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Housing and Regeneration Bill

With the leave of the House, I shall comment briefly on some of the issues that have been raised. I thank Members on both sides of the House for their comments and the generally warm sentiments that have been expressed about the amendments. I should like to make a number of points on cross-domain regulation and community land trusts, particularly with regard to the comments made by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). I am sure that the hon. Gentleman does not want inadvertently to mislead the House; I do not want him to rewrite history and make it seem as though I had been fundamentally opposed to cross-domain regulation and community land trusts but suddenly underwent a conversion halfway through the passage of the Bill. I have always said that cross-domain regulation was an objective that we should pursue. I said time and again in Committee that the issue was complex and would require detailed consideration, helped by the work of Professor Ian Cole. Frankly, I also thought that the other place would not like a broad enabling clause—a so-called Henry VIII clause—to allow the provision to come into being, but I was wrong. The will of Parliament was clearly expressed, and that is why the measure was included in the Bill. I have always been a great fan of community land trusts. One of the 14 pilot areas is in my constituency. I think that CLTs are an incredibly important way of ensuring that land, buildings and assets generally are available for the local community in perpetuity. Again, it was always the intention that we would provide some legal definition of community land trusts.