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Housing and Regeneration Bill

There can be no more heart-warming sight than the admission by a Government Minister of his own human fallibility. In making such an admission, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright) has shown a humble divinity rarely observed at the ballot box—I mean the Dispatch Box. I always refer to it as the ballot box; I shall be in trouble for that. We all know that the Minister does not portray himself as all-powerful, but concern has been consistently expressed on the Opposition Benches that the Homes and Communities Agency could appear all-powerful from below, at local authority level. For that reason, this group of amendments is encouraging in two ways. First, it explicitly increases the responsibility of the HCA to consult in particular ways. Secondly, it requires precise specification by the Secretary of State of the remit in a number of situations. We were calling for those provisions in Committee, but the Minister seemed somewhat resistant to them at the time. Let us not be churlish, however, because he has now taken them on board after some fairly tough negotiating in the other place. A large number of the votes went the way they did despite, rather than because of, the Government's willingness to accept the proposals put forward at the time. Nevertheless, the fact that this group of amendments has been embraced by the Minister shows that the iterative process—which I think works pretty well if people are genuinely focused on a good outcome—has once again served us well. The fact that there are 770 new amendments—