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)
Practically, the measure will allow the Housing Corporation to operate in exactly the same way as a series of other NDPBs—English Partnerships, English Heritage, the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. A series of bodies have that kind of power nowadays. Such power will allow the board to take responsibility for deciding which decisions it needs to scrutinise properly, which issues it needs to debate and discuss, where it can add the greatest value to the running of the organisation and which decisions could be delegated far more effectively to officers or sub-committees. It allows the board to have the kind of flexibility that many organisations already have, and it was also presumed that the Housing Corporation already had that power.
Throughout the Housing Corporation’s history it has been clear that the corporation and the Department, as well as housing associations and lenders, thought that the corporation had an implied power. That was clear not only in discussion of previous legislation enacted before 1997, but in the most recent debates on the Housing Act 2003. It was clear that the corporation, the Department and all the lenders thought that the implied power was in place.
The Bill simply restores to the Housing Corporation and all the stakeholders who need to engage with it something that everyone had previously thought already applied. It is therefore not practical to expect the board to operate in a different way from similar bodies. This is about simply giving it a sensible administrative basis on which to work.