Housing and Regeneration Bill

I take almost entirely the point made by the noble Lord, but I thought immediately of a situation that started to develop in the Housing Corporation when I was there and is probably an even bigger issue now. Registered social landlords are now acting in areas where they have no social grants and are outside the regulated area. They want the non-regulated area to be completely separate on their balance sheet; yet that non-regulated area could be the financial risk to the regulated stock that has been funded by public funds. I hope that I am not making things too complicated. The financial risk on the overall balance sheet could come more from the non-regulated area, although it might not. If something happened, no receiver would say, ““I accept that that part of the organisation is not subject to receivership, but this part is””. The paragraph may have been aimed at this. The direct intervention of the Secretary of State should not be necessary, because the regulator should be able to give good guidelines. I have to say, without being too indiscrete, that we have had one or two difficult discussions with some housing associations that tried to tell us that it was nothing at all to do with the regulator, because the money that was raised was entirely outside the regulated part of the organisation and therefore should not be part of the overall group balance sheet. The corporation took the view that it was regulating the group, not the individual entities within the group. Whether that is still the case, I do not know. The noble Lord’s amendment sounded eminently sensible. As he spoke to it, those kinds of thoughts came into my mind. As noble Lords can see, in the social housing sector enormous amounts of funding have been raised, and it is not a partner to the government grant. It does not have government grant in it at all, some of it.