Clause 25
Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Stewart Jackson (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; Peterborough, Conservative)
Indeed.
The amendment is cunningly disguised as a probing amendment. Conservative members of the Committee feel that there was not sufficient debate in the other place on financial provision for tenant representative bodies. The specific questions that my noble Friend Baroness Warsi put to the Minister, Baroness Andrews, and others were not properly addressed.
There is a wider issue about this clause. We have heard that, in many respects, the Bill contains the fag ends that could not be put in other Bills. As the appropriate Minister advised us, part 8, on construction contracts, should have been a separate Bill in the same legislative programme. It is not and instead, it was tacked on to the end of this Bill. In the same way, this clause should more properly have been included in the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, which I was privileged to be involved with on Report and Third Reading.
The clause seems to be out of place, and there are issues with the definitions in it. There has been some debate about the concept of “other residential property”, and whether it is right in the Bill to give carte blanche financial responsibility not only to the representation of social tenants and the functions of the organisation set up in their name, but to the tenants of social housing in other residential property in England.
In Committee in the other place on 3 February, Baroness Warsi asked:
“Once the Secretary of State has provided the money, who will spend it? What will it be spent on? Who will account for it, and to whom? I will be grateful if the Minister will explain the meaning of the words “financial assistance” so that we can read the explanation”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 February 2009; Vol. 707, c. GC151.]
The terminology used in the clause is too wide, and on that basis, we do not feel predisposed towards supporting it.