Estate Regeneration
House of Commons · Westminster Hall · 15 Jul 2026 · 16 speeches · Official Report
I beg to move, That this House has considered estate regeneration. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I want to use this debate to talk about the principles of estate regeneration, its real-life impacts and the process through which it should be handled. I will speak specifically about the current regeneration in Buckskin and South Ham in my constituency. First, I want to cover what good regeneration looks like. When done right, good estate regeneration has the power to breathe new life into communities, restore civic pride and improve quality of life through better infrastructure such as schools, GP surgeries and green spaces. In all cases, there is a community that lives there, often close-knit and deeply rooted across generations. Those communities deserve not just respect but full and genuine engagement, shaping and driving the future of their own areas. That is at the heart of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s 2016 guidance on estate regeneration, although I will go on to say that that guidance needs to be refreshed and strengthened. Buckskin and South Ham are proud, strongly knit communities where many have lived for decades and neighbours look out for each other. They were transformed when Basingstoke became a London overspill town post-war. By 1973, more than 3,250 homes had been built in South Ham alone. With new housing came new schools and the associations and religious groups that bind an area into a...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) on securing this debate. I want to speak about the importance of housing-led regeneration. Done well, it transforms lives, rebuilds communities, unlocks economic growth and creates places where people want to live, work and raise families. Yet for many communities across the north, that aspiration remains out of reach. Too many families live in ageing homes that are expensive to maintain, difficult to modernise and increasingly unfit for today’s needs. In many neighbourhoods, outdated layouts and ageing infrastructure no longer meet the needs of the communities they serve. Without significant intervention, 100,000 social homes could be lost over the coming decade, further reducing the supply of affordable housing. It is against that backdrop that the interim findings of the Renew inquiry are so important-I declare my interest as chair of the Westminster group for the inquiry. Led by the Northern Housing Consortium, the inquiry highlights the vital role that regeneration can play in addressing housing needs, supporting economic development and strengthening communities across the north of England. The Renew report found that more than half a million good-quality homes could be unlocked through regeneration and renewal programmes, demonstrating the scale of the opportunity before us. The report highlights the transformative impact that...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for highlighting this issue. Many of us can be guilty of forgetting that a house is not just a unit on a spreadsheet, but the anchor of a family’s life. I see it that way, as do others, including the hon. Gentleman. Our historical, post-war social housing estates across Northern Ireland possess an incredible and undeniable community spirit, but are too often choked by generational underinvestment, outdated design and structural neglect. As always, I will give the Northern Ireland perspective on this topic to support the hon. Gentleman in his challenge and focus, and in what he wants to achieve, as it is what I want as well. It is nice to see the Minister in her place again-she is becoming a regular in Westminster Hall. I look forward to hearing her contribution. I stand here to speak up for the thousands of families living in social housing across my constituency. Those estates were built decades ago, and although they were built with the best of intentions, time, by its very nature, has taken its toll. We are dealing with ageing housing stock that suffers from chronic dampness, poor insulation and completely outdated heating systems. In an era where energy prices remain painfully high, it is a tragedy that our lowest-income families are living in the hardest-to-heat homes and are forced to choose between heating their homes-or even just their front rooms-and...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for securing this debate and giving me a chance to talk about the Alton estate in Roehampton in my constituency. It is also a pleasure to follow on from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who always brings wisdom and a flavour of Northern Ireland to every debate, which I fully appreciate. The Alton estate in Roehampton in my constituency is home to over 13,000 people. It is one of the largest housing estates in the country, and it was built in 1954. It is a beautiful area; it is right next to Richmond Park, and it has some listed stilt blocks designed by Le Corbusier. It is a beautiful estate and a fantastic community. I am so proud to be the MP for Roehampton. However, the estate has been run down for too long. It is an area of high deprivation and high health inequalities. From one side of my Putney constituency to the other, in the Alton, there is a 10-year life expectancy difference. It also suffers from poor transport links. The failure of the estate was recognised in 2010 by the then Conservative council of Wandsworth, which said, “Yes, we need to do some regeneration. We will look into this.” Since 2010, regeneration of the Alton estate has been discussed, but as yet it has not yet been delivered to the people of the Alton. A plan was developed by the Conservative council, but it was unpopular and widely not liked. People very much...
