Lords Grand Committee
17 September 2026
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Chamber House of Lords
00:00 - 00:31
Speaker 1
Sit down, Lord Bird. I was told it was 12:50. Lord Bird, sit down. 12:50. Lord Bird, please sit down.
My Lords, if there is a division in the chamber while we are sitting, this committee will adjourn as soon as the division bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Question for short debate: the potential of a national empty homes strategy. The time limit is one hour. Lord Bird.
00:31 - 02:58
Speaker 2
To me, as a person who lived in social housing and as a person 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 70s, I'm very, very interested in what you might call resources that are never used correctly. Now, every government that I have known since 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 was—and this is every government, including the wonderful government of Sir George Young, who was the Minister of Housing when—the stumbling block was that there seemed to be so many legal reasons why you could not grab hold of the hundreds and thousands of social housings, of empty housing that could be used for social good. Now, come forward 35 years, because it's our 35th anniversary last week, you come to the realization that you've got this absolutely brilliant means of helping the government to push up its targets of providing as many people as possible with social housing. But the stumbling block is planning, is local authority, is ownership, and it's a whole plethora of reasons why you can't just say, "Here's a person in need, or a family in need, and here is a property in need in the sense that it's empty, it's vacuous, it's not carrying out any social purpose," and melding them together. There's so many impediments to this actually happening.
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