My Lords, a few minutes ago, the noble Lord, Lord Porter, began to introduce a debate about the broad principles of right to buy and whether people supported them or not. It is interesting to reflect on the history of the whole process. The Minister may be interested to know that the first time right to buy was proposed was by the Liberals—who subsequently opposed it on a number of occasions—way back in 1947. The Labour Party, which has a long track record of opposing the right to buy at various times, first introduced the proposal in their manifesto for the 1959 election. The Conservatives were very late to the party, until Horace Cutler proposed it for the Conservative-controlled GLC. It stopped briefly when Labour took control of that body, and was then reintroduced. All the political parties represented here have, at some time or another, been in favour of the principle of right to buy.
I continue to believe that the broad principle is correct. The issue has always been about the detail. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, was absolutely right to chide the noble Lord, Lord Porter, and say: “Let us get back to the specifics of the amendment”. The specifics of Amendments 57 and 60 are very important. Looking at some of the details of the right to buy in relation to council housing, the coalition Government were absolutely correct to introduce a requirement for one-for-one replacement. The Minister should note that I have not said “like-for-like”. However, since that was introduced in 2012, for every nine council houses that have been sold off, we have so far only had one replacement. It is inevitable that there will be a drag: it takes time to consider where a new home is going to be; to get planning permission; to gather together the finance and so forth; and then to have it constructed. I am hopeful—the figures give grounds for optimism—that the one-for-one policy initiative will gradually deliver, but it will take a very long time.
There are some 1.7 million council houses left, but there are 2.3 million housing association houses. If we are now to introduce a voluntary scheme for the right to buy housing association houses, depending on the decisions of the housing associations a very large number of properties could be involved. So it is important that we get right the issues that concerned us about the right to buy council housing.
We need to introduce at least a replacement scheme of one sort of another. Amendment 57 seeks to introduce that; it raises two issues and, very interestingly, does not raise, as I might have liked, the issue of size in the one-for-one replacement scheme. Amendment 60 would develop a way of speeding up the process so that a replacement plan would be in place, something that housing associations are more than capable of doing even before they get to the point of selling off any houses. We have a package of two measures on housing association properties that make sense in terms of the principle of having a replacement policy and a system of ensuring that housing associations have replacement properties coming on board. That is why I support both amendments.
Having sat in a similar position to the Minister and seen the sort of briefings that she gets, I know that she will come forward with reasons why there are technical
problems with the amendments. I accept that there probably are technical problems with both amendments, but it will be very good to hear that in principle the Minister supports the idea of a one-for-one replacement scheme. We know that she does because it has been said already that for London it is going to be even better. Does she agree that the principle behind Amendment 60—that housing associations should get organised so that they can do a quick replacement—makes sense, and is she prepared to look at ways of improving any technical deficiencies there might be?