Housing and Regeneration Bill

I am happy to give the sort of assurances that both the noble Baroness and London Councils are seeking in terms of what we are looking for in these clauses. These are probing amendments about the purpose and effect of Clauses 201 and 202 about the way information will be provided, collected and published. I want to focus on Clause 202, which really is the key clause, but the principles I shall set out reflect Clause 201 and Amendment No. 110RB as well. The clause states that the regulator is required to publish performance information at least once a year, but it also stipulates that that must include information likely to be useful to tenants, potential tenants and local authorities. We added that clause to the Bill in the other place because we wanted to clarify what the regulator had to do as a minimum to meet the recommendations of the Cave review regarding information for tenants. It is true that the regulator has clear statutory objectives to ensure that tenants have chosen the opportunity to be involved in the management of their homes, but it is clear to me that in order for consumers to exercise genuine choice in any sort of market they have to have sufficient information about the alternatives on offer. They can hardly have any form of choice without information that enables them to compare how their landlord performs in their areas against other landlords. Part of the purpose of Clause 202 is to meet that need. It is not just about information for existing tenants. Potential tenants of social housing also deserve to be able to compare landlord performance in their area when they enter the social housing system. That gives them some useful information and useful choices. I agree that performance information is going to be of critical use to local authorities. They have an obvious interest in knowing how well landlords in their area are performing. London Councils has argued that there needs to be a clause requiring this performance information to be broken down by local authority area level. I agree with that. I assure the noble Baroness that Clause 202 in effect requires the performance information published by the regulator to be broken down by local authority area level. If information has to be at that level in order to be useful to local authorities—as I, the noble Baroness and stakeholders believe it does—then that is what the regulator will have to provide in order to meet its duty under this clause. It is reasonable, given that we are all agreed on this, to ask: ““Why don’t we just say in the Bill that the performance information that is published should be broken down by local authority area?””. In addition to the argument I have just put, we have here a clause that allows the right sort of flexibility. Instead of drafting Clause 202 in the way we have done, if we had drawn up a clause that had this sort of detail we would inevitably have ended up with a clause that had to cover every other aspect of the nature of the information—who it should be available to, how it should be provided, how it should be accessed; all sorts of exhaustive requirements. That would have been very difficult and would have left the regulator with little room to respond to changing needs. I hope the noble Baroness will accept that that is the intention. That is certainly how we want to see the clause being interpreted and implemented. It is not merely limited to requiring that the performance information should be broken down by local authority level; it could cover other types of performance information that is of use to tenants and local authorities as well. The same principles apply to the first amendment in the group. Amendment No. 110RA would require registered providers, when submitting performance information to the regulator under Clause 201, to break down that information by each local authority. Again, I can provide the assurance that the noble Baroness seeks. I hope that having that on the record will reassure local authorities that they will get the information in the most useful form as they need it.