National Empty Homes Strategy
Thursday, 17 September 2026
Contributions
Question for Short Debate
Asked by
Lord Bird
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the potential of a national empty homes strategy to help to end homelessness.
Lord Bird (CB)
As someone who lived in social housing and whose eldest daughter was a squatter in Brixton and who got into social housing through squatting empty buildings and being involved in the squatting movement in the 1970s, I am very interested in using resources that are never used correctly. In the early days of the Big Issue , when we set out on the road not only to get people off the streets but to get them into housing, we found that one of the big stumbling blocks, under every Government, including the wonderful Government in which the noble Lord, Lord Young, then Sir George Young, was Minister of Housing, was that there were so many legal reasons why we could not grab hold of the thousands of empty units of social housing that could be used for social good. When we move forward 35 years—because it was our 35th anniversary last week—we come to the realisation that we have this absolutely brilliant means of helping the Government to meet their target of providing as many people as possible with social housing, but the stumbling block is planning, local authorities and ownership. There is a plethora of reasons why we cannot just say, “Here is a person in need”, or a family in need, “and here is a property in need”, in the sense that it is empty, it is vacant, it is not carrying out any social purpose, and melding them together. There are so many impediments to this actually happening. When the Big Issue started, 35 years ago, we were very involved in the empty homes movement because we could see, not just from our own experience, that this was a completely wasted resource and that society should grasp it and do two things. One is to house people, and the other is to get rid of waste, get rid of redundant property, and get rid of the idea that there were people out there who, as much as they needed housing, could not use the opportunity to take over these properties. In the early days, the Big Issue was a pain in the rear. We were doing things and occupying places, we were shouting and we were demonstrating in Parliament Square and all sorts of things—but very little has changed, if you look at the problem. Whatever Government come in, they always tell you why they cannot achieve the simple thing of putting need with resources. I will be campaigning at the various conferences at the end of the month and into next month to do something very simple around the problem of social housing. We know that, over the past 40 years, nearly 2 million houses have been removed from the social sector and sold on, because Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes wanted to spread middle-class values and property ownership into the working classes. I agree with that. I hate the idea that we still have a working class, 35 years after the Big Issue and 80 years after I was born in the slums of Notting Hill, where everybody seemed working class. I am disappointed that we have not dismantled our class system. I can see why this Government and many others, including Tony Blair’s, have not done that. By the way, the idea of people buying their social homes was not a Conservative one. I had an argument with the present Lord Speaker, and he upbraided me when I said that this started in Callaghan’s Cabinet, which looked at the idea of buying social housing and was doing a big event—and we, as a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist group, did our best to stop that Labour Government becoming too Conservative. The point is that we have a problem, and I would love any help that we can get in bringing together need and resource. What can we do? Forgive me, but, while I love this Labour Government and Andy Burnham, who I have known on and off over the years, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—they are all brilliant, and we are all singing off the same hymn sheet—they all point to what happened to the last Government and the one before that and the one before that and say that there are imponderable reasons why we cannot just put need with resource. I should say that, last night, I was out celebrating, and I did not get back to my hotel until about 5 am. I was celebrating that my son, who works with me, is going off to India, and celebrating my daughter. It was a wonderful opportunity, but I will not take up too much of our time with that. But here I am, to ask what we can sensibly do—and cut the blether and the impediments—to match need and resources. There are so many resources available in this country. I believe that one of the problems for every Government is that they have never been able to step back and do a social audit of the advantages and disadvantages in society, and grasp the opportunity. I am calling for us to get behind the idea that there is enormous resource, but every Government always put their hands in the air and say that they cannot do it, or can do only a limited amount about it. Let us end that and solve this problem. Need and resources—put them together.