New Clause 3

Part of Orders of the Day — Housing Finance Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 April 1972.

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Photo of Mr Arthur Latham Mr Arthur Latham , Paddington North 12:00, 24 April 1972

The hon. Gentleman has not appreciated the considerable significance of the earlier intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. Stallard). I urge the Minister to refer to column 1049 of the OFFICIAL REPORT of the Committee proceedings and remind himself that Clause 25(5), to which he has referred, opens with the words In order to assist the authority to give effect to this section". The assistance to the authority is concerned with the eligibility or otherwise of that element of the rent which is paid in respect of services for the purposes of rent rebate.

I urge the Minister to grasp firmly the point that one is here talking about two categories of service charges, those charges which could not reasonably be excluded from the rent—the Minister's predecessor gave as an example a lift in a multi-storey building—and those which the former Minister described as optional extras, which would be a different kind of service charge in respect of which rent allowance would not be expected to apply.

The point that I am trying to emphasise is that it is clearly the intention of the new Clause not simply to identify, as in Clause 25(5), that element in respect of which a rebate would not be payable, but to identify the whole of the service charge element within the total paid by the tenant. That is an important distinction, and it makes nonsense of the suggestion that what the new Clause requires is provided in the subsection to which reference has been made. That subsection is there for different purposes, and has a limited effect.