Housing and Regeneration Bill
12:00 pm
Adam Sampson: I shall be brief. First, thank you for inviting us; it is a good opportunity for us to put our views forward. Generally, we support the Bill and consider most of the measures to be entirely appropriate. Although there may be some issues about drafting in one or two places, generally we support the vast majority of measures. One or two individual measures can be strengthened, and, inevitably, we would not be Shelter unless we had a shopping list of other demands that we wish to see in the Bill. However, we are conscious of the need to move swiftly to enact the legislation and not to delay matters. In our judgment, it is imperative that the Government accelerate their programme of social house building, and the Bill is a key step towards that, so we are anxious not to delay its passage by bringing forward lots of extraneous amendments, no matter how important they may individually appear to us. We say that in the hope that there will be other opportunities for housing legislation within the lifetime of this Government.