Housing

I was going to start by congratulating the Minister on her measured and emollient response to the debate, but she rather spoilt that plan in the last 30 seconds of her speech. The Minister might have acknowledged that this scheme is in a bit of a mess. Those who believed in the whole gospel of compulsory home condition reports, home information packs and energy performance certificates were taken up the aisle by the Secretary of State and have been dumped. It is unsurprising that some of those people are angry and embarrassed, and are shouting, ““Betrayal.”” She cannot completely dismiss the fact that Which? and the Law Society, which were supporters of the scheme in its original form, have now backed away and are feeling very despondent about the scheme as it currently stands. Those inside the Labour big tent who are still supporters of the scheme in its full-blooded, 1997 manifesto style could at least get some reassurance from the way that things were evolving by thinking that they would have the slimmed down scheme before them with the results of the evaluation of the pilot studies also available and that in this debate they would be able to rebut the challenges and accusations from the Opposition Benches by referring to the detailed results of those studies which would show that all the bad predictions were not justified. However, the pilot studies have not been completed; there has been no proper evaluation and there is no hard evidence of success. The safeguard of those trials producing evidence on which we could take a proper and balanced decision—which was much talked about last year when the scheme was debated on several occasions in this House—is not available. The safeguard has been swept away. I want to bring to the attention of the House some of the evidence that Mr. McDonald gave to the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee of the other place. Mr. McDonald appeared on behalf of the Department for Communities and Local Government, and he said that it cannot yet check the pilot studies to find out what savings have been made in transaction times. He said that that was because it would need at least 3,500 transactions to have been completed before it could make that assessment. I was surprised when I read that evidence; I was not surprised by the idea that 3,500 examples would be needed to reach a judgment, but I was astonished that 3,500 transactions had not been conducted so far. The Minister did not deal with the issue of the pilot studies. There was a good reason for that; to have done so would have underlined the embarrassing situation that she is in and the difficulties that the scheme faces. The pilot studies were supposed to have started in July last year. They could not start because the regulations were not produced in time. They were supposed to restart—have their second start—in October last year. Yet the evidence that Mr. McDonald gave to the Committee was that most of the schemes had not started until January this year and that it was therefore too early to evaluate whether they were performing in accordance with the Minister’s predictions.