My Lords, before the Minister sits down, may I press her on the letter she issued just before 3 pm today? The letter is about high-value assets and therefore the sale of local authority homes. The statement does not say that those homes, in the form of that tenure, will be replaced one for one. It simply says:
“I am clear that we should be building at least one new affordable home for each dwelling that is sold”.
Because a starter home is defined earlier in the Bill as an affordable home, on the sale of a high-value council home that was for rent it could be replaced by a starter home for sale. That is the issue I tried to get at when I followed the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Porter. If I interpreted correctly what he said, he thought that local authorities were to be allowed to keep the money to build a one-for-one replacement. What the Minister is now saying in this letter, as I interpret it, is that starter homes are in fact being counted as an affordable home replacement for the high-value sale, which means that there is a loss to the social rented sector. I heard the Minister say that we will look at this further on Amendment 64A but I hope she understands that there is a major issue of principle here because a number of us in your Lordships’ House believe that we have to defend social housing for rent.