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Housing and Regeneration Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), who has forgotten more about housing than most of us ever knew. I am only sorry that there is not room in the new Brown Administration for his talent. As for the Front-Benchers' speeches, I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) made a robust speech, and I found the Minister for Housing's speech much more partisan than the one that the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich would have made if he had been introducing the Bill. I begin by mentioning clause 267—a clause that no one else has mentioned, but that represents a triumph by Housing Ministers over the Treasury. As the House will know, many local authority tenants have voted to transfer from a local authority to a housing association in exchange for guarantees on rents and commitments to investment in their homes. For theological reasons, the Treasury has insisted on rationing the number of transfers each year, and as a result a number of tenants have had to wait for the improvements, and the local authority has had to wait for the receipt of capital that it would have reinvested in new social housing. Clause 267 prises the clunking fist of the Treasury away from this process and, we hope, brings an end to the rationing of large-scale voluntary transfers. My welcome for that clause at the end of the Bill is balanced by an unforgivable omission in chapter 4, which deals with the functions of the new Homes and Communities Agency. One of the aims of the Bill, which I applaud, is to empower tenants and give them more choice, but there is nothing in the Bill that requires the landlords of social housing to work together to enable tenants to move from one landlord to another. Unlike owner-occupiers or private sector tenants, who can up sticks and move, social housing tenants are not in control of their destiny. The stock distribution of their landlord is often based on local authority boundaries, and if they want to transfer it can take a long time so to do. The popular and successful national mobility scheme, which was inherited by the Government in 1997, collapsed earlier this year owing to mismanagement. There is now no way that a tenant in, say, Andover can move to another constituency except through laborious methods such as those which existed when I first became an MP 33 years ago, with a tattered reciprocal exchange book and the individual negotiating skills of housing officers. I had a debate on this fiasco earlier in the year. It remains my strong view that there should be in the Bill a statutory basis for a national mobility scheme, and I hope the Bill will be amended in Committee in order to secure that. Without it, the promise of empowerment and choice for social tenants rings rather hollow.