Affordable Housing: Supply

I promised myself not to overload my remarks with figures, but there are a few which are inescapable in illustrating the scale of the problem. There are 1.2 million individuals or families on local authority waiting lists for social housing. More than 100,000 are in temporary accommodation. Over the 10 years to 2021, the completion of affordable and social homes averaged 50,000 a year. Critically, during this period, homes built for social rent—defined as 65% or less of market rent—fell from around half of that figure to one-fifth. Affordable rent—80% of market rent, which represents a still intolerable burden on the lowest-income households—has become the largest part of this broad sector. The remaining category of shared or low-cost ownership is likely to be way out of reach for those lowest-income households.

In 2019, the Social Housing Commission calculated that more than 3 million social homes needed to be built within 20 years to meet needs—that is more than 150,000 a year. The Bramley paper for the National Housing Federation and Crisis made its own analysis. It reached a very similar figure of 145,000 per year. Is this mission impossible? The challenge, should we accept it, is to triple the level of affordable and social housing built annually, compared to that achieved in the past decade, and to ensure that, of the almost universally accepted total housebuilding target of 300,000 per year, 50% should comprise affordable and social homes, compared to the 25% in recent years.

Should we accept this challenge? Yes, of course we should. Let us unlock our inner Ethan Hunts and Ilsa Fausts and accept this challenge. If we do not, we condemn hundreds of thousands of individuals and families to a life of financial hardship, anxiety and distress. Most importantly, the provision of affordable housing contributes to the well-being, happiness and mental health of individuals and families who are otherwise living insecurely in overcrowded and substandard conditions, while paying a disproportionate share of their income for the privilege.

In addition, there is clear evidence of a wider economic benefit from improved productivity, better workforce participation, greater rates of innovation and, critically, improved provision of public services, in which so many lower earners work—which takes us back to where we came in. These economic benefits—GDP and tax revenue enhancement, and cost savings on temporary accommodation from reduced reliance on short-term agency workers, for instance—in the medium to long term at least mitigate the cost of increased investment in affordable and social housing. In the shorter term, though, there is inevitably an up-front financial cost, as well as the challenge of executing such an expanded building programme cost-effectively and as fast as possible.

I was thinking, “There is no silver bullet”. That reminded me of a consulting firm, a micro-McKinsey that I worked with in the past, rather wonderfully named by its founder the Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company, with the emphasis on the word “machine”. The point that the founder was making in a drily humorous way was that looking for a random large single silver bullet to solve a problem is vanishingly unlikely to be successful, whereas establishing a system or process that identifies and utilises a number of smaller silver bullets is far more likely to be productive.

Central government, local government, housing associations and the private sector each need to play their part and, if necessary, need to be empowered to do so. It should be a true mixed economy. Each party may act alone in some cases or in partnership in others. Each has challenges. Local authorities rightfully aspire to the central role that they have had historically, but the restrictions on their ability to reinvest the proceeds from right to buy over the years have significantly reduced their financial firepower. The increase from 40% to 50% retention recently announced by the Government is welcome, but why not 100%?

The reduction in building activity over the past 45 years, exacerbated by the vicious cuts in local government funding by Conservative or Conservative-led Governments since 2010, has left many local authority housing departments atrophied. It will take time for them to be rebuilt, even under a more enlightened central government regime, particularly as planning departments also need strengthening in many cases.

Housing associations are limited in their capacity to build new homes by their inability to raise equity funding, limits on their gearing levels and the capital investment required to maintain their existing stock. They can still contribute directly and significantly to the 150,000 new affordable homes a year that are needed, but also, vitally, as partners, particularly to private funders and providers and as managers of homes owned and/or developed by others.

The private sector encompasses landowners, commercial developers, the construction industry and specialist, mostly private affordable housing funds and investors. I will touch on landowners in a moment but will otherwise speak briefly about the specialist funds. If there is not to be a Trussian renouncement of all discipline in public borrowing, which your Lordships will know would not happen under my right honourable friend the shadow Chancellor, private equity capital is needed to play its part in achieving the challenging targets for new homes—not just the capital but the development skills as well.

