---

Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill

I think that the hon. Gentleman is mistaken. Certainly the housing associations in my part of the country—including Banbury Homes, which is part of Shaftesbury Housing, and Charter Community Housing—have good tenant involvement. Only the other day, they organised an open advice day for local tenants at the Spiceball centre in Banbury, working with other agencies, including the district council, to explain such matters as housing benefit. I thought that that was a very good initiative, and that I believe tenants of both Banbury Homes and Charter Community Housing are very satisfied with their landlords. After all, the tenants had to vote, by a majority, for the large-scale voluntary transfers. What concerns me is where the new social housing is to come from. The Housing Corporation is concerned about its members, committees, sub-committees and employees. My concern is this. When money is allocated through the regional housing boards, designated growth areas such as Milton Keynes and the Thames Gateway do extremely well, but shire districts are literally white on the map: they receive no money from the Housing Corporation. The Minister suggested that Banbury Homes and Charter Community Housing should apply to the regional housing boards, but the trouble is that those associations are below the size of those that the Housing Corporation appears to be funding. The Minister looks quizzical, but the corporation seems to have an unwritten policy of funding only certain areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) rightly referred to new development. Banbury and Bicester, in my constituency, are probably two of the fastest-growing towns in the country, and a great deal of new development is going ahead. The difficulty lies in the definition of affordable housing. Developers have sold a proportion of their housing at below market value for the first time, so for the first time it is affordable housing because someone buys it at below market value; but it is not affordable housing thereafter. We are not seeing new social housing being introduced as part of the planning process for new development. Again, the Minister looks quizzical. Let me challenge her, as Minister for Housing and Planning. We have a huge housing development, which she has just decided not to call in, at Bankside/Bodicote. I shall be interested to see how much new social housing comes to that development as a consequence of the planning system. I suspect that very little will do so. As a result of all that, working families on low incomes with children are finding it extremely difficult to gain access to secure housing.