Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. Indeed, I had a great deal of sympathy with the similar amendment tabled in Grand Committee. I will not rehearse the statistics; we heard ample statistics in Grand Committee on the extent to which rural communities have different growth trajectories for social housing and those statistics are on the record. I shall make two or three simple points on why the availability of more affordable housing in rural communities is a matter of concern and why, therefore, it should be addressed through this amendment. First, the principle is simple. There are people who either choose to live outside cities or simply cannot afford to live in cities, but that does not mean that they should not have a voice. There is the idea of being part of a community. Indeed, we now have the Department for Communities and Local Government. The idea of communities is at the heart of what this Government believe should be a tool for regeneration, for reinvigoration and for making people have shared endeavour and shared purpose. Therefore, it is extremely important that those people should have a voice, although they may well be small in number and are not for whatever reason—whether choice or affordability—part of the larger urban or suburban landscape. However, because of the unfortunate figures and the changes in trends on the amount of social housing available, those people are losing their voice. Secondly, democracy is part of the shared endeavour. The noble Baroness, Lady Ford, rightly argued that there should be local decisions and so on, but you can diminish democracy. The HCA will have considerable powers and resources. Should there be in the Bill a duty on the HCA to take account of rural communities? That democratic voice would be far more to the forefront if the amendment were made. It is as simple as that. We go for champions in other areas of life. We recognise the need for ethnic minorities and women to be represented on boards and so on. Ideally, I would have liked to see a champion, but I accept that that is not where we are. Even if we do not have a champion to speak for rural communities, the amendment would concentrate peoples’ minds, not necessarily when they are making clear-cut decisions on the allocation of resources and so on, but when they are making decisions in the grey area where there are conflicting priorities—and there are many priorities. That is when such a duty would make a difference. It would be assessable, because we would be able to see the extent to which rural aspects had been brought to the fore. Finally, on something more topical in relation to what the Prime Minister said today in Japan at the G8 summit, we are considering exhortations that we need to live more environmentally coherent lives—for example, that we need to conserve energy and, more recently, the supply of food. We will achieve those longer-term environmental objectives only if we recognise that a lot of the policies that we undertake today will impact on those objectives. We should make provision for smaller numbers of people from minority groups who choose to live near where they were born or where their parents live—not people such as me who have come from half way across the world, or my siblings, but people who want to be within 15 miles of where they were born when they die. It is important to recognise that the longer-term environmental objectives that we want to achieve may well be served by giving voice to those people and catering for their needs. That objective may well be among the intentions of the noble Baroness, but it is not in the Bill and it would be most helpful to see it there.