PFI and private equity’s role in the utility industries, notably the water industry, understandably cause concern at the prospect of private capital playing a larger part in the affordable housing sector. We should learn from this history. In the water industry, there has been a toxic combination of a disgracefully weak regulator and unfettered, aggressive maximisation of financial returns by some private equity houses. On the one hand, the Government and Parliament must ensure that the regulator for social housing is strong and robust. On the other, the specialist funds need to behave in a responsible way. I believe this is not a forlorn hope in the light of these funds’ culture and central position in the ESG and sustainable investing movement. We should also ensure that net zero is embedded in all they do.

Finally, central government must drive and co-ordinate all of this, and provide the funding for the grants to local authorities, housing authorities and private funders alike, which are needed to deliver the homes at affordable and social rents. It has to be recognised that much of these subsidies will be for the southern half of England, given that this is where the gap between market and affordable rents is greatest. This needs to be reconciled with levelling-up ambitions.

Should landowners provide more of that subsidy through the imposition of more ambitious Section 106 conditions without choking off the supply of land? That would require cross-party agreement about a long-term policy to remove the incentive for landowners to hang on and hope that a future Government will introduce a more advantageous regime.

A friend with long experience in both the housing association and private sectors said to me this week, “Remember the two Harolds”. Not the two Ronnies, but the fact that only under Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson in recent history have there been material state-driven expansions of affordable housing. My right honourable friend the Leader of the Opposition may not be called Harold, although though he is a strong admirer of the Labour Harold’s career. I am confident, though, that he and my right honourable friend Angela Rayner would become honorary Harolds if a Labour Government were elected. I am sorry that we will not have the opportunity to hear today from many latter-day Macmillans from the Back Benches opposite, but I hope the Minister’s reply will make up for that.

To rebalance the market between the private rented sector and the social rented sector, the commonly acknowledged solution is to increase the supply of social rented housing—that is, homes that are let at often half the market rents, according to a formula used for most existing social housing. Several studies have concluded that a figure of around 90,000 such homes should be built every year. Secretary of State Michael Gove told the Lords Built Environment Committee on 6 February this year that

“we need to aim to have a net addition of 30,000 homes for social rent every year”.

This target from the Secretary of State may sound unambitious, but it would mean far greater numbers of social rented homes than have been added in recent years.

However, without major changes, there is no possibility of achieving either the overall government target of 300,000 homes a year or, within that, 30,000 social rented homes. Indeed, rather than there being a growth in supply, output in both the private and social sectors has been falling significantly. Higher interest rates and inflation of building costs mean that social housing grants fund fewer new social rented homes. At the same time, it has become necessary to channel more social housing investment into the existing stock, rather than funding new supply. This follows a number of high-profile cold and mould cases, most notably causing the death of little Awaab Ishak.

With the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 and more powers for the Housing Ombudsman, the housing associations and the stock-holding councils are rightly spending more on retrofitting their existing stock. The result of these trends is a big reduction in the pipeline of new affordable homes. One major housing association, for example, has self-imposed a two-year moratorium on any new development. Overall starts on site by social landlords are expected to fall by more than 30% this year. Meanwhile, because the private sector housebuilders, faced with lower profits, are postponing their developments, fewer new social rent homes are being achieved through planning gain contributions from the developers.

What can be done? I did not declare earlier my housing and property interests, as on the register. A starting point must surely be to have a national housing strategy. This would comprise an agreed vision for achieving the quantity and quality of new and existing homes that we all seek, with a road map to take us to this destination. Following the Church of England’s report Coming Home, a number of noble Lords have been supporting the Church’s subsequent efforts to help create such a strategy. We suggest the establishment of a statutory national housing committee, modelled on the Climate Change Committee. This would provide a long-term mechanism that holds government to account, irrespective of changes of Housing Ministers—we have had 16 in the last 14 years—and Secretaries of State, monitoring progress toward the agreed goals. It would be wonderful if this concept found its way into party-political manifestos.

In the short term, there is no escaping the need for government funding, principally via Homes England and the GLA. Most immediately, more investment is needed for property acquisition and modernisation to switch private rented sector properties into social housing and reverse the shocking rise in temporary accommodation spending—but more fundamental change is needed.

