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Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. I shall deal first with the question of Professor Cave. We all have the greatest respect for the work that the professor has done on this subject, but none of us would expect him to be an expert on parliamentary procedure or the drafting of Bills and proper implementation of Acts of Parliament. That is not what we would expect—and Parliament would not wish to delegate the responsibility for such decision-making to anybody, however expert they were, if they were not themselves Members. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on the width of the directions clause, I remind the House that I suggested that if the Government thought it more appropriate they could use Clause 49 and thus put the regulator on exactly the same basis as the HCA. That clause is quite short; subsections (1) to (4) are the ones that count. It would do admirably. I chose Section 76 of the 1985 Act only because the Government kept citing it as the precedent on which they relied. Directions clauses are meant to be wide. There are many of them, in many Acts of Parliament, and when they are used as backstop or reserve powers, as is their usual use, they are wide, because it is not possible to foresee the purposes for which they may need to be used. In Grand Committee, we had three uses of directions pointed out to us by the Minister, which were all to do with the Dome. That is an absolutely classic example of the need to use directions under an Act of Parliament because the circumstances of the Dome, as it was shut down after the millennium, could not have been foreseen. That is why they were used in that way. As a matter of precedent and parliamentary procedure, I believe that directions clauses should be wide. There is much benefit in Amendments Nos. 121 and 123, and I wish to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 121) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 76; Not-Contents, 168. Clause 195 [Direction by Secretary of State]: