Clause 8
Housing and Regeneration Bill
3:45 pm
Iain Wright (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Communities and Local Government; Hartlepool, Labour)
I think I am getting older and my knees are not what they were. In order to catch your eye quickly, Mr. Gale, I may need to have a knee replacement operation soon. However, I shall do my best to be quick. [ Interruption . ] I was going to say that perhaps the HCA could provide that.
Let me try to reassure the right hon. Gentleman and clarify what the agency will actually do in respect of housing and regeneration. I expect that it will do several things. It will help local authorities to develop expertise, so that they have the concentration of skills that will allow them to step up to the plate to ensure that they can deliver what is necessary. It will be in a position to lever in private sector finance and to take a strategic view of how and on which sites national needs will be best met. It will acquire land and remediate it to the point at which it becomes viable for a developer to take on further development of it. It will be able to determine what needs to be done on the ground to encourage private sector investment, and to facilitate the appropriate action for providing infrastructure.
However, where the circumstances demand, the agency will be able to take a direct role if it so wishes. Forgive me for using the same language, Mr. Gale—I know that this might not reassure the right hon. Gentleman—but the main thing will be to work in conjunction with local authorities, housing associations and others to bring forward the objects of the agency, rather than to do the work directly itself. However, the option is there should it so wish.
I do not think that I have convinced the right hon. Gentleman, but, to move on to a wider point, clause 8 is about how the HCA can work with land, including buildings. The clause also gives the agency power to reclaim land, which is something that English Partnerships has actively undertaken with a great deal of success. Due to the range of activities that the agency can undertake in respect of land, housing, plant and machinery—for example, acquiring, improving, managing or disposing—it will be able to adopt an innovative approach to delivery.
Those powers will give the agency the best incentive to make the best use of the assets that it acquires, and there is a range of models to help it do that. In order for the agency to fulfil its objects of improving housing stock and regenerating or renewing areas in England, it will need all of those powers.