The Labour Party has made bold statements for growth through developing “grey-belt” land and building a new generation of new towns. For initiatives such as these, any Government will need to find ways of making available funding that goes much further and securing a better-resourced planning system. To that end, I advocate adoption of the model spelled out by Sir Oliver Letwin in his excellent report which, disgracefully, has been sitting on the shelf since 2018. The Letwin approach involves ending the dependence on the oligopoly of volume housebuilders, whose interests seldom coincide with the public good, and shifting the initiative for all major housing projects to locally established development corporations. These corporations—which are less susceptible to local opposition—would have CPO powers to acquire land at a price that reflects the content of a master plan that embraces the necessary infrastructure, green space and facilities. The site would then be parcelled out to the appropriate providers, including social landlords, SME builders, community land trusts, providers of retirement housing et cetera. By capturing the uplift in land value for the public good, this model makes possible affordable, quality homes at scale.

In conclusion, I therefore suggest that the way forward begins with establishing a statutory national housing committee, just like the Climate Change Committee, which sets out the path to agreed goals and provides the continuity and persistence to see the job done. To get there, as well as the necessity of more public investment—which is handsomely repaid in lower health, care and welfare spending and improved productivity—there are also bigger and bolder changes of approach to planning and land acquisition that could make a huge difference. It is certainly worth trying, against the backdrop of human misery that the severe underprovision of genuinely affordable housing has created.

In every part of the housing market, there is insecurity, unaffordability and distress. There is also a decline in physical conditions, which I will come on to. At the same time, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, household formation has continued apace and, according to the figures that everybody has accepted in recent years, we need to build or provide, one way or another, 300,000 new homes a year. We have never attained anything like that figure—the figure that we have from time to time hit 200,000 or slightly over is an exaggeration, as it is a gross figure, not a net one, and does not take account of demolitions.

It has been the case that, for most of the last century, social housing has provided a positive, safe and affordable alternative. Regrettably, that has declined over recent years. There have been a number of scandals in both local authority and housing association accommodation, with mould and damp, unhealthy conditions, and repairs not being addressed. This has made social housing less attractive.

In the days when both the numbers and standards of local authority social housing were improving and setting the benchmark for good housing associations, the relationship between local authorities, social landlords and the construction industry were very different from what they are now, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, has implied. On the one hand, local authorities had substantial in-house staff and architects, and had their own direct maintenance staff in most cases; they were likely to be the main procurers of house construction work in their areas. On the other hand, in the days of Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, the construction sector was highly competitive locally, with a dozen or so SMEs—mainly large family businesses—competing for their local authority’s work. Nowadays, as the noble Lord said, most architect departments and direct works have been dispensed with, and even a competent clerk of works does not exist. The housebuilding sector is dominated by large housebuilders and large developers, which means that the balance of power within the housebuilding market has changed dramatically. We need to do something about that.

There are people who blame the planning system for the lack of new housing provision. It is not perfect, but we do not want to uproot the planning system entirely, because it protects the environments in which people live and the provision of decent housing. It is not the planning system that is the major problem but, frankly, the fact that even when planning permission has been granted there are probably up to a million homes which have not yet been started. It is that, rather than blockages in the planning system, which means that the supply of new homes has been so diminished. The reduction of environmental standards or the loosening of planning restrictions will not speed up that process unless we address it directly, by insuring that starts are made in those areas.

We also have to recognise that the usual figure for new homes completed is the gross figure, not the net figure. In other words, it does not take account of demolitions, particularly those of social housing. I have argued before in this Chamber that the predilection of many developers, and in some cases planning committees, to demolish and rebuild both public and private estates, rather than take the option of retrofit—which is both environmentally more sensible and likely to be much less socially disruptive—is a problem. We need to make sure that, in all major planning permissions, the alternative of retrofit is always considered.

We will need more social housing, and most of it will come from local authorities. As I have said, local authorities have been sadly diminished, financially and in their expert staffing, since their great days. At one point, I thought—or was nearly persuaded—that the idea of having hived-off arm’s-length companies owned by local authorities would help provide social housing, but we have seen local authorities of all political persuasions have their fingers severely burned by going down that road. We need something closer to what the noble Lord, Lord Best, was arguing for—regionally based multi-local authority area corporations to become the major procurer within the housing market and therefore face down the housebuilders in their intentions to, for example, keep the level of social housing low in any mixed development, and then halfway through the project say that they can no longer afford it and get it reduced yet further. That phenomenon must be removed from the housing market.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Best, that we need a new housing strategy. Whether that is a housing committee, a housing corporation, or a housing Cabinet committee, I do not mind, as long as we have an overall approach that can face up to all these problems.

