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Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill

My Lords, I am very grateful indeed to both noble Baronesses for their responses and I will certainly answer the questions raised. The response will also send confidence and reassurance to the stakeholders and particularly to the Housing Corporation for which there is obviously so much at stake. I take the point about the changes that have happened in social housing since this Bill came into legislative force in 1964. We have had massive changes in the way that we provide, generate, deal with and manage social housing. Given that the same agencies have been in force, possibly no other sector has gone through such a revolution in management. It is partly a reflection of that situation that we are dealing with. I am sorry that the noble Baroness felt that she could not pursue the debate on social housing. We should certainly have such a debate and I would look forward to it. I will give her a few reasons why I do so. We are on course to meet our target of providing 75,000 social rented homes between 2005–06 and 2007–08 and allocated investment for 2006-08 is £3.9 billion, which is 15 per cent up on the past two years. As she said, we have been making progress and those figures reflect that. The projected creation of new affordable homes is up by 33 per cent. We hope to do more in the coming years. We have a housing challenge in this country and social housing has an important role to play in meeting that. We have worked very closely with partners at all stages since we discovered that, which I want to reiterate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said, it is important to recognise that this is a very specific incidence of the use of retrospection. It is watertight for reasons that I have explained. It is a one-off. To answer her question, yes, ““members”” does indeed refer to members of the board, so it does not open the debate to anyone who could for any other reason be called a member. As for the Housing Corporation, the problem with Section 9 is that it deals essentially with disposal of land, as I indicated. However, there are all the bits that I mentioned that we need to secure as well. Also, it did not provide sufficient certainty for lenders, so we have gone out of our way throughout this process, with belt and braces, to put in the certainties that people wanted us to put in. The powers of delegation as they existed in 1964 were very similar to other bodies at the time, for reasons that I explained. Things have changed a lot, in the way we regulate not least, and in the forms of regulation and express determinations that we have put into legislation since then. All past statutory decisions are validated, those taken both under seal and not under seal. Some do not require the seal to be used. The important thing is that all decisions are validated under this Bill, but some are not taken under seal because they do not need to be. Perhaps the noble Baroness would like me to write to her with more details.