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. Estate regeneration must be about more than replacing bricks and mortar. It must restore confidence, strengthen communities and give residents pride in place in what they call their home. In Dunscroft, in my constituency, local people want to see sustained investment in their estates and neighbourhoods, not just one-off quick fixes that rapidly degrade. They want better-quality housing, safer streets, improved green spaces, well-maintained public areas, and community facilities that bring people together. Residents have told me at local positive action groups-resident-led groups that action local improvement that they believe will make a change-that living in a place where they see reminders of neglect has a real impact on their mental health, their sense of pride, their local identity and the day-to-day lived experience of everyone who calls the place home. To be clear, local people are still doing amazing things in those areas. I recently met the Dunscroft and Friends communities group at the Dunscroft Warriors junior football team’s annual gala. They are doing great work in difficult circumstances, but they need more support. They have the ideas and the know-how, and they know their area, but they just need a little more help from Government. Residents know where investment is most urgently needed, so regeneration must be shaped by them, not imposed on them. Pride in Place funding gives councils and...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Murrison. I congratulate the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) on securing the debate. His call for minimum repair standards seems very reasonable, and I am happy to echo it. I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) identifying the regular attendees in this Chamber-I am tempted to say that it takes one to know one. I am sure we will see him again; it is always a pleasure to have him with us in a debate. It is a shame that the constituents of the hon. Member for Basingstoke do not feel they have been fully consulted, as they should have been, on the regeneration project he mentioned. Regeneration, when done with genuine community involvement, can change lives in some of the best ways possible. Community involvement, consent and consultation are fundamental necessities if that kind of positive and transformative outcome is to be achieved. Regeneration is one of the best tools we have to help solve the housing crisis. It allows us to build the new homes we desperately need-including, crucially, new social homes-on brownfield sites, saving precious greenfield from development. It allows residents to exchange some of the coldest, leakiest housing stock in Europe for better homes that are affordable to run, while adding the kind of infrastructure that the hon. Gentleman referred to, such as GP surgeries, school places and playparks, which some estates built 60 years ago never had. Many Liberal...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison, and to take part in this debate about estate regeneration. I find myself in agreement with much of what I have heard so far. I thank the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for securing this important debate and for his opening speech about an estate regeneration scheme in his constituency; he made a strong argument. I also thank those who have spoken in the debate: the hon. Members for Putney (Fleur Anderson), for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher), for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I also somewhat belatedly congratulate the Minister on her promotion and welcome her to her place; this is the first time that I have had the pleasure of facing her in a debate. Estate regeneration is an important process in delivering the right homes for local people. That is true across all the main types of estate regeneration, from refurbishments, where homes are retrofitted to bring them into line with regulations and make them safe, viable and modern places for people and families to call home, to infill developments, where new homes are built on previously developed or undeveloped land to increase density and provide housing for the local population, or full redevelopments and regenerations, meaning the wholesale demolition and reconstruction of entire estates to provide fresh stock for residents and for new buyers or tenants....
Does the shadow Minister know that since Wandsworth council became Conservative, the only decisions it has made have been to cancel all of the housing development on one estate and partially cancel it on another? We are now wondering what will happen with the Alton estate. Does he support building more houses and keeping them as social housing, especially on the Alton estate?