For many families and key workers, as the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, has said, it is impossible to find a place to live that they can both afford and be safe and secure in. We need to make a change. I hope the Labour Government will make that change. Whoever is running this country in the next few years, the housing problem for the least secure people must be urgently addressed.

My responsibility as I see it is to not just be my own voice, or that of my party or my country, but to be a voice of my generation. My own experience is of growing up on a council estate in Llanfaes in Ynys Môn, as a young carer to my dear late father: battling on a daily basis the kind of prejudices that too many of our fellow citizens still face; trying to find hope and build a future for myself in a world where the odds seem to be stacked against people like me; and burning with anger at the deprivation to which my community had been subjected.

These experiences are not unique to me. My generation has a particular experience, a particular perspective, which deserves and needs to be reflected in this place. We grew up through the global recession at the end of the first decade of this century. We grew up in the shadow of terrorism, at home and overseas. We grew up with the internet and social media. We grew up in the age of devolution. We grew up with the ever-growing threat and reality of climate change, and mankind’s destruction of the natural world. We grew up at a time of increasing and often aggressive polarisation in our politics, in the age of Trump and Brexit, and we became adults in the age of Covid. During our short lifetimes, we have seen inequality grow and poverty deepen.

Despite our protests, we see world leaders still to respond adequately to the climate and nature crises. We see wealth inequality all around us. We see high debts and housing costs, low wages and unstable work. That is why I am particularly pleased to be making my maiden speech during this debate, and I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, for moving this Motion today.

In August last year, the Wales Expert Group on the cost of living crisis noted that rising rent and mortgage payments are affecting households’ disposable income, and that low-income households are particularly affected. It also said that the full impact of poor housing security is yet to be felt, and that by May 2023 the number of people placed in temporary accommodation, including children, had increased by a third on the previous year. The housing and homelessness charity Shelter Cymru meanwhile says that:

“Young people are not on an even footing with their older peers. They tend to have lower incomes and are more likely to be earning minimum wage, and/or working zero-hour contracts. They are penalised by the UK welfare system, which limits their entitlement to housing benefit, and are routinely discriminated against and exploited by landlords and letting agents when attempting to rent in the private sector”.

Housing is, of course, a devolved subject area, but social security is not. It is the interplay of these two dimensions that is of critical importance. Data shows that, by the spring of last year, around 67,000 people in Wales were on social housing waiting lists, and almost 7,000 were in emergency accommodation. By October of last year, almost 90,000 were on waiting lists, and over 11,000 were in temporary accommodation, of which almost 3,500 were children. Of course, many of us in Wales know all too well the difficulty that so many people—especially young people—face in buying a home in their own community, particularly in the rural and coastal parts of Wales where the Welsh language is the strongest. For these reasons, it is imperative that the voices of young people are included in your Lordships’ deliberations.

Since the announcement of my nomination to this place, I have been quite open in my view that, although I believe that Welsh voices are necessary here now while this place has a say in the laws that govern Wales, I do not believe that an unelected upper Chamber has a place in a modern, democratic society. While I may be in the minority in your Lordships’ House in holding that view, I would not be doing my job if I did not continue to express it. Nevertheless, it is my intention to be constructive in my contributions here, and I look forward to offering my perspective and sharing my voice in your Lordships’ deliberations, and I look for your support as I do that.

In closing, I thank my supporters—my noble friend Lord Wigley and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett—and all those noble Lords and Baronesses who have taken the time to welcome me and offer me their advice since my arrival. I have been touched and humbled by the welcome that I have received, and I also offer my thanks to Black Rod, the clerks, the doorkeepers, the security services, the police and the many and various members of staff, both party and parliamentary, who have all been unfailingly warm and courteous in the welcome that they have given me.

I thank my friends in the other place and I look forward to working alongside them in Wales’s interests. Finally, I thank my family and friends for the love and support that they have given me. I am the person I am because of them, and I can only hope to do them proud. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

We have to look at this in the context of how genuinely affordable housing rent—what has been termed a “genuine living rent”—can be calculated. The general rule is that households should not have to spend more than 30% of their monthly income on rent. That is in a broader frame of what is known as the 50:30:20 rule: households should be able to spend 50% of their income on their needs and 30% on their wants, and have 20% available for paying off a debt or saving. There are very few households in the UK today that are in that situation—the situation that we should actually aim for.

