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Housing and Regeneration Bill

If the hon. Gentleman had waited a little longer, he would have heard me say some very nice things about the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), whose period as Housing Minister was distinguished in a number of ways, even though I am afraid it coincided with the Conservative party adopting planning policies that had the effect that I was describing: to polarise areas of owner-occupation and of social housing, and to allow unsustainable development which, frankly, gave development and housing a bad name in many parts of the country, the legacy of which we still live with today. If we consider some of the other adverse consequences—the concentration of too many poor people in areas of exclusively social housing, where a geographical concentration of poverty and disadvantage inevitably resulted in some degree of stigma, and the extent to which the standards of energy efficiency in both public and private housing were woefully short of the standards that we now recognise are necessary—we can see pretty clearly the scale of the problem that had to be addressed. The Government's initial approach in saying that the first priority must be to tackle the backlog of substandard council housing was correct. It would have been nice, if there had been more resources, to expand the new build programme as well, but the priority was to put an end to the scandal of millions of people living in substandard housing in which they had been neglected and left for decades because of a lack of investment. There was some increased public investment, but the Government recognised that there would be no possibility of achieving the consequences that were set out in the decent homes programme of improving the entire social housing stock within a finite time without the injection of some additional private finance. That is where the stock transfer programme, which began when the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire was Housing Minister, has played an important role. As I have said already, we should not approach these issues in an ideological or dogmatic way; we should consider the interests of the tenants and see what the outcome has been. If we look objectively at the evidence, we see that it is not as it has been presented to the House today, with tenants universally opposed to stock transfer. There has been a mixed view. Some tenants are opposed; others tenants have welcomed it. The evidence where stock transfer has taken place is that, in general, there have been huge improvements in the condition of the stock and high satisfaction among a large proportion of the tenants concerned. I take the view that we should listen to that, rather than to the views of people who want to put tenure ahead of the interests of the public.