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Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill

I want to make two brief but important points about this short Bill. The first has to do with accountability, and the second with the Bill’s retrospective nature. On accountability, clause 1 provides very broad powers to all sorts of committees and sub-committees. It states that the Housing Corporation will be able to"““delegate the exercise of any of its functions to any of its members, committees, sub-committees or employees””." That is a very large responsibility to hand over to almost anyone who comes into any sort of contact with the Housing Corporation. By comparison, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) pointed out, the present situation is very restrictive, in legal if not in practical terms. What is proposed is the opposite of the current legal requirement, which is that all decisions must be taken by a very small board of directors meeting about five times a month. I accept that, in practice, that is not what has been happening since the 1985 Act came into force, although it has become much more common since the problem with that legislation was discovered in January. However, the Bill seems to be taking the legal position to the opposite extreme, allowing almost anyone with any sort of connection to the Housing Corporation to make a decision on the corporation’s behalf. The Minister would do well to consider that point in some detail before the Bill completes its passage. The simple fact is that the Housing Corporation is answerable to the House and thus to the Minister, which leads me to highlight a wider point that concerns me somewhat—the composition of the Housing Corporation and its accountability to this place. At the last count, the corporation was answerable to the Housing Commission, the Audit Commission, the Charity Commission, the Financial Services Authority, the Public Accounts Committee and something called the finance, management and policy review committee, which meets once every five years. That is an awful lot of lines of accountability, before we even get to the Minister and the House itself and I am concerned that as clause 1 allows such wide-ranging powers to such an enormous number of individuals, with only a vague connection to the corporation in some cases, we may be making the kind of drafting error to which my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough referred. We must look carefully at those lines of accountability and not simply take it for granted that we have got the legislation right this time. My second point is about the retrospective nature of the Bill, which has already been touched on. Like most Members, I accept that some legislation can be retrospective, but I am concerned that the House should consider such legislation on every occasion. We should not enter into it lightly. There is some expert opinion on the matter. Professor Charles Sampford has argued that"““many laws have partially retrospective effects. The issue is not whether those effects are retrospective, but the nature and extent of those effects and the reasonableness of their imposition””." In other words, will the Bill be reasonable in its imposition? Many, though not all of us, probably consider it reasonable in the circumstances, especially because its impact will be not on the rights of individuals but on those of housing associations. It is probably sufficient. However, I give this caution. If we combine the two factors that I described—the potential for lack of accountability given all the different strands, including the Minister and the House, and the retrospective nature of the Bill—the Minister must be aware that he has to take into account not only everything that happened in the past, but everything that will happen henceforth. When so many people have accountability or authority in respect of the Housing Corporation, implementing retrospective legislation is an enormous responsibility. Those are the issues that most concern me. Will the Minister consider whether the matter could have been handled differently? Could non-retrospective legislation have been used to tidy things up? I understand that in reality decisions were made as the Bill now proposes, although they were outside the remit of the law, as we have discovered, but in the light of my cautionary tales about accountability and the retrospective nature of the Bill I urge the Minister to ponder whether there might have been another way.