Clause 1
Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill
4:00 pm
Yvette Cooper (Minister of State (Housing and Planning), Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Pontefract and Castleford, Labour)
Clause 1 sets out the purpose of this relatively short Bill. We discussed many issues concerning the clause on Second Reading, but nevertheless it is worth rehearsing some of the key points and details today.
The clause has four subsections that aim to address the technical difficulties that we face as a result of an omission in the legislation governing the powers of the Housing Corporation. The first subsection will give the corporation an express power to delegate the exercise of its functions to individual members of the board, sub-committees, committees and employees.
When the Housing Corporation was created, it was common for public bodies and non-departmental public bodies not to be given an explicit power of delegation. At that time, powers of delegation were more readily taken to be implied. Since then, the majority of bodies set up without explicit powers have been wound up or have had their legislation modernised to confer such powers.