asked the Minister of Housing and Local Government if he will now state the outcome of his consideration of measures to restore the house building programme.

I would refer my hon. Friend to the statement I made in the House on 18th March. Also I issued a circular yesterday to local authorities explaining what in my view is the purpose of local authority lending; namely to meet housing needs or to further public policies, which would not otherwise be provided for. It also sets out the method of allocating quotas among local authorities for the current financial year.

While appreciating that action, may I ask my right hon. Friend whether he will look again at two emergency measures—the use of the existing compulsory powers against local authorities which are deliberately cutting down their house building programme, and, secondly, permitting banks to make priority loans to house builders, which they are not at present allowed to do?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his suggestions. As to the compulsory powers, this is rather a slow process and I am anxious to make much more rapid progress than would be possible through this means. It is necessary that local housing authorities should have much greater determination than they have now. There are authorities like Birmingham, Sheffield and Newham which are managing to build, and there seems to be no reason why other local authorities should not do just as well. On the second question, this is a matter of which the Chancellor will no doubt take note, but it is probably true that at the moment the difficulty facing the builders is not so much in getting credit as in the high interest rates they have to pay if they get it.

Why does the right hon. Gentleman concentrate so much on local authority housing when it is a fact that there is a severe shortfall in the private sector? Although he said that he would mention these things to the Chancellor, does he not have some shots in his locker to get private enterprise going?

The hon. Gentleman must not have heard the answer I gave to my hon. Friend. He must have been absent from the House on 18th March too. If he will look at HANSARD for that day he will find the very positive measures which the Government announced to help the private sector.