Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 16: 16: Clause 2, page 1, line 11, leave out ““improve the supply and”” and insert ““increase the supply and improve the”” The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 16 I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 30 and 31, which are grouped with it and address essentially the same issue. The overt reason for Amendment No. 16 is to probe the meaning of the words ““improve the supply””. It is not clear to me what that means. My amendment would change the word ““improve”” to ““increase””. Is an improvement in the supply an increase in the number of houses being built, or does it mean something different? If it means an increase, just how strategic a role do the Government expect the HCA to take in terms of the overall housing supply? I understand what improving the quality of housing is. Perhaps we will talk about that in more detail on a later amendment. So far as supply is concerned, however, I do not understand what the word ““improve”” means. More generally, the quantity of supply—the number of houses that are being built—is topical. The document entitled House Building: March Quarter 2008, England from the Department of Communities and Local Government that came out last week shows clearly that the number of houses that are being built, both starts and completions, is suddenly going down. Having been on a gently rising graph since 2002, they have taken a nosedive for reasons we are all aware of. The starts in particular look fairly dire in the past quarter. The statistics are all set out in the document. I refer to it to make the general point that the number of housing units being built at any time is something of which the main factors are the state of the economy generally and the state of the housing market. It is not the demand for housing in terms of need but in terms of the economy, how much money people have, how much money the banks and building societies are making available to buy houses, general confidence and so on. It is not clear how much influence the Government expect this new agency to have over the supply of housing except in certain specific areas where it provides the funding, which by and large will be those areas that are affected not by the market conditions directly but by public policy, particularly the amount of funding being put into them by the HCA and—fairly directly, therefore—by government policy. These issues are worthy of discussion. Specifically, though, what do the Government mean by ““improving”” the supply? I beg to move.