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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Clearly there are means of deepening tenant participation in all different models of tenure, but there is a model of accountability that people readily understand—the ballot box and local elections—and we should retain it. We are entering into a different phase in more general terms. After the Northern Rock fiasco, the ideological position that public sector equals bad and private sector equals good is completely tarnished. We are also entering into a new financial era. People in the United State of America are talking about 10 days that have changed capitalism, because the private sector is no longer awash with the kind of money to which the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich referred. There was a demand for bonds and asset-backed securities, and that is one of the reasons why stock transfer and the kind of financial instruments that it could create were attractive to investors at one point. We are now in an entirely different era—the credit crunch—and we should not put our faith in the private sector when the money in it is drying up. We must examine other models that have served us well in the past. When facing such a housing crisis in this country we would be unwise not to grasp this political opportunity, given that there is such a consensus in this Chamber on the fact that council housing needs to be a far larger part of the solution than it has been for the past 10 or 15 years.