Housing and Regeneration Bill

I had not intended to intervene, but I support the idea behind the amendment. When I was chairman of the Housing Corporation, towards the latter part of my period of office, the then Deputy Prime Minister asked me to chair a task force on better access to affordable home ownership. My noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton referred to the loss of publicly owned housing to the private sector. One of the first things that we did was to conduct a survey to ask people whether they wanted to own their own homes, because it was just assumed that that they did. About 70 per cent of people in Britain are either buying or own their own homes. Ninety per cent said that they did, but they did not interpret it in the way that we traditionally have: they wanted a stake in their own home. Shared ownership is one way to deliver that for them, so I support that idea. I find it personally objectionable that people who can afford their own home, and I am one of them, can have a choice but people who cannot have no choice at all. I think that they should have. One choice that they should have is the opportunity to have a shared ownership home. Where the report helps in the argument advanced by my noble friend Lord Graham is that we recommended very strongly that there should be different kinds of shared home ownership and different ways of raising the money, but that if the home was bought from a local authority or housing association, when the tenant wished to sell it, they had first to offer it back at market price to either the housing association or the local authority. That was a way to recycle a property to go back out to rent. However, to put that in the Bill would, as with many other things, restrict the new agency to such a degree that we would almost not allow it to be innovative. We want it to be creative and innovative. The leader of the HCA will have to consider the Government's national strategy all the time. I cannot see any Government of whatever colour in future withdrawing from the idea of providing shared ownership. The former Mayor of London was talking about 50 per cent affordable or, I should say, social housing. That has meant that many developers have left London. They will not develop in London because the numbers do not stack up. I would not want that happen in this area, which is a creative, dynamic area and one that I very much welcome. I welcome the principle and the idea behind the amendment, but I think that it would be a retrograde step to insist that it goes in the Bill.