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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I beg to move,"That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Housing and Regeneration Bill because it creates a top-down, centrally-driven approach to development and regeneration, allows the unaccountable Homes and Communities Agency, in conjunction with the unelected regional development agencies, to ride roughshod over local communities, takes further powers away from democratically-elected local authorities and places them in the hands of politically-appointed Homes and Communities Agency officials, does not extend to social tenants proper rights to buy or part-buy their homes, fails to address the growing problems with the Housing Market Renewal and Thames Gateway regeneration schemes and provides insufficient measures to promote genuine brownfield regeneration, choice for social tenants, wider home ownership and the raising of environmental standards in house building." At 169 pages and 280 clauses with 10 schedules, the Bill is particularly large. The fact that the explanatory notes stretch to 121 pages suggests that it is probably also overly complex. What does the Bill say? One of the first things it tells us is that the Housing Minister intends to merge the Housing Corporation with English Partnerships to form the new Homes and Communities Agency. After the Government spent £167 billion on quangos in the past year alone, perhaps the Minister has finally realised that getting rid of a quango would be a good thing to do. But does she not realise that more bureaucracy will not equal more homes? Sadly, if one wades through the Bill to page 36, one discovers that the Government could not help themselves. Clause 80 creates a brand-new quango, the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords, which, I am reliably informed, will be called Oftenant. The Bill is a classic piece of new Labour draftsmanship—it deletes two quangos but then sets up two more. The aims of the Homes and Communities Agency are laudable enough, but the Government have misjudged our housing challenge by creating a bulging piece of legislation that simply replicates the failed measures of the past. They are introducing a top-down, Whitehall-driven, centrally controlled, big-Government-know-best approach, while local people and their communities are having their powers stripped away.