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Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. We had considerable discussion in Committee of a short Bill that enjoys widespread support in the House, both for its content, as I said, and for the need for a speedy response from Parliament to the issue that has arisen for the Housing Corporation. The provisions are not the most dramatic, but they are extremely important to the Housing Corporation, the housing associations that it regulates, the lending community and, ultimately, the 2 million people who depend on social housing. In Committee we undertook extensive scrutiny of the details of the Bill and its underlying purpose. I shall summarise the conclusions of that debate. The Bill’s purpose is simple. It gives the Housing Corporation a power of delegation from board to below-board level, either to a committee of the board or to officials, with retrospective effect. It also deems the corporation always to have had such a power, since it was founded in 1964. Over the past 40 years the board had been acting, in good faith, on the basis that it had an implied power of delegation, until it was discovered at the end of last year that the board did not have that express power of delegation. It was not just the corporation that thought it had such a power, but everyone else with an interest, including the Department, the lending community, housing associations and the residents of housing associations. When the Housing Corporation was created, it was common for public bodies and non-departmental public bodies not to be given an explicit power of delegation. At that time, powers of delegation were more readily taken to be implied. Since then, the majority of bodies set up without explicit powers have been wound up or have had their legislation modernised to confer such powers. That did not happen in the case of the Housing Corporation because of administrative oversight on a series of occasions. Hon. Members asked whether we were aware of any other NDPB being in the same predicament as the Housing Corporation, but we are not. As I assured the Committee, we have examined all the NDPBs that were responsible to the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. I will need to confirm that any new non-departmental bodies that may arrive in the Department as a result of the change in the Department’s responsibilities are similarly checked, in order to ensure that we have addressed the issue. We have contacted the Cabinet Office, which is co-ordinating further consideration of the matter across Government. Hon. Members will be aware that as soon as the issue for the Housing Corporation was discovered, we set about addressing the many decisions that have been taken, so as not to leave housing associations, the corporation and lenders in a state of limbo about previous decisions that had been delegated. The Opposition raised concerns on Second Reading and in Committee about the retrospective nature of the legislation and the fact that it will legitimise past decisions that the corporation board had delegated. We had an extensive discussion of retrospective legislation on Second Reading and in Committee. We are clear that the concerns expressed by hon. Members about retrospective legislation do not apply. The Bill does not seek to alter the rights of individuals to the benefit of some and the disadvantage of others, or seek to unravel previous transactions that were undertaken in good faith with unforeseeable consequences. It does not attempt retrospectively to change people’s understanding of the position that they are in; in fact, the converse is true. It seeks to restore what was thought to be the status quo and restores the parties to the position that they all considered, in good faith, they were in before the problem was discovered.