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Housing and Regeneration Bill

It is very nice to see the noble Baroness in her place. I am sure that she drew on the forensic scrutiny of this Committee to impress her conference. I can give the noble Baroness a short answer on the FOI point. She has drawn attention to the regulations made under the FOI Act, which applied to the provision of information under the Act by public authorities. Those regulations cover how a public authority should estimate the cost of complying with a request, for example, for a piece of information. These regulations include provision as to what a public authority can take into account in determining charges for dealing with an FOI request, and include, for example, how easily or not the public authority could determine whether it held the information, how it could take account of the costs that it expected to incur to locate or retrieve information and so on. These are very sensible principles in relation to charging for the provision of information when responding to a request under the Act. The regulations will certainly apply to both the new HCA and the regulator, so the noble Baroness’s amendments are redundant in that sense. There are consequential amendments in Clause 87 and Schedule 8, which also provide for the FOI Act to apply to the HCA and the regulator. I hope that she will be satisfied with that.