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Housing

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for repeating the Statement made by my honourable friend the Minister for Housing in another place. We should be generous in extending our welcome to an additional £3 billion investment in the next spending period on social housing, and £8 billion in the period to 2016. I draw attention to two aspects of the Statement that are extremely welcome. We are unusual but not unique in this country in not having a single mechanism for wholesaling public sector assets and land. Many other countries do that before they decide whether public assets are surplus. The Statement moves us a long way forward in giving the Register of Surplus Public Sector Land some teeth. It is excellent news that we are putting an end to the practice of selling public sector land and assets with no regard to housing policy. That is extremely welcome. I also welcome the return of local councils sponsoring developments in their local areas. Will my noble friend reassure us that we are talking about not a return to wholesale mono-tenure council housing of the type that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s but rather a return to local authorities sponsoring mixed developments in their areas, with a whole range of tenures and houses for sale in communities? We should remember that over the past 40 to 50 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, rightly pointed out, there was a decrease in construction. But over that long-running trend the private housebuilders have held up the numbers; the withdrawal from publicly sponsored housing almost entirely accounts for that decrease in housing numbers. So it is very welcome that after 20 years the Government have decided to do this. I thank my noble friend again for the Statement.