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, this seems a strange, intimate place for us to have these formalities, but I am delighted to add my words to the debate on the Question before us. One of the first things I want to do is use this occasion to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for the extraordinary work that he has done in his own extraordinary way over so many years. If that goes on the record as part of my contribution to the debate, I will be very pleased indeed. The Library briefing gives all kinds of information; I will not repeat it here because others have read it too and we can see it for ourselves. One of the difficulties is defining exactly what we mean by an empty home—that is, a home with nobody in it. For how long and under what circumstances has it been empty? What factors are involved? They are not just all of a kind. I did pick up from the briefing some words that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, may be comforted by. It suggests that the Government are “setting out plans to ‘make it easier for empty homes to be brought back into use and expect[ed] councils to use the powers we’ve already given them to ensure that this happens’”. It also said that the Government “noted that local authorities can access funding associated with bringing empty homes back into use”. As an opening statement, as often happens with this kind of issue, I feel the need to start from the other end of the spectrum, having been homeless. I have never owned a home. I live in a little two-up two-down terraced house provided by the Methodist Ministers’ Housing Society. That is the extent of any expertise I might bring on the question of home ownership. I remember a key moment in my early life. When I was 10, my mother suffered domestic abuse of an awful kind, which I remember graphically to this day. She had been pursued through the divorce courts and declared the guilty party. She was evicted from the family home with her two small boys, and we were homeless for an indeterminate amount of time—I was too young to have counted or kept a record. Neighbours put the three of us up. Finally, my grandparents, who were caretakers in a factory and lived within its confines—they had two rooms plus a scullery, and they were very proud of their scullery—said, “Well, we’ve got two rooms. You’d better have one of them”. I was brought up in one room in a factory in Burry Port, so I inevitably come at the question of homelessness from my own experience of being homeless. I spoke in a debate on another issue about the smell of panic. That was about school meals and my mother having to feed her two boys when the school holidays were on. I still associate those words with my memories when I remember, as I do, the smell of panic in my body and my jeans as my mother asked yet another neighbour if they could put us up for the night. These are not things you forget. In 1952, at 10 years of age, I faced stigmatisation, eviction and homelessness. We had been living in one room in a brickyard within a factory. All of that was part of my very being as I grew up, and I cannot for the life of me address this issue without that coming to the surface. As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, noted, 35 years ago, the Big Issue first came out. It has been 40 years, just now, since I took charge of the west London homelessness mission at Seymour Place, which was open 365 days a year. I slept in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the homeless. I tried to get as close to them as possible to see the range of issues that end with homelessness. Therefore, talking about how to bring assets into use makes most sense to me when I think of how far away they seemed from me in my day. I passed the 11-plus and entered a bourgeois world—the bourgeoisie and I were now one. I visited so many of my friends’ homes in my teenage years, but never once could I invite any one of them to mine. Therefore, it seems such a natural thing to ask that a way be found to deal with the problem and crisis of the moment, especially if lazy and unused assets are in question. We must find a way to do that. The matter has become a little complicated for me, because I have just had the most wonderful holiday in Burry Port, at 8 Silver Terrace, which is just round the corner from where I was brought up. It was the most bustling place; it was our Tiger Bay in those industrial days. But now, the whole of Silver Terrace—20 terraced houses—has been taken over by the Airbnb industry. We were there on that ticket and enjoyed it wonderfully, but it has become such an empty, ghost-like experience, at the hazard of whoever is living in houses there at the time. There was no community—and nor could there be a community—and so I became aware of 20 houses in a row that could be used in a different way, if we found a way to do it. For all that, it is a human right for people to have a home—a roof over their heads. I have lived long enough in the company of homeless people to know what wretchedness casts them into the street. If it combines with personal failures of their own, it can be absolutely disastrous. So I am very happy to speak in this debate. I had hoped to speak a little lower down the list, so that those who know the facts and figures and the trends and policies could get in first, but here I am, having to be autobiographical right at the outset, to set the tone. For me, it is a matter of still being able to smell the panic that comes from not having a roof over your head and being desperate to do my little bit to make the world a better place where people do not have to endure that degree of degradation and destitution. Expecting the Committee’s kindness and forbearance for such a note to be struck, I now yield my place to others with facts and figures and with tendencies and policies.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green) (CB)
