Housing and Planning Bill

My Lords, when the Minister has a chance—perhaps over the weekend—to look at the “Dispatches” programme, would she like to reflect on the information given to that programme by experienced housing professionals? It concerns the implications of illegal deferred sales, in which the money does indeed come from the wide boys and is given to an older person to buy, and many of these people will be pensioners. The arrangement then allows the house to be reclaimed five or eight years on when the pensioner dies. It is a malign form of equity release—if you like, a rolled-up mortgage payment. I hope that she will look at that. Socially, the housing professionals—obviously, it was a television programme and I do not know what the other side of the argument might have been—scandalise me, and I think the Minister, as a local authority person, will also be scandalised at what is being reported there.