Housing and Regeneration Bill

Amendment No. 104ZA seeks to encourage the Minister and her colleagues to look carefully at how the large amount of money which they are about to invest in housing can be used as a trigger to encourage social innovation. The housing association movement was begun by social entrepreneurs of their day, who used their independence from the state to begin to pioneer new and innovative ways of creating social housing. The capital development programme has often been used as a mechanism for stimulating new and innovative approaches to social problems. At Second Reading, I referred to my work more than 25 years ago at the Kaleidoscope Project in Kingston-upon-Thames, where, alongside the hostel accommodation that we built for young people with drug-related problems, we pioneered new ways of working with people in this hard-to-reach group. We developed and ran for many years an all-night club that ran one of the first night-time walk-in surgeries for people with drug-related problems in the country. We also developed educational programmes, and provided a nursery for children of addicts and a church-based community setting in which people could rebuild their lives. The hostel accommodation, which was subject to regulation by the Housing Corporation, gave us the freedom to pioneer new ways of working with this hard-to-reach group. Until the 1980s, the first duty of the Housing Corporation was to promote housing associations. Only in recent years has it moved from promoting new ways of working to regulating and controlling. The Bill takes this logic to its next logical stage, and even now not only gives powers to the Secretary of State to regulate the first-line service to tenants—housing and the protection of public investment, which I agree with—but gives the regulator powers to control social innovation. The amendment seeks to encourage housing associations to continue to use—