My Lords, despite my suggestion that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, could sit down at the beginning of proceedings and the informality of the Room, we are standing in this Room unless one cannot.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, with his very moving personal story of the impact that homelessness had on him as a child. It is worth placing on record that 175,000 children today are living in temporary accommodation and going through what the noble Lord described. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on his choice of subject and share his frustration that so many homes lie empty when there are so many people in housing need. Like the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, I pay tribute to his work on tackling homelessness over 30 or 40 years. The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, took me back about 30 years to the first time I met him. I visited the new distribution centre for the Big Issue in inner London—I think it was legally occupied then—and made a speech, which probably lasted more than eight minutes, commending his initiative. After that, when I was Housing Minister, I always bought the Big Issue when I met a seller on the streets. In those days, it cost 35p; today, it is £5 and still a bargain. However, I did not always read the editorials because, when I did, I found some searing criticisms of the Government’s housing policies. As such, I tended to give the content a miss. I will briefly mention three initiatives that I launched over 30 years ago to deal with empty homes. I do so not to seek commendation but to make the point that this issue has been with us a long time and many Ministers have had a go at tackling it. In 1992, I launched the Empty Homes Agency—now called Action on Empty Homes—in response to exactly the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, including the sheer waste of homes lying empty. At that point, it was 700,000. That was driven forward by one Antony Fletcher, who launched me into a series of turf wars with my ministerial colleagues because it was the Department of Health, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office that were the guilty parties. But we also worked with local authorities—they were in many ways easier to get on with—and we got their numbers of vacancies down by 40,000 over a five-year period. Action on Empty Homes is alive and well, doing valuable work under the leadership of Rebecca Moore and Chris Bailey. That was one initiative. Another initiative that I launched in 1991 involved flats over shops. At that point, there were 100,000 empty flats over shops. We embarked on a three-year campaign to bring them into use, putting £25 million on the table for local authorities to adapt the schemes, in many cases providing separate entrances to the flats above the shops. Again, that had a big impact. Many of the solutions either existing or suggested by noble Lords involve an element of compulsion—empty dwelling management orders, CPOs, works in lieu, enforced sale—or they involve public expenditure. Being a Conservative, cautious about increasing public expenditure and about more regulation, the third approach I tried was different: making the owners of empty properties a deal they could not refuse, but with no compulsion and no extra public expenditure. It was called Housing Associations as Managing Agent, or HAMA. The deal was that a local housing association would say to somebody who owned an empty property, who did not want the hassle of renting and did not want the risk of a tenant who did not pay or who might trash the property, “We will manage the property for you. We will find a tenant, we will guarantee the rent, we will return the property to you in the same condition as we found it, and we will remove the tenant at what point you want the property back”. If the property needed some work, and some of them did, the housing association would do the work then recoup the money from the rent. The rent that the owner received was below market rent because it was a fantastic deal, as there was no risk. The lower rent saved money for the housing association or the local authority, which might otherwise have had to pay a market rent for a similar property. We launched five pilot schemes with housing associations, and I recall going to the first property in Paddington, in conjunction with the Notting Hill Housing Trust. I was then either sacked or promoted, and I lost sight of the scheme. I did some googling yesterday, and it seems to have sunk without any trace at all. The Minister, whose heart I know is in the right place on homelessness and empty properties, might just ask her office to look through the records and see whether this is something that might be resuscitated. If it is, I would like to go to the first launch of it.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, it is great to be back speaking again. It has been some time since I have made a contribution in this House; I have had some challenges. It is wonderful to speak on a topic secured by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I join the chorus of congratulations on his 35 years tackling homelessness, dealing with successive Governments and being frustrated. We are now at the beginning of a new Government, and the noble Lord is giving huge praise to them and the current Prime Minister—he sees huge opportunities. I am sure the noble Lord is drawn to the fact that this Prime Minister has made it his very first pledge to see the end of rough sleeping. He wants to ensure that everyone is in by Christmas, which is a very noble endeavour. However, I hear echoes: I have heard this before. In January 2009, when I was council leader in Hammersmith and Fulham, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, summoned me to the Broadway centre in my borough, in Shepherd’s Bush, to launch his campaign to end rough sleeping. At the time, Boris set the ambitious target of ending rough sleeping in London by 2012. Some years later, that pledge has been