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Housing and Regeneration Bill

It is a major issue. It reminds me that, if you go back 50 years, that rented accommodation was the most usual choice and people lived there for most of their lives—in overcrowded conditions, too. One of the reasons why the house-building programmes of the 1950s and 1960s were so important was that they gave people a home of their own for the first time. The noble Lord is right; it is not just a question of building our way out of lack of affordability or overcrowding, but we need to look at the whole of the housing stock coherently to see what else we can do. That brings us back to our debates on social accessibility. The private rented sector is often the most invisible and often, frankly, the worst served sector because it is managed by market. The review by Julie Rugg of that sector that we have commissioned should look at a whole range of situations, including the extent to which the sector may be soaking up some people in ways that the noble Earl described. However, because we need more supply and mobility across the sector—and that goes for social housing as well—we need people to have aspiration and opportunity to move out of social housing if they so wish and into owner occupation so that we can get more vulnerable people into social housing and away from the very worst of the private rented sector. Essentially, we are aiming to create a vicious circle which is powered by notions of access, equality and affordability. The virtue of having the HCA in place is that we can have that single conversation with people who are responsible for land and with those across the sectors, and we will be able to judge what is effective in relation to them all. Although there is one set of very technical amendments to go, that seems to be what we have been addressing throughout the whole Bill—all these issues relate to each other. I am grateful for the noble Baroness's amendment, which has given us an opportunity to open up our debate.