My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy, Lord Beecham, Lord Best, Lord Kerslake, Lord Shipley and Lord Berkeley—in his absence—and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Grender, for their amendments. I welcome this opportunity to discuss their suggestions for possible exclusions from the housing that is to be taken into account in calculating the payments required from local authorities.
The legislation already includes the ability for the Secretary of State to exclude categories of housing from the calculation through regulations. Regulations will provide flexibility to ensure that if circumstances change over time or a need for different exclusions is identified in the future, this can be easily addressed by adding to, amending or removing exclusions in the regulations. We will carefully work through the suggestions that have been put forward, considering the points noble Lords and others have raised, while balancing the need for the policy to support the delivery of right to buy to housing association tenants.
Any exclusions of types of housing that have been suggested today would reduce the amount of money that would be available to increase overall housing supply and to extend home ownership, as the Government committed to in their manifesto. Therefore, we will be considering the data that have been submitted by local authorities, which I referred to earlier, covering the 1.6 million council properties, to identify the potential impact that these possible exclusions would have on the funding available to deliver our priorities.
While no decisions have yet been made, I assure noble Lords that we will be carefully considering the views expressed in your Lordships’ House and the other place and through our engagement with local authorities and other stakeholders when making these decisions. With this in mind, I hope that noble Lords will support our ongoing engagement with local authorities in looking at possible exclusions, and will agree to withdraw or to not move their amendments.
Turning to the detail of the amendments, Amendment 66C, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Beecham, concerns tenant management organisations. We are collecting data and engaging widely to inform the types of housing that will be excluded from the policy, but homes managed by TMOs that are in scope of this legislation must be owned by councils. We think that councils should not keep hold of their vacant housing, the value of which could be released to fund both the building of additional homes and the extension of right to buy to housing association tenants. Excluding housing managed by TMOs would result in less funding being available for these two aims.