My Lords, I will briefly contribute to the debate on this group of amendments. I am pleased that the Government have brought forward Amendment 2. As many of your Lordships will recognise, we have always felt strongly that it was likely in many places across the country that the need for additional housing was such that the desire of local authorities, the local development community and local people for that housing would mean that we would very much be looking for an agreement of this kind with the Government. I declare again my interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. Cambridge and the surrounding area is one of those places. So amendment 2 seems to be very welcome.
Amendment 3, the amendment to Amendment 2, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, would be very unwelcome. In Cambridgeshire we have a number of local plans, for East Cambridgeshire, South Cambridgeshire, Cambridge City, and many of these development sites cross the boundaries of two local authorities. The local authorities work closely together, but it would be very unwelcome for them to feel that the decisions that they were making and the agreements reached with the Government led directly to rigid and potentially distorting requirements about where the new homes could be built. At Trumpington Meadows, to the south of Cambridge, there is a new development with considerable demand. It would be great to have more affordable housing as the development is extended and we would want the City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council to be able to support the new affordable housing through these kinds of agreements.
I simply did not understand the noble Baroness’s references to the revenue that is to be returned to the Government under Chapter 3 of this part, which is not relevant to the determinations and agreements under Chapter 2. That part of her speech was irrelevant to the question we are considering. This part is about
liberating value in vacant high-value local authority housing, both to build more houses and to support the extension of right to buy to housing association tenants. It is not about funding the deficit.