-existent supply. For a decade, the “why” behind the lack of houses was local political paralysis. Councils routinely bowed to pressure and scrapped housebuilding targets, choking the market. We broke that logjam by immediately reinstating mandatory housing targets and aggressively streamlining the planning rulebook through the updated National Planning Policy Framework. By introducing brownfield passports and opening underused grey belt land, we have removed the bureaucratic vetoes to clear the path for 1.5 million new homes. This Government are addressing the supply issue too. We have changed who gets new housing by establishing local priority windows. We have blocked overseas investors from buying up entire developments off-plan, ensuring that those new keys go to local families first. This is especially critical for our key workers—the nurses, teachers and first responders who keep our country running but are routinely priced out of communities they serve. For many of them, shared ownership was supposed to be the safety net but let us be honest about what has happened to it: high interest rates and volatile service charges have left many shared owners struggling. In response to this, the Government have injected new protections through the social and affordable homes programme. We have tightened regulations around optional fees, enforcing greater transparency on costs and backing the new Shared Ownership Code to protect buyers from financial hardship. We are also reforming the model so that it serves as a sustainable staircase to 100% ownership, not a dead end. Yet solving this crisis is not just about pouring new concrete or tweaking intermediate tenures; it is about better utilising all the homes that we already have. Right now, there are thousands of older citizens living alone in large multi-bedroom family houses who want to move closer to their children, grandchildren or wider family. They want a home that is easier to manage, but the heavy financial friction of moving stops them. I urge the Minister to look at targeted initiatives that the Government can prepare to help older home owners to right-size. There is data—from the Radix Big Tent housing commission’s landmark Resizing Rightsizing report—that indicates that nearly half of those over the age of 65 find the current stamp duty rates an active barrier to moving. This effectively locks up an estimated 870,000 underused homes across the UK. If we want to bring family-sized properties back into the active supply chain for the next generation, without laying a single brick, I ask the Minister to consider a tailored scheme that will help them to unlock a massive hidden housing supply.