My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 71C in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham. I think we can all agree, no matter what position you take on this Bill—whether you think it is right, positive and a great Bill or think it is wrong, negative and not a good Bill—that the proposals are controversial and not universally welcomed. That is because of the lack of regulation—I am not going to start a regulation speech, I promise—and the fact that it is a skeleton Bill with, it has been suggested, not all the bits of the skeleton in place. So I have begun to think that the Bill is just not right. There must be a mechanism in it to enable the Government and Parliament to understand fully the effects of the provisions that have been brought into law.
When we discussed the right-to-buy provisions in Committee, there were many contributions from across the House. I recall the contribution from my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, who told us about a council estate quite close to this House that had almost entirely been sold under the right to buy but, now, almost entirely entered the private rented sector. In fact, many rooms in many of the council flats are now being rented out. He said that there are door numbers on the rooms within flats, and people are paying hundreds of pounds a week to live there. I am confident that when the original right-to-buy proposals were introduced by the first Conservative Government after the 1979 election victory, that was never their intention. The intention was to increase home ownership—a perfectly understandable intention. Of course, its effects today can be seen in the situation up the road.
My amendment provides for a report to be compiled in three years’ time. Three years seems to me a sensible length of time. We will see what has happened with the proposals in the Bill and it will enable the Government—unless there is some unforeseen event, this Government will still be in office when we get the report, with one more year to go—to look at them and understand their effects. That is a sensible thing