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Housing and Regeneration Bill

The Minister violently agrees with that assessment. My hon. Friend, in common with others who have spoken, has made it quite clear that the Bill's provisions will make things even worse. It amounts to taking money away from less wealthy areas and giving it to what can easily be perceived to be more wealthy areas. Given that dynamic, it is almost incomprehensible to us or other people who believe that the Labour party is in favour of redistributing wealth to hear the Government defending something that increases the disparity. In a sense, we could say that the subsidy is redistributive: it takes money from poorer people and gives it to the more wealthy. I thus challenge the Minister, particularly after he has heard my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield and others, to explain why the Government have been so unwilling to right a wrong that is felt across the country. If the Minister really wants to redistribute wealth—or, to be more precise, to give funding support to the councils that he believes most need it—he should not implement a system that redistributes wealth from one set of tenants who are already badly off to another set of tenants, as that process amounts to redistributing poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South, the hon. Member for Stroud and, indeed, the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) have reflected on why it has been so difficult to achieve a house building rate of more than 1 per cent. of the level of house building that occurred shortly after the second world war. There is a fairly simple reason for that.