If we look at some figures from the National Housing Federation, we see that it estimates that by the end of the next Parliament, one in five households—more than 4.8 million households—will be forced to spend more than 30% of their income on rent. That is an increase of 30% on the figures now.

Of course, the other end of this rather disastrous housing pipeline is rough sleeping. We all see this every day—we see it on the streets around your Lordships’ House. There has been a 20% increase in rough sleeping in the last year, and 280,000 households in temporary accommodation.

I have done the depressing stuff; I want to focus on the positive—just a hint of what is possible. For this I am going to Lewes District Council, and Fort Road in Lewes. In 2020, the council took a disused council office building there and replaced it with an award-winning block of 13 council-owned apartments, providing safe, spacious, bright apartments with a very high level of building performance and a renewable energy strategy. Designed using fabric-first principles, they have a large solar photovoltaic array, with 13 individual domestic batteries. That means that the electricity costs are estimated to be 60% below the normal level. The house also, importantly, has fire safety features which are currently not required but are anticipated for the future, with fireproof materials and cutting-edge suppression systems. These are not only affordable quality homes but are very safe to live in—something we need to think more about.

I point to this because it is not simply a one-off. I go to announcements made by the Green leader of Lewes District Council, councillor Zoe Nicholson, who in March pointed out how the council has purchased brownfield land around the Peacehaven golf club and is hoping to also develop a council-owned brownfield site in Ringmer. Twenty-four homes will be built on the Peacehaven site and more homes on these other sites. The council is also looking at old garage sites: 11 locations that could see 45 new homes.

I focus on that because both the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Whitty, focused on a centralised, national approach to solving our housing crisis. There is no doubt that resources and changing regulations and rules need to come from the centre, but I argue that we need to resource local authorities to provide the housing they need in their local community according to their local desires, rather than having something enforced from the centre.

The need for change in the centre comes to one particular issue that I want to focus on in this speech, which is right to buy. That has been one of the enormous privatisations, continued over decades under Governments of different hues, that has done great damage to our national social structure and our communities, and continues to do so. I spoke about the exciting things happening in Lewes; similar things happened a few years ago in Norwich, in Goldsmith Street, where ultra-low-energy Passivhaus homes just outside the city centre were built in 2019 and won the RIBA Stirling Prize for architecture. However, after three years, the tenants have the right to buy, and it now looks as if Norwich will lose a number of those brilliant social homes to the private sector.

Of course, this has happened to 2 million homes since 1980. Norwich has more than 4,000 people on the waiting list, yet there and all around the country, we are still losing more social homes than we manage to build. I have a question for the Minister: what is the current rate of loss of social homes to right to buy? I also have a question that perhaps noble Lords on the Labour Front Bench might like to address: why do they not plan to abandon this disastrous policy of privatisation?

I come now to some of the other costs. I should perhaps declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Councils are spending £1.74 billion a year on temporary accommodation. This situation is a large part of what is driving councils towards bankruptcy. On LGA figures, 10,896 homes were sold in the last financial year under right to buy, and only 3,447 were replaced—a net loss of more than 7,000 homes. Since the scheme began, £7.5 billion has been handed out in discounts through right to buy.

I am not sure that many people know about this, but it is worth highlighting that, in desperation, Wandsworth Council in south-west London is offering £120,000 help to tenants to buy a house anywhere in the UK—or anywhere in the world—provided it is not a council property. The council is so desperate to save its homes that it is offering people this very large sum of money. I note that four in 10 of the homes sold off under right to buy are now owned by private landlords. I talked about the cost of temporary accommodation, but we also have the massive cost of commercial-level rents on what were council homes for which the state is having to pay housing benefit. This is, clearly, a disastrous policy.

We knew that from the start because the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, back at the origins of this policy, said that

“no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the State”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/1/80; col. 1443.]

That is, under that ideology, a description of reducing the size of the state, but of course what we are actually doing is making all our communities and our societies much poorer.

