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Housing and Regeneration Bill

Perhaps I may seek clarification. In terms of the agency’s contribution to house building, we are looking at more like 30 per cent of overall supply. Realising that only about 150,000 homes are built every year, I think that the agency will contribute and subsidise, one way and another, 30 per cent of those over the next couple of years. The noble Earl asks what will happen to the organisation if it does not meet its targets. I am terribly sorry to have to confess that during the six years of my stewardship of English Partnerships, we exceeded our targets every year. I therefore have no knowledge of what happens when that is not the case. My noble friend Lady Dean will confess to the same track record. We are sorry to disappoint, but we do not have much experience of failing in the last period. As regards the economy, if we compare the current situation to that when interest rates were in the mid teens and almost 3 million people were unemployed, it is reasonable still to conclude that the economy is in good shape. As we are all aware, the housing market is not in such good shape but, again, during my tenure at English Partnerships, whenever we tried to do innovative things the Treasury said, ““Where is the market failure in terms of the housing market?””. Plainly, there is some market failure now, but the different attitudes of the housebuilders in terms of starts and their confidence plainly shows us some people have less confidence in the market than others. In this situation, it is imperative that the new Homes and Communities Agency gets going and helps where it can to address that market failure. I hope that that helps the noble Earl with his issue about hiving off to agencies—