Clause 11 - Use of capital receipts
Local Government Bill
4:30 pm
Mr David Curry (Skipton and Ripon, Conservative)
I shall not wait with bated breath. I am a long-standing Bolton supporter, but I have gladly taken the precaution of never watching the team in action ever since they lost—unfairly, I thought—to Blackpool in the 1953 cup final, which I watched on my Gran's television in Burton-on-Trent.
The other leg of the Government's programme is demolishing houses in the north. That is desperately needed. There is not a single housing market in England, but several, and the major division is caused by the problems experienced in many of the northern cities. Everywhere, people are moving out of cities into surrounding areas, which creates a problem of financial resources being drained from some of the big metropolitan areas—hence the resource equalisation programme—and leaves large amounts of housing for which there is no market and which have to be demolished.
An interesting question is: where does one fit into the other? Is it intended to redistribute from what the explanatory notes call ''richer authorities''? I always try to avoid reading explanatory notes, because they are usually even more obscure than the text of the Bill itself. The notes refer to redistribution
''from richer authorities to those in areas with a greater need for new housing investment'',
but the areas with that greater need can themselves be very rich authorities.