met by neither him nor successive mayors. When he was Prime Minister, he made the same pledge to end rough sleeping in England. Unfortunately, we did not see the end of rough sleeping by 2024, and we are not going to see it by 2027, by which time Theresa May wanted to end it. These challenges are here for some time, and it is important to come up with concrete policies that address them. This is a timely debate. I am interested in data and statistics, and the numbers are not good. The number of homeless people, whom we owe a duty to help, has increased from 269,000 in 2019 to a record 330,410. My noble friend Lord Young mentioned the number of children in temporary accommodation. The number of households in temporary accommodation has hiked from 95,000 to 135,000. The number of rough sleepers is now at a record level, at 4,793 in autumn on a single night, up from 2,443 in 2021. The numbers are going up, and it is not for lack of housing support. The amount of money going on direct housing benefit and the housing element of universal credit is ratcheting up all the time. It is now at £39 billion, up from £27 billion in 2018-19. It is right to set challenges. It is right for the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to set the challenge of bringing need and resource together. It is right for the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, with his personal experience of homelessness and “smelling the panic”, as he put it, to ask how we bring in assets to find a way through this. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Young went back into the far reaches of history to come up with specific policies that might make a difference. I would like to add a few to the three that he mentioned. First, if we are to do something about addressing the challenge, we have to recognise the problem that we are dealing with. I would zero in on one number, not many numbers. Let us look at the number of homes that have remained empty for more than six months; I think we can all agree that bringing those homes back into use is the policy challenge. The number remained stable for five years from about 2012 to around 2017-18, but it has now risen from 248,000 in 2022 to 309,000, so it is up by about one-third since those stable years around a decade ago. Let us focus on that. Why are those homes empty? Let us be clear: they are not all private homes; a number of homes in social housing remain empty for long periods of time, and there can be very good reasons for that. The problem of long-term vacancies is irrespective of tenure. We have only anecdotal data about this, but sometimes it is due to a lack of funding to refurbish and renovate a home. Sometimes people invest in and hold an asset and do not use it, just to see a return on investment—the so-called buy to leave. Other times, family members die and there is no clarity about who the beneficiary is, so a home remains empty. Whatever the reasons, let us think of specific policies that can help. This is where I turn not to the 1980s and 1990s but to the coalition Government. They initiated the empty homes programme, which involved a direct amount of money, not a general housing grant, which was successful in bringing more empty homes back into use. So the first thing I would call for is a dedicated pot of money, recognising that we are all in favour of long-term empty homes being brought back into use. Secondly, if we agree that that is a good thing, can we have a progressive, far-reaching and generous Treasury that realises that there is no benefit to it of a long-term empty home? It is not securing any tax revenues. How about thinking about not charging VAT on long-term empty homes for refurbishment? That is the same as a new build. With a new build, no VAT is payable. What about removing VAT specifically for long-term empty homes? There might be homes that are vacant for more than six months. Perhaps we could create a threshold for that. Why not look at stamp duty? You have to pay that if you transfer ownership of empty homes yet, with new builds, no stamp duty is payable. So, specific things can be done. I ask the Minister if she would consider these three things: can we go back to the idea of a dedicated pot of money to bring long-term empty homes back into use? Can we come up with creative mechanisms that incentivise? A carrot is often better than the stick, as my noble friend Lord Young has said. Let us look at whether there can be a waiving of VAT or stamp duty to bring this resource back into use for social good.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, I am not particularly comfortable talking about my own experiences of homelessness, and I am not going to, but the comments we have heard today prove that it can happen to anybody. I am patron of a brilliant charity in Watford, New Hope, where we know that all too well. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for introducing this debate and for his lifelong persistence in keeping homelessness firmly on the agenda. I, too, start from a position of agreement and entirely share his aspirations behind the call for a national strategy. Like all of us, we also share your frustrations. At a time when we have over 100,000 households living in temporary accommodation in England and councils are spending extraordinary sums simply managing the consequences of homelessness, it is entirely right that we look at homes standing empty. The costs are eye-watering. I am not usually one for statistics, because I can never remember them, but some figures are too striking to ignore. We are spending £2.29 billion a year on temporary accommodation, while more than 300,000 homes stand empty. Frankly, that is bonkers. We are paying a fortune