My Lords, I will speak to two of these amendments. First, I cannot support Amendment 55EA. It has a mild whiff of retrospective taxation which I do not approve of. More importantly, it fails to understand the motivation of an entrepreneur, and his or her assessment of risk. If a particular project is marginal, then the developer does their own assessment of the upside and downside risk. They will proceed only if they personally believe that the upside returns are sufficient to justify the downside risks. If the upside is threatened, as seems to be the case in this amendment, and only the downside risk remains, I do not believe that they will proceed. In that case, one nullifies the whole purpose of this clause.
Furthermore, it occurs to me that if the local authority wants to share in the upside benefits, it should equally
share in the downside risks. I cannot believe that the local authority would be happy to pay the developer if the housing price should drop below the estimated figure. In other words, it seems only fair that if it is going to share in the upside, it might also share in the risk. This applies if it wishes to see the development take place as soon as possible; of course, I would personally prefer that it did neither.