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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I shall make one quick point. I realise that I did not refer to local authorities when I spoke originally. They would rightly come down on me if I left them out. Furthermore, paragraph 1(3)(a), to which the Minister referred, contains the phrase, ““has shown some capacity””. I asked my noble friend Lord Greaves whether he understood what that meant and he thought that it might be about capacity-building—but I do not think that it is. Experience must be different from capacity, because otherwise one would not have the two phrases. Does that mean some sort of achievement? I do not quite understand what capacity is. Surely, it cannot mean personal capacity to go out with a JCB. I hesitated when I first read the schedule and thought that it was pushing it a bit to try to take the whole of this paragraph apart, but I have been unable to resist temptation at this point.