to manage housing failure, while leaving one of the most obvious solutions gathering dust. We are also reliably informed that for the public investment needed to deliver one new-build home, we could apparently bring 5.6 empty homes back into use. If any investor were offered that return on their money, they would snap it up without a second thought. Why are we not doing it? There is also a human cost. For a family living in temporary accommodation, homelessness is not an abstract policy principle or problem. It is a child travelling miles to school or changing schools. It is a parent trying to hold down a job while living out of a suitcase or losing that job. Families are then cut off from the communities and support that they probably used to rely on. There is a neighbourhood cost, too, and you do not hear much about that. Empty properties become eyesores; they attract vandalism, fly tipping and anti-social value, and they certainly undermine pride in your neighbourhood. So, I am very much with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on the destination, but perhaps I disagree a little about the route—perhaps I am more in tune with the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh. In my former role as an elected mayor and now here, one of the lessons I have learned is that it always looks much simpler from Westminster than it does at the other end of the telescope. Bringing back empty homes sounds relatively simple and wonderful, and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, made it feel that way. However, in practice, it does not work like that. When I first entered local government, I assumed an empty home was an empty home, but years later I realised that it came with a back story—complications, all the things the noble Lord has said. Usually on some poor officer’s shelf there is a lever arch file several inches thick, and he is trying to wade through it. Properties can be tied down in probate. Owners cannot be traced. Buildings require extensive repairs and families disagree over inheritance. Councils can spend months and sometimes years untangling legal and practical obstacles before any progress is made, and that is where there is a real will. I am proud to say we took on this agenda and the flats above shops agenda from the noble Lord, Lord Young. One instance comes to mind that really was a lightbulb moment for me. A housing officer spent nearly a year pursuing action against a long-term empty property. I had had a petition and everything about it. Notice had been served, everything had been followed but just as we got a court date, the owner, having been notified of the court date, returned. The utilities were off, the property was virtually uninhabitable, but he went round the neighbours, persuading them that he was going to come back and do it up. The judge was convinced—we were not—and the council’s action ground to a halt. I still remember the look of absolute disbelief and total disappointment on that officer’s face. It was very demoralising. That experience taught me a lesson. The problem is not always lack of powers, as I believe was said; it is often the gap between having the powers and being able to use them effectively. We already have a range of powers, and it might be interesting to see what the noble Baroness feels about how we can beef those up. The problem is that they are slow, complex, resource intensive, and require a lot of evidence-gathering, legal processes and definitely officers’ time. Time is important, when councils are facing immense financial pressure, enforcement teams are often smaller than they once were and capacity is restricted, if there is any capacity at all. At the same time, nobody should pretend that 300,000 empty homes are irrelevant to the housing crisis. We should be careful not to think that one more bit of legislation will do the trick. The noble Lord outlined very practically, I have to say, things we could do. I ask the Minister: first, could we make it easier for councils to identify and contact owners? Far too much time is spent on this. Secondly, could we look at speeding up the probate process, which seems very slow, particularly with homes getting trapped following bereavement? Thirdly, we should perhaps adopt a more use it or lose it approach. I am not advocating confiscation, but where a property has stood empty for years, owners should occupy it, rent it out or sell it, or at least demonstrate that they are making genuine progress towards this. A few nights on a camp bed should not be enough to undo many months of hard enforcement work. But fourthly, we need to help owners who genuinely want to do the right thing. Not every owner is a villain. Some have inherited property they cannot afford to repair, some are elderly, and some are simply overwhelmed by the costs involved. That is why I was interested to read the case studies from the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and to learn about the work being undertaken in Greater Manchester. I think the common focus there has been practical delivery, working across a larger patch, and dedicated officers working alongside lease and repair schemes to bring homes back into use and, at the same time, reduce temporary accommodation. What appeals to me about that approach is that it is encouragement and enforcement. It is carrot and stick. Some owners need a helping hand; some, quite frankly, need a firm boot. Good councils know the difference. Empty homes are not the whole answer to homelessness, of course not, but they are part of the answer. I support the noble Lord’s intentions wholeheartedly, but my plea to the Minister is: what can be done now to improve the effectiveness of the powers we already have?
