Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy, and to take part in this debate about the delivery of council housing. It is a debate on a very important topic and I thank the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) for securing it.
Building more homes is a critical mission for anyone governing England and Wales today, in order to make the dream of home ownership a reality for even more hard-working families. With a record number of people homeless, and with 177,530 children and 49,120 adult households in temporary accommodation, clearly the priority must be to build more council homes. That is what the Opposition want to happen, but that is what the Government are currently failing to do.
Let us take a look at the Government’s own data. Just 208,600 net additional dwellings were added in England in Labour’s first year of power. That was a 6% drop from 2023-24, which was the last Conservative Government’s final year in office. Of these, 190,600 were new homes, a fall of 8,000, around 4%, on 2023-24. Taken together, the Government are on track to build around 400,000 fewer homes than they promised at the election, meaning yet another broken promise made to the British people. The Government know that—the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), admitted this on national media.
That poor showing on homes directly impacts the pressing issue we are debating today, which is the delivery of council housing. We heard the Prime Minister proudly making his summer promise of the comeback of the council house, but what little details we do know on that policy show that the money he has earmarked would equal just 15,494 homes a year, barely 5% of the Government’s annual housing target. That is in exchange for another £79 billion added to the housing subsidy bill, despite the fact that the UK already spends the most on housing allowances as a percentage of GDP of any OECD country.
One might have been forgiven for thinking that the aptly-titled Social Housing Bill introduced earlier this year might have been the answer to get local authorities, the Government, industry, and the nation building again. However, as is becoming a theme in this Government, we are left severely disappointed by the reality. The Government have presented a Bill to the House that fails to build a single new council house. Instead of making social and affordable housing sites viable and pushing developments through the pipeline at pace—the Government love to use that phrase—to get people off the street and help children into permanent homes, they have chosen to use up parliamentary, Government and civil service time on an ideological assault on right-to-buy. It is a shameful course of action, and far from what the 1.34 million people on the social housing wait list need.
Even worse is that the Government know this Social Housing Bill will not deliver new homes. According tousb data from the Minister’s own impact assessment, in 2026-27 the pre-November 2024 baseline was 8,050 right-to-buy sales, leading to 5,450 replacement homes. The document goes on to show that if this Bill were to pass and the legacy impacts were to wind down in the period of 2031-35, annual right-to-buy sales would fall to around 1,100 a year, with around 1,450 replacement homes. That means that by their own analysis and admission, the Government will be overseeing a housing system in which there would be 4,000 fewer new social homes funded every year. Moreover, research conducted by the House of Lords Library shows that only a net 3% of social homes become available each year to new tenancies. That means that around 90 additional homes will be available for a new tenant each year instead of 5,000.
The Bill would not only mean no new homes built, but would actively prevent them from being delivered. The Government really must refocus their efforts on building more council housing, and that requires serious reforms to the viability of sites for social and affordable homes. We are halfway through a Parliament in which we have spent much time debating the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, various updates to the national planning policy framework and the aforementioned Bill, yet after all of that we are still left without a clear route to building more homes. Projections from the Government show they will have managed to build just 26% of their target in 50% of the time.