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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I will come to those words in a moment. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Best, an acknowledged expert in this field, for his support in principle for what I was rather inadequately trying to describe. It is important that we optimise every possible avenue to get both flexibility and a broad spectrum of choice in this field. We do not like to hear that awful segregationist term ““council housing”” nowadays. One of its problems was that it was seen as a form of tightly defined community within a community that was different and not bound with the wider field. Although one could perhaps regret the reduction in the number of council house sales, it has been a great social opening for the whole of that community and the community at large has benefited as a consequence. I am grateful for what has been said. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, about ““low cost”” as a local definition, it had jolly well better be a local definition. Pendle and Paddington are worlds apart, but both have a need for social housing. Not least of the difficulties for this big national organisation will be that it has to make that kind of differentiation and to make what it does in Paddington relevant to Paddington and not to Pendle, and vice versa. That is one of the big difficulties for the organisation we are creating. I am particularly grateful to the Minister for what she has said. It seems that we have struck a chord. If she is now going to consider this field to see whether she can come back to us on it on Report, that is be enormously encouraging and helpful. I draw strength from that. I hope that she will take the suggestion that when she has come to a conclusion it might make the proceedings on Report easier if she wrote to us to let us know what is going on, otherwise we might feel tempted to return to the subject unnecessarily and we have spent long enough on the Bill in Committee. In my view—wholly to the benefit of the subject with which we are dealing—when we reach the next stage we should be rather more expeditious, in large part because of the work we have done at this stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 79 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.] [Amendment No. 79A not moved.] [Amendments Nos. 80 to 86 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.] Clause 34 agreed to. Clause 35 [Recovery etc. of social housing assistance]: