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Housing and Regeneration Bill

It seems rather curious that the Bill as it stood went through the other place and then Amendment No. 91 came up. The amendment seems to have been thought of at a time when the financial situation for housing associations, and indeed for anyone who was involved with housing, was rather different from how it is now. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, the principle that the taxpayer should get an equitable return is perfectly fine and fair. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said that there had been discussions with the RSL sector, but those discussions certainly do not seem to chime with discussions that some of us have had with the same sector, in which concerns were raised. The attitude of those in the sector is that they take a risk at a given point in certain circumstances in the financial environment that exists at the time of taking the risk. If, many years down the road, there is a change in the climate, that will not necessarily have been predictable at the time that people were deciding what risks to take. You find yourself in a situation where there is a target of 3 million homes by 2020. It is going to be a jolly difficult target to achieve in the present climate, we all know that, but the idea that we then hamper the ability of a sector that provides nearly half of that housing—social affordable housing, the housing that the Government want to put through with the Bill—and create a hurdle for it, or at least create greater risk adversity in their decision-making than might be in the original Bill, seems quite odd. I hope the Government will think again on this one.