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for raising this very important debate and for his impressive work helping homeless and vulnerable people over 35 years—I must admit that it shocked me when I heard that it was 35 years. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, shared with us his experiences, and I thank him for that. My father was a bus conductor, and I experienced as a youngster my parents being able to buy their social housing, so I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on that because, at the end of the day, many people such as them stayed in their properties; they were long-term tenants, they did not go anywhere, so actually the homes were not lost as a result of them buying. On the doorstep of No. 10, the Prime Minister pledged to end rough sleeping by Christmas. I do not think anyone in this room would disagree with that pledge, and we would all love to see it happen. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham recalled his interventions to address the issue many years ago, and I want to continue in that vein. I remind people about the previous Government introducing the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which came into force in 2018. That included the duty to prevent homelessness, moving it to the other side, and the duty to relieve homelessness into the statutory housing duty. It saw 740,000 families helped into housing and long-term accommodation between 2018 and 2024. I saw the benefit of that scheme as a council leader. I know my colleague here, my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh, who it is lovely to have back again, served us well through that period. These things made a big, big difference, but the previous Government’s rough sleeping initiative provided over £2 billion to help rough sleepers find work, access services and secure accommodation. It was a long-term fix; it was not just a revolving door. What is more, they allocated £11 billion to the affordable homes programme from 2021 to 2026, and met the promise to build 1 million new homes over the last Parliament. However, when the new Prime Minister’s pledge was made, there was no detail on how it would be achieved, how much it would cost or where the money would come from. These are not just technicalities to be ironed out further down the line. Furthermore, it is not the first time that the Prime Minister has made the pledge. He did the same as Mayor of Manchester, where the number of rough sleepers proceeded to rise. He set up the Bed Every Night scheme and then a Housing First scheme. How exactly will the Get Everyone In for Christmas scheme differ from and work better than those two schemes? Is the national plan to end homelessness, published only last December by the Government, still being followed, or has that now been shelved? In addition, the Prime Minister has called for the biggest council housing programme since the post-war period, then backtracked on his proposal for the Government’s £10 billion 10-year affordable homes programme to be spent entirely on social housing. Can the Minister clarify exactly how many social homes they are planning to build? During the passage of the Social Housing Act—of course, many of your Lordships in this Room were on that journey—we on these Benches made constructive proposals to enable the building of more social homes and reduce waiting lists. For example, an estimated 148,000 social homes may be fraudulently occupied; that is a big theme that I have and an issue that I feel needs resolving. The Government themselves estimate that 5,800 social homes may be illegally sublet through short-term letting programmes, and we heard some comments earlier about some short-term lettings. Yet in 2024-25, there were just 476 evictions for illegal subletting. When there are people out there on the streets in genuine need, this is unacceptable. Those are British people for whom the welfare state should be there. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify this Government’s plans, how they will be funded and exactly what the Government will do to achieve the numbers. I look forward to hearing her response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for opening this debate in his usual powerful way. I echo the tribute that other noble Lords have paid to his fantastic work on homelessness and rough sleeping over many decades. The noble Lord has an enormous record of supporting those who have to sleep on our streets or who are facing homelessness, as the powerful testimony from my noble friend Lord Griffiths demonstrated. I also welcome back the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh. I remember meetings with him when he was leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, and it is great to see him back. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for all her work with the Watford homeless charity—she does marvellous work—and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his constant contributions to housing. Today’s debate has shown our shared determination to tackle homelessness and make better use of existing housing stock. There is never any argument about that among any of the political parties. Everyone should have a safe, secure and affordable home, and we should make the best possible use of the homes we already have. But there is still work to do. Our Government inherited a profound homelessness challenge. Rough sleeping and households in temporary accommodation have more than doubled since 2010. As my noble friend Lord Griffiths highlighted, one of the issues causing this is that there are people fleeing domestic abuse. There are many issues, and this Government have had to introduce a raft of legislation to start tackling the causes and finding solutions to the homelessness problem. The situation is unacceptable, and we need urgent intervention. That is why we have invested more than £4 billion for homelessness and rough sleeping services over the next three years, including funding for our national plan to end homelessness and the rough sleeping programme, which is certainly not in abeyance, I would say in response to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. We are investing £950 million through the local authority housing fund and offering the biggest boost to social housing in a generation through the £39 billion social and affordable homes programme. Preventing homelessness fundamentally depends on having enough suitable homes. That means building new homes and, of course, making the best possible use of those we already have. