Housing and Planning Bill

I think we are pleased that the Minister shares our concern, as we would expect her to do, about the widespread abuses, some of which apply to RTB on council housing, and which will certainly, if we do not check them, apply to RTB on housing association sales. Given the local government experience, which is not normally found in her civil servants, supportive though they may be, would she consider setting up a working party, possibly with the LGA or whatever, including some housing practitioners, fraud experts, lawyers and the rest, to see how she can build fraud out of this system before it is too late? I completely trust her, of course, about how she sets this up and who she talks to, but we share a common agenda here, and if any good is to come from this policy—I worry about it—it will be dwarfed, some of us fear, by the abuses and the screaming headlines she is going to find in the press a year or two down the line as some of these abuses come to light. I do not ask her to make a commitment now, but will she take away the proposal so that she can come back to us, perhaps on the next day in Committee, and say that she is going to set up such a working party with appropriate people—the LGA would obviously be the first point of call, and lawyers, as well, some of whom have acted for the wide boys in the past, as I know—to see how she can build out fraud in a more effective way than at the moment we believe may happen?