The Week in Housing: Labour’s first King’s Speech

Good afternoon.

Wednesday saw the official opening of parliament and the annual King’s Speech setting out the government’s legislative agenda. The speech, written by ministers and read by King Charles, is the first under a Labour government in 14 years following its landslide victory in the general election.?

Alongside the speech, 39 draft bills were announced, which the government plans to introduce to “take the breaks off Britain”.?

Key to housing were the Planning and Infrastructure Bill , the draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill , the Renters’ Rights Bill , the English Devolution Bill, and the Hillsborough Law .?

The key announcements can be found here , and here is what we know so far about the bills .?

The government did not immediately ban Section 21 no-fault evictions as pledged, but abolition will be included in the Renters’ Rights Bill. This bill will also extend Awaab’s Law to the private rented sector.?

The government confirmed that new laws will be introduced to reform the planning system to speed up building homes “of all tenures”. A briefing document published after the speech said the proposed legislation will “speed up and streamline the planning process to build more homes of all tenures and accelerate the delivery of major infrastructure projects”.

The sector has broadly welcomed the announcements , but some did raise concerns about how affordable and social housebuilding is going to be funded.?

Ahead of the King’s Speech, and in the theme of the English Devolution Bill, new housing secretary Angela Rayner?offered to devolve housing to all county and unitary council leaders who currently have a devolution deal.

The plans cannot come to fruition soon enough, given the stark statistics that came out of the English Housing Survey this week. The figures showed that 512,000 households across the social and private rented sectors have experienced homelessness in the past few years.?

Matt Downie, chief executive of homelessness charity Crisis, urged the new government to use the next 100 days to establish an ‘office for ending homelessness’, “backed by the prime minister and sitting at the heart of government”.?

Activist Kwajo Tweneboa spoke to Inside Housing about his first book , out this week,?Our Country in Crisis: Britain’s Housing Emergency and How We Rebuild. The book is a call to action to fix social housing (and, while he is at it, fix the rest of the housing market).

Lloyds Banking Group unveiled a new investment model that proposes to repurpose government funding towards building new social housing, while reducing the cost of providing housing benefits.

The Social Housing Contract would provide a payment to landlords, additional to their rental payment, linked to homes being made available for social rent.?The model was detailed in a white paper released as part of the one-year anniversary of Lloyds’ social housing initiative.

Lloyds also revealed plans to redevelop parts of its estate and announced an additional ￡200m of investment into the housing sector.

Elsewhere, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) published a review of its consumer regulation work in 2023-24 , warning landlords that they “must take their responsibilities seriously and provide safe and decent homes for their tenants”. The review, which covers the year up to when the new, more stringent consumer regulation regime came into effect on 1 April, included nine case studies of social landlords breaching standards, all of which were councils.

The English regulator said the report provided “important learnings” for both councils and housing associations, which they can use to “strengthen their approach to delivering the outcomes” in its consumer standards.

It also emerged that the RSH is investigating small Merseyside landlord Ravenscroft Re-build Co-operative for potential “serious failings” in governance and financial viability.

The Housing Ombudsman highlighted 14 landlords which failed to comply with complaint-handling orders in the last quarter. The watchdog urged landlords to adopt a more “ethical complaint culture” as it reported the highest rate of non-compliance ever recorded.

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