My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 3, which is intended to have the same effect as Amendment 2. If it is pre-empted by Amendment 2, I would be more than happy with that outcome.
At the moment we have a sunset clause that is in rather an unsatisfactory situation. Effectively we have the right for developers to renegotiate affordable housing obligations on which the sun indeed may never set. As the noble Lord, Lord Tope, said, now is not the time to revisit our broader concerns about these provisions. On Report the Minister justified the three-year primary period of the sunset clause by quoting evidence from the OBR that showed that investment in housing is expected to stabilise in 2016, yet she argued the need for a pragmatic power to extend this if prevailing market conditions justified it.
This is a hard argument to maintain unless the Minister is anticipating a further deterioration in the housing market. By 2016, developers will have been negotiating affordable housing obligations in circumstances of recession, or of zero or little growth, for about eight years. The amendment allows for a possible further two years, so it would then have been for a full decade. Perhaps the Minister can be more specific about the
nature of the catastrophe that she considers might beset the housing market that would justify retaining residual powers beyond 2018.
The March 2013 OBR report does not seem to help, as it comments on the variety of housing measures that the Government have promulgated, noting that overall, together with the Funding for Lending scheme, the measures should support significant growth in property transactions and residential investment at levels that we forecast for the next two years. The Government may have got something right; is the Minister saying that the OBR has got it wrong?
The justification for a possible two-year extension of the sunset clause is pretty thin. The opportunity to keep Clause 7 in being beyond this is not justified, unless it is intended to be held up as some sword of Damocles to ensure that future affordable housing obligations are depressed. We agree with the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Tope, that a maximum of two further years of the sunset clause is okay but not more than that. Like the noble Lord, Lord Tope, we hope that the Minister can reassure us on that so that we do not need to test the opinion of the House.
5.45 pm