Housing and Regeneration Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has raised two fundamental issues. When we undertook the consultation to think about the creation of the new agency, in all the regions of England those two issues were the ones that occupied the most time and generated the most anxiety on the part of those who attended. I am sure that my noble friend will provide much more detail, but the way we were anticipating the agency taking shape six to nine months ago was that the national organisation would quite rightly have its direction set by Ministers and would have overarching targets to meet on all the issues we have been talking about today. Underneath that, each regional office of the Homes and Communities Agency would work with all the regional bodies to determine the priorities for investment in the locality over whatever period seemed reasonable, be it three years, five years or, in the case of infrastructure projects, perhaps 10 years. Regional development agency and local authority colleagues who came to those meetings understood that those regions which got their act together early and were able to articulate their priority areas for investment would do best in terms of their engagement with the new agency. That point was made powerfully at the session in Leeds, when a number of local authority colleagues and RSL colleagues said, ““We don’t want to be hidebound by national targets and policies that don’t have relevance for our region””. The desperate need in that region was for family homes and not one-bed or two-bed apartments. The plea from each of the regions was that, while Ministers would rightly want to set national targets, the agency should have sufficient flexibility to could come to a clearly agreed view with each region and then feed that through the organisation back up to Ministers. Ministers then have the unenviable task—and we are delighted that they do it and we do not have to—of acting as judge and jury on the allocation of resources. The process by which that happens was meant to be within a national framework with clearly articulated regional priorities that were then brought back for Ministers to finally decide the allocation. I hope that helps.