My Lords, I will comment very briefly on the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, who made a significant point about the existing instruments we have to help people in this situation—the Help to Buy method and so forth. He made the point that this is a financial instrument and therefore the debt/deficit equation, which is so important to the Government, is resolved by using these sorts of methods. As he pointed out, no fewer than 126,000 people, with total costs of £3.8 billion, have been helped by these methods.
The simple point is that it has not been enough. As the noble Lord also pointed out, you have to have an income of no less than £83,000 to be able to afford a house in London, and 90% of people cannot do that. So the plain fact is that we need to do more—which is what Government are trying to address with starter homes. We dealt two days ago with the question of whether we are helping the right people when we addressed the question of whether you can help people
who are in a different category but who are even more disadvantaged than people who might benefit from starter homes. We dealt with that issue—or at least we tried to. Now we are dealing with whether this is the right kind of instrument in the circumstances to deal with the fact that we have a crisis, particularly in London, and the present instruments do not help enough. That is the fundamental point.