I am not going to comment on that particular scheme, because I am not across the detail of it, but of course I support building more houses, and we need more houses of all tenure. That is something that we have said repeatedly, here and in the main Chamber. Once again, Whitehall has the wrong priorities: targeting our green belt, the ideological attack on the right to buy and the failing new towns programme. Those come before the right priorities, such as estate regeneration. Replacement rates are too low for social homes and too many councils have been unable to deliver. The Government would therefore be wise to generate an appetite for regeneration, to feed the desperate hunger for new social housing. To date, they have not done that. The Conservative Opposition believe in building more homes, prioritising brownfield land and making the dream of home ownership a reality. We believe in aspiration and, critically, in regeneration. Only through those priorities, and by acting on those beliefs, can we provide the much needed, much demanded and much wanted decent and modern social homes that people deserve. I hope the Minister will address those concerns in full and give our constituents on the waiting list, the developers in a position to build, and local leaders the confidence that the nation needs in order to make estate regeneration real.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. May I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), for his generous words? I also thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon); he and I are competing for appearances in this Chamber this week-
You’re playing catch-up!
Yes, and I have a long way to go. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for securing this important debate and thank all Members for their contributions. Each one has provided an important perspective on the challenges of estate renewal and the need generally to build homes in a way that works for communities. My hon. Friend spoke powerfully about the difference between good regeneration and poor examples in his constituency. The Government recognise that good estate regen is critical to delivering our housing target and to providing decent homes for everybody to live in. There are many reasons why estate regeneration might be the best thing for existing tenants or for a local area. In some cases, years of neglect from a Conservative Government that failed to invest in existing estates and mandated council rent reductions, which meant even less for housing revenue accounts, has left many estates in dire need of regeneration. I know that only too well, having led a local authority that felt the burden of pressures on the HRA account. Social housing was the tenure most affected by damp and mould issues-my hon. Friend correctly highlighted the impact that that has on many of his constituents, and I know that many other Members have cases involving the same problem. An ageing housing stock not only impacts life chances, but costs the taxpayer more in the long term, because disrepair has a bigger impact on communities and also on the stock itself. In...
I completely accept that, as the Minister said, residential ballots are not the answer in and of themselves, but they do drive the behaviour that helps to build community consent. Will she extend my request to the Housing Minister, our hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), to meet me about this issue following this debate?
Of course I will. The Department welcomes any engagement about that. I have to emphasise that the engagement process requires more than just a “yes or no” tick box, and the best regeneration and estate renewal programme demonstrate a long-term commitment to engagement with residents and to giving residents the opportunity to shape the outcomes of the programmes. In the best programmes, local leadership also demonstrates political bravery in saying, “We have to have some homes built, so let us go on this journey together.” Too often, we see examples where it has become too easy to say no to everything, and that is how we have ended up with a housing crisis. A good question was asked about the governance of regeneration schemes. I agree with Members who stated that it is vital that estate regeneration schemes demonstrate transparency, particularly when they involve public land or public money. Estate renewal can actually be quite easy, if all the land is sold off. Particularly in places like London, an estate will not be short of interest from developers. Estate regeneration is much harder if we are committed to delivering affordable homes and ensuring the amenities that make an estate a community. The estate regeneration national strategy guidance helps to set out a framework from Government to achieve what is needed. The Regulator of Social Housing works to improve standards and the ombudsman provides routes for readiness. On more effective statutory routes for better estate...
I thank the Minister for her response. I particularly want to recognise the points she made about repairs and maintenance. I would welcome her passing on my request to the Housing Minister, and I acknowledge what she said about residential ballots. I fully agree that it is just one part of the process, but it would be a useful mechanism to drive some of the engagement she was referring to. I also thank other Members for their contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper) made a point about the value of estate regeneration to both the economy and pride in place. I fully recognise that community needs to be at the heart of any proposals. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made the point that communities are not just a number on a spreadsheet and spoke about the need for a holistic blueprint for renewal. I think that we all agree that there should be a UK-wide approach on that. I heard the pride of my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) in the Alton estate, and I share that pride in representing Buckskin and South Ham. She mentioned a number of things that are also really important locally in Buckskin and South Ham, including the need for a permanent community centre as part of the regeneration and the role of co-design. She also mentioned the way that the residential ballot worked-I was very interested to hear that. My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) made a powerful argument...
Sitting adjourned.