Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 99A: 99A: Clause 81, page 38, line 21, at end insert— ““( ) are public authorities for the purposes of section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (c. 42) and for the purposes of amenability to judicial review by the Administrative Court.”” The noble Baroness said: The amendment is grouped with Amendments Nos. 100, 103, 104 and 110 of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow. I apologise to him for stealing his thunder. I tabled the amendment after discussions with the Housing Law Practitioners Association, a group of lawyers which has briefed me from time to time over the years and which I have always found extremely helpful. It has raised points which need dealing with. I did not realise when I tabled the amendment that it would be the first in the group. As I say, that is a pity; it is not intended to detract from the points of the noble Earl. This brief point is again about a level playing field. Are tenants of housing associations in the same position as tenants of local authorities in that they have the benefit of human rights legislation? Put the other way round, is their landlord body under the obligations of the Human Rights Act? We are all aware that provision of social housing has increasingly moved away from local authorities. It is quite odd and coarse to distinguish between the providers of housing in a way that affects tenants. Indeed, the whole thrust of the Bill, subject to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, at the beginning regarding local authorities, is that every tenant matters and that every tenant has similar protection. There is a chain of cases, of which the Government will of course be aware, but what they seem to boil down to, and what the Government have to say, is: ““Let the court determine in any particular case whether the relationship between the housing provider and the local authority is such that it comes down on one side of the line or the other””. That is a very unsatisfactory position, and I believe that the Joint Committee on Human Rights takes the same view. The issue arises in areas such as allocations and grounds for possession. While I appreciate—probably not adequately—the Treasury point about categorising housing associations, I am not persuaded that we should not be looking for a way of getting round that. This may not be the right way, but to leave a large group of tenants without the protection that they would have had had circumstances which are probably entirely outside their control been different, seems to me a very sad thing. It cannot be a good thing for people’s rights to depend on who their housing provider is when, in almost every sense of the word, we are talking about public provision. I beg to move.