My Lords, I have some difficulty with all these amendments. I was not going to speak because it exposes my difficulty; however, I will do so briefly. When the then Conservative Government decided to introduce the right-to-buy policy in the early 1980s, I was one of a very few Labour MPs who had reservations about opposing it. That was because my constituency at the time was in quite a deprived area with a lot of property in very bad condition, and the only way round that problem that I could see was to incentivise people on estates to buy their homes and thereby spread a culture of prettifying those estates and making them look pleasanter and nicer to live in. Under that scheme, gardens were done up, windows and doors were changed, roofs were redone—all sorts of changes took place. When I look back over the years, I see that that scheme worked. However, the problem was that while I was living up there I was also living in London and I could never understand the justification for selling local authority housing in London. That has been an absolute disaster.
When I checked this morning, I found that 43% of all the local authority property in Westminster has been sold off. A lot of it is now in the hands of private landlords—we are trying to get the statistics for that in Westminster—who very often charge four times the rent levied by the local authority. This Bill will denude London of most of its public housing stock. That will be the product of the Bill. I consider the estimate that 76% of this housing in Westminster will be sold to be an under-estimate. I think that a lot more housing will go from the public sector than anyone ever imagined. Therefore, I have a dilemma: in parts of the country I can see the justification for this measure, but in other parts it will be an absolute disaster.
The Government say that we should leave this issue to the housing associations to decide. However, as cuts are imposed and as housing associations find that they have reduced resources, they will feel under pressure to sell. Therefore, what may appear to be a voluntary arrangement now will become a de facto mandatory measure because the housing associations will need to draw in this money to enable them to invest further.
My noble friend has moved an amendment which is particularly important in many ways. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Horam: I think it is possible to replace stock in the same borough—you just build high rise. If you compare high-rise and low-rise property, the figures stack up. I think I read somewhere that Boris Johnson—or was it Goldsmith?—had extracted an agreement from the Government whereby they were going to have to replace two for one in London. That is what we are talking about. Obviously, the Government have calculated that it is possible to do it, so my noble friend’s amendment must surely be in order. The reasoning of my former noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Horam, must be wrong. The Government believe it is possible.