Indeed, the right to buy is at the behest of the housing association. It can decide whether a house is up for sale or not. If that particular house is not appropriate for sale it can of course offer the tenant another house, and there is the question of a portable right to buy somewhere inside or outside the public sector. Therefore all of that is possible, and I am sure that a sensitive housing association, after having a proper consultation with its tenants and so forth, will do the right thing in the end. It may make mistakes along the line but it has the full power and flexibility to do that, and long may it be so.
I will explode another issue which has come up, which the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, mentioned—that housing associations and others are not replacing houses on a one-for-one basis. Historically, she is correct—that is undoubtedly the case. The numbers have been very low; I think the figure is that one out of every 10 has been replaced by a new home. However, since the new right-to-buy provisions came in, it is more or less one for one. That is the fact of the matter over the last two or three years. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, pointed out, we hope to
do better. We hope that this will galvanise housing associations. The truth of the matter is that in the housing association world, while there are many dynamic and quite large housing associations—