Renters’ Rights Bill: Motion to disagree with Lords Amendment 39

MPs voted 325 to 171 on 8 September 2025 to reject Lords Amendment 39 to the Renters' Rights Bill, which would have placed military service family accommodation within the scope of the new statutory Decent Homes Standard. The government's motion to disagree with the Lords passed comfortably, meaning the amendment was stripped from the Bill before it became law. The practical effect is that service families living in Ministry of Defence accommodation will not have the same legally guaranteed housing standards as private or social renters under the Act. The government argued that MOD housing already meets a "decent homes plus" standard that exceeds the statutory benchmark, and that local authority inspections of secure defence sites would be unworkable on security grounds. In place of legislation, ministers committed to an annual report to Parliament on the standard of service family accommodation, pointing also to a planned defence housing strategy and a £1.5 billion investment in MOD housing. Labour MPs voted almost unanimously in favour of the government's position, with only one Labour MP voting against. The Liberal Democrats voted solidly against the motion, alongside all voting Conservative, Reform UK, Green, and Democratic Unionist Party MPs. The Liberal Democrats argued that service families would become the only category of renters in Britain without statutory protection under primary legislation, and pressed the government to table its own amendment if it objected to the Lords' wording. No such government amendment was forthcoming. The vote was one of several on the same day in which the government successfully disagreed with Lords amendments to the Bill, with related divisions on amendments 11, 18, 19, and 26 all producing similar government majorities.