What we should be doing is moving towards a housing policy that treats homes as comfortable, affordable, secure places to live, not primarily as financial assets. So my final question to the Minister is about community land trusts, co-operative housing and other alternative tenure models. I absolutely champion council housing, but there are other models that can protect communities from the government policy of right to buy. What are the Government doing to encourage them?

It is clear that a change in approach is needed. There are currently over 8 million people in England who cannot access the housing they need. For 4.2 million of these—around 1.6 million households—social rented housing would be the most appropriate tenure to address that need. Our failure to deliver the homes we need is breaking down our communities. It is driving families and key workers into financial hardship, and away from work, schools and support networks.

Some groups of people are feeling this crisis even more acutely. Black, Asian and minority ethnic households, and disabled people, are more likely to experience homelessness or live in poor-quality, unsuitable or overcrowded homes. Women’s Aid points to the lack of affordable housing as a primary barrier to those escaping abuse.

Yet, despite our severe housing emergency, the supply of genuinely affordable housing is falling. Last year, 29,000 social homes were sold or demolished, and fewer than 7,000 were built. Many households are now forced to live in expensive, insecure and often poor-quality homes in the private rented sector.

Most damning of all is the impact of this crisis on children. A record number of children are homeless and are forced to live in inadequate temporary accommodation, including bed and breakfasts. This disrupts their education, affects their life chances and puts huge pressure on families, as the exhibition I referred to so graphically illustrates. Some 138,000 children are currently living in temporary accommodation, and this is estimated to rise to 310,000 by 2045 without government action. These figures are a stark illustration that a radical change in approach is urgently needed.

I hope the Minister will not respond to this debate simply by asserting the work that the Government are doing, a lot of it good, and the number of homes currently being built. Whatever that number, it simply is not enough. I urge the Minister to focus on the key question in her response: how do we increase supply?

For those at the sharp end of the housing crisis, we need to build 90,000 new social homes every year to keep up with demand. In 2010, the amount of grant funding available for new social housing was cut by 63%. The consequences of this decision have been dire. Does the Minister agree that we need a new, long-term and substantial grant programme that can be used more flexibly to deliver new social homes, regenerate and refurbish existing homes and acquire more existing homes where appropriate?

Does the Minister agree that we need bold planning reforms to deliver the highest possible level of affordable housing, incorporating new, large, mixed-tenure communities? My party recently announced proposals to allow grey-belt development, which includes 50% affordable housing. This is a welcome step in the right direction.

Does the Minister agree that government funding and fiscal rules need to be reviewed to incentivise long-term public investment in social housing? I must also ask the Minister to comment on the need to invest in a skilled workforce if this ambition is to be realised. Does she agree that the Government must ensure that there is resilience within the supply chain and workforce while unlocking innovation in the construction industry, which could include exploring new technology and supporting new methods of delivery?

There are huge economic benefits to be gained. We need to move away from the outdated idea that social housing is a drag on the public purse. In fact, it is a long-term driver of sustainable growth. Every £1 invested in social housing delivers at least double that of wider economic benefits. Recent research from the National Housing Federation and Shelter, carried out by Cebr, showed the positive economic impact of building social housing. These include savings on housing benefit, reduced homelessness, increased employment and improved healthcare.

I have said before in other debates that building social homes that meet local need can offer stability in people’s lives. This helps people to get and keep work, and reduces the long-term scarring effect that being homeless or in temporary housing can have on employment prospects. It also supports children’s education and the mental and physical health of families.

I support the Archbishop of Canterbury’s report in its call for an end to “short-termism” in housing policy and its advocacy for decent homes across England. As the report states, everyone should have a home that is comfortable and safe. Sadly, and to our shame, decades of piecemeal and short-term policy have left us with a failing housing system that is affecting our health and well-being and costing our country billions. It is also holding back our economy and making communities unsustainable.

The housing crisis is a complex problem. It will take long-term political commitment, investment and collaboration across government and with partners across the country. I echo the call from the noble Lord, Lord Best, reflected in the Church of England’s report, for a housing strategy committee, modelled on the Climate Change Committee or the Low Pay Commission, which will hold the Government to account.

Does the Minister agree that, to meet the scale of the challenge we face, there needs to be a comprehensive and policy-led long-term national plan, agreed in its fundamentals across political parties, with the Government in partnership with local authorities and the social housing sector? Perhaps then we can begin to solve this worsening housing crisis.

