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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I will not go into how we feel about the Conservatives. The easy way for them to achieve what they want is to summon up the courage to support new clause 8 if it is pressed to a Division, because that is a reaffirmation of Labour party policy. It would be good to hear what the official Conservative line is on that. I am proud of the fact that tenants in my local authority area chose, despite every inducement possible, overwhelmingly to reject the idea of selling off the council's stock. They feel that they have been punished as a result. It would be good to hear what the Minister says on that, because I gather that, through new clause 1, the Government are moving towards providing even greater assurances that any ballot will be fair. The ballot held in my local area, admittedly some years ago, was not fair; it was rigged. Local tenants chose to reject the proposal and chose to stay with local authority management of council stock. I congratulated them because I shared that approach to the issue. It is only right that we listen to such tenants. As new clause 8 evinces only too clearly, the view ascribed to the Government is that if tenants do not vote to opt out and to go with a private finance initiative project, an arm's length management organisation, or some other form of privatisation, they will be punished in two ways. The first method by which it appears that they will be punished is through money being siphoned off. I face that issue daily, as local Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors allege that the Government take money from authorities such as Stroud and use it to bail out other authorities. There is an easy way of dealing with that, and I am pleased to see that there are to be various pilots looking at how local authorities can relocalise their provision of local authority housing. We are talking about local authority housing, but the great strength of it is that it has always been backed by the Government. Let us not fool ourselves; the whole history of so-called council housing has been about collectivisation and the fairness through which we provided housing for those who could not afford to buy or to find housing through other means. There was a collective underpinning to that policy.