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Housing and Regeneration Bill

What I want is a provision in the Bill which obliges somebody to run a national mobility scheme. I hope that if an amendment along those lines is tabled and if the hon. Lady is on the Committee, it might have her support. The main thrust of the Bill is basically to split the Housing Corporation into two, and adds extra functions to each half. On to the investment half is tacked English Partnerships, and on to the regulatory half is tacked Oftenant, which will eventually cover all social tenants. The social housing landscape will change significantly when the Bill goes through. It is worth pausing to reflect that the most successful private finance initiative that the country has ever seen has been the Housing Corporation. Some £35 billion has been invested in social housing, with not one default. If one compares that with private finance initiatives in health, transport or defence, one can see that it is a fantastic record. One could argue that instead of abolishing the Housing Corporation, the Government should be cloning it. It is vital—I pick up a point that the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich made—that, in the new landscape, we continue to generate substantial private capital to invest in social housing, and nothing in the Bill should prejudice that aim. In particular, the new regulator must not cause housing associations to be reclassified as public sector bodies. I remember the so-called Ryrie rules, which meant that the private funds raised by housing associations scored as public expenditure, wholly negating the advantage of borrowing from the City. We must not return to those days, and we need to address the concern of the National Housing Federation that the regulator might inadvertently so reclassify. That would be a shot not so much in the foot but much higher up. On the case for the abolition or splitting of the Housing Corporation, which was set up some 40 years ago, there has been a rather academic debate as to whether the dual responsibilities of the corporation—regulation on the one hand, and investment on the other—complemented or compromised each other. I tended to be in the complementary camp, for the reason that I have just mentioned. There was an implicit reassurance for investors that regulation of housing associations would have an eye on the lenders, as well as on the tenants. Having both functions under one roof meant that money was not lent to housing associations, for example, where there were doubts about corporate management, and there was a one-stop shop for housing associations. I hope that under the new regime we are not heading for a Northern Rock-type scenario by spreading responsibility for housing associations over more than one institution, with the new HCA being a sort of Bank of England in control of the money supply, and the new Oftenant being in control of regulation, with a possibility of confusion and regulatory failure. As the Minister said when she introduced the Bill, the HCA is about supply, and there has been much emphasis on the need for 3 million new homes. Supply should, of course, be increased, and we all want to see faster help for those in housing need. However, I must make a basic point: the quickest and cheapest way to help those on the waiting list is to create vacancies for them in the existing housing stock. For those on the waiting list, the statistic that matters is not the number of new social houses built, but the number of re-lets in the existing housing stock. We should be doing far more to accelerate the number of re-lets by helping those whose circumstances have improved to do what many of them want to do, namely become home owners. The part of the Housing Corporation budget that promotes mobility has been squeezed, and I hope that the HCA will revisit that balance. In turn, that would help to encourage demand at the lower end of the housing market and give confidence to house builders. If we are to hit the ambitious target, we must look to the private sector as much as possible to build the new homes rather than the public sector.