What are we doing to close that awesome deficit? Not much—local authority and housing association build in recent years has been around a modest 20,000 units per year. A huge increase in private renting, which has doubled over two decades, has taken the strain, often with poor quality, underinvested housing.

Many factors, most of which have been mentioned, stand in the way of increased homebuilding, including planning restraints, land hoarding and shortages of skilled labour. Estimates vary on the scale of the overall housing gap—the gap between demand and supply—but all are in the range of 1 million and 2 million homes. That is a measure of just how far behind we are from where we need to be. Despite the recent improvements in housebuilding, it is a very long journey to get anywhere near to filling that gap. The noble Lord, Lord Barwell, put the issue simply and bluntly, and I think everybody here would agree, when he said that building more of every level of housing is what is needed.

I echo what a number of others have said in this excellent debate so far. We need to take out a clean sheet of paper and build a new housing strategy from scratch. What we have been doing in recent decades has simply not been working. We need to create a plan developed from a national, not regional or local, perspective. This is not for housing in our precious green belt, of course, but near where people work. We need a strategy for housing close to services, which is well-insulated, with decarbonised heating, and of beauty—something which the UK has achieved brilliantly again and again in our history and must do again.

We will not solve our housing crisis overnight. It will take 10 to 15 years of systematic hard work to do that. However, we will not resolve it at all without, as others have said, speedily framing a comprehensive national plan that addresses and deals with the many causes of our most pernicious national problem.

I hesitated long and hard before putting my name down to speak in this debate, because I have never owned a house in my entire life. I have lived in tied accommodation, and so many of the issues mentioned here have never been within my direct experience. But I have three children, and these issues lie very definitely within the ambit of my children’s generation. They themselves have come up with mixed responses, and abilities and inabilities, as to how to fashion a housing future for themselves.

It is admittedly a very complex area. National plans and strategies have been mentioned again and again, and they have to take in many diverse and often conflictual strands of experience. I received, as I am sure we all have, briefings ahead of this debate—for example, from Women’s Aid—about not forgetting the needs of women who have been domestically abused, who will have housing needs. Then there is the news that there is no guarantee that the ban on no-fault evictions can be implemented before the election. That took us all by surprise too, and affected radically the way we were thinking about a particular piece of legislation before us at the moment. Then the Residential Freehold Association came in, all guns firing, to have its own particular interest defended too.

It has all left me feeling, in agreement with those who have said it already, that we need some kind of bipartisan national effort for what is a universal need. It is no good having my plan versus your plan; rather, we need to be thinking together to achieve an outcome that would and can, as is the only way, benefit the world at large.

I have a couple of personal examples, which I use not because of the personalities involved but for illustrative purposes. I have been in conversation this week with a young person—although it is some time since I was young. Having graduated during the Covid years, and looking to his future career and the rest of it, he has received a very good offer of a further degree in one of our prestigious universities. But as he says, unless he can find funding, with £48,500-worth of debt already, how does he do it? Some £3,500 of that debt is the interest accrued on the debt last year—what is that all about? We are eliminating this from the frame of young people’s possibilities and needs, by the punitive way that these things happen.

I shall perhaps a bit more personal, if noble Lords will permit me. My parents divorced when I was a child. I still have at home, and I thought to bring it, just to wave it around, the letter from my father’s lawyer that ordered my mother and her boys out of the family home at one week’s notice. It was October. The winter was nigh on. We had nowhere to go. In the little locality where I lived, various neighbours took us in for a week or a few days at a time until my grandparents, who were caretakers in a factory, decided that they would share the three rooms that they lived in with my mother and her two boys, so I was raised in one room in a brickyard. I mention this not to alarm people or to draw attention in some kind of pathos moment, but because I can never forget my mother’s feelings, which were never expressed verbally, of panic, fear, depression, and—what the Centre for Economics and Business Research refers to as being the case for people who have gone through that—long-term scarring. Long-term scarring is what people who have been thrown on the garbage heap carry with them for the rest of their lives. I have to say that in my worst moments I give evidence of it myself. I feel that we must keep in view the needs at large of young people, marginalised people and those who have no hope or stake in society when we utter our fine words, analyse the statistics and form the resolve that as a nation we need to do better than we are doing right now.