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, is right about right to buy, and our recent Social Housing Bill is starting to action the loss of social homes. We have not decided to abandon right to buy, but we have said that when a social home is sold, we must build a replacement. That is why we have decided that 100% of the receipts from those homes should go back to councils, and that new homes that councils build should not be sold for 35 years after they have been built, so that councils have a chance to recoup through the rent the money spent on them. This brings us to the role of empty homes. Homelessness and empty homes are distinct challenges, and bringing an empty property back into use will not always provide a swift solution to those in immediate need of housing. But where we can bring previously empty properties back into use, it can provide temporary or settled accommodation and help to relieve pressure on local housing markets. The noble Lord, Lord Young, mentioned a number of initiatives from local government and housing associations. These continue to evolve and I see them all the time when I go around the country visiting our local councils. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for bringing this question before the Committee and for highlighting in his speech the frustration felt by everyone in this sector and by everyone who cares about housing that we have empty homes, sometimes long-term empty homes, at the same time as we have people sleeping on our streets and an enormous temporary accommodation bill, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. There are around 303,000 long-term empty homes in England. The Government want to see more of these homes brought back into use. That brings me to the proposal at the heart of today’s debate: a national empty homes strategy. Let me first be clear that our Government share the objective of the noble Lord, Lord Bird; bringing empty homes back into use can provide homes for people who need them, support regeneration and help to relieve pressure on local housing markets. But recognising the importance of the issue does not necessarily mean that a new national strategy is the right response. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, identified, empty homes arise for many different reasons. Properties vary in their condition, ownership and the cost of bringing them back into use. Local housing pressures and property markets also differ considerably. A single national approach could, therefore, be overly prescriptive and may not reflect what will work in each area. It could create additional reporting and administrative requirements for councils, which would in itself draw resources away from the practical work of identifying empty homes, engaging owners and returning properties to use. We already have national strategies that address the wider challenges to which empty homes contribute, including our National Plan to End Homelessness . Crucially, councils are already taking action. They are best placed to understand why homes are empty in their areas and to decide which course of action will be most effective. Many councils already have their own empty homes strategies, reflecting local circumstances and priorities; I commend them and hope that those councils that have not yet considered an empty homes strategy will do so. The central challenge is, therefore, not a lack of recognition or another layer of strategy but making sure that councils can make effective use of the tools available to them and match the right intervention to the right property. For some empty homes, financial incentives, such as the council tax premium, may encourage home owners to bring their property back into use. Where owners are unwilling to act, stronger enforcement powers, such as enforced sale, compulsory purchase or empty dwelling management orders, may be used. As we outlined in the English devolution White Paper, we intend to strengthen the ability of local authorities to take over the management of empty homes. We will provide further detail in due course; I hate that term, but I assure noble Lords that in this case “in due course” means very soon. Where the objective is to use empty homes to provide accommodation for people who are homeless, funding is often required. Councils can access a range of funding opportunities for this purpose. Every part of the toolkit has a role. By encouraging, enabling or requiring more empty homes to return to occupation, these levers can improve the use of the existing housing stock, increase local supply and help ease wider housing pressures. I want to make some specific comments about funding because a number of noble Lords—everybody who spoke, actually, but in particular the noble Lords, Lord Griffiths, Lord Young and Lord Greenhalgh—mentioned it. Local authorities and registered providers can access funding, such as through the local authority housing fund or the social and affordable homes programme, to bring empty homes back into use. Both can use SAHP funds to purchase market housing for affordable housing, and bids are assessed on individual merit by Homes England and the GLA. The £950 million fourth round of the local authority housing fund is for councils in England to increase their supply of better-quality temporary accommodation. It also provides safe and suitable housing for some families, such as those on the Afghan resettlement programme. Councils can partner with registered providers to use LAHF funding to purchase existing properties, including empty homes; that is a big resource. In some areas, empty homes can help reduce reliance on expensive and unsuitable temporary accommodation by quickly bringing existing housing back into use. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, commented on the nearly £3 billion spent on temporary accommodation. We want to make sure that we return long-term vacant properties—empty homes—to occupation in order to increase the housing supply. This will vary from area to area, of course. The noble Lords, Lord Bird, Lord Griffiths and Lord Greenhalgh, referred to the rise in the numbers of children in temporary accommodation. It is an absolute scandal; it is unacceptable that those numbers are increasing. I should say, though, that the number of children in the most harmful form of accommodation—bed-and-breakfast accommodation—is decreasing each quarter. Since the peak on 30 June 2024, the number of families in bed-and-breakfast accommodation over six weeks has fallen by 75% to 1,000 households, as of 31 March 2026—but that is 1,000 households too many for me; I want to see that figure down to zero. This encouraging progress follows our £30 million investment over three years in the emergency accommodation reduction programme. I am running out of time so let me conclude by saying that I am sure that the purpose of this debate is to draw attention to the importance of empty homes. Let me be unequivocal for the noble Lord, Lord Bird: our Government believe that bringing suitable empty properties back into use is an essential piece of this puzzle. However, we believe that the most effective approach is to empower and encourage councils to act locally, supported by appropriate national powers and funding, rather than imposing what might appear to be a one-size-fits-all national strategy. We will respond formally to the policy paper sent by the noble Lord to the department. In closing, I thank all Members across the Committee for their very important contributions to this important debate.
Sitting suspended.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5409269.