My Lords, this afternoon we have heard many examples of potential housing crises and disasters caused by the way that tenants will be treated under this Bill. Most of the examples, of course, depend on the properties in consideration being high-value properties, and therefore available for sale. So a lot of the problems would be resolved if the Secretary of State determined what a high-value property was in negotiation with representatives of local authorities.
Clearly, there will need to be further negotiations in some cases to decide how you tackle particularly difficult cases. Putting all that in the Bill would indicate that we could produce a solution to these problems covering the whole of the country rather than one which reflects local circumstances, local authority by local authority. That is what we need to do, perhaps by means of the regulations which—as has been said many times, not least by my noble friend the Minister—we have not yet seen. We do not know when we will see them, but a resolution of this issue will be down to the good will between the Secretary of State and the local authority negotiators.
Some problems have not been addressed, one of which applies particularly in London. The noble Baroness, Lady Grender, touched on it slightly but I thought rather overegged the issue, if she will excuse my saying so. If a local authority sells a high-value property and uses the proceeds to build two other properties, the two other properties will probably not be high-value properties. Just the arithmetic, apart from anything else, makes that unlikely. However, London house prices are going up at a very high rate, and have done so historically. They are not going up at a high rate at the moment. In fact, in some places they are positively coming down. I am told by my friends in the property world that that trend may well continue for some years. If that is the case, the point I am about to make will not arise for some time. But I think we can expect that in due course the replacement properties that the central London local authorities build will rise in value.
It is conceivable that in a very strong domestic property market, a local authority will build a housing unit—if I can use that ghastly expression—which is currently below the high value but, because of its land value, is still quite a high-value property but not high enough to trigger the sale. But within a very short period of time, which could be as short as 12 months, or possibly two years—who knows?—it could become vacant, and at that time its value could rise just above the threshold. So there is a problem here. I think it applies particularly to London. I suspect that it will be less of a problem elsewhere. But it depends totally on the definition of high value in each area, as I said earlier. The key to making this policy work is to get the definition of high value right area by area and district by district.