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Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, I have put my name to the amendment; I should have put it to the second amendment as well and my failure to do so was an oversight. I warmly support the noble Lord. At the previous stage of the Bill, I explained how important it was that the culture of the organisation should be such that local authority housing is not just an add-on in a year or two. The noble Lord explained and unpacked that in his description of how the agency will get going. I am grateful to him for that. At one point, I suggested to the Minister informally that if the Government were concerned that we should wait for primary legislation, they could meet everyone’s concerns by providing that the regulation-making powers in the Bill should not come into effect until a certain period—we were led to expect that we would have primary legislation during that period. I accept that that might be a bit of drafting too far but, as I said earlier to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, things can be entirely benign and the Minister’s assurances can be taken absolutely in the way that she intends them to be taken but life moves on. Who knows what might preclude the primary legislation or knock it back a little? In any event, planning and working for the inclusion of the whole domain from the start is enormously important and will have a very different effect on the way in which the agency gets started. We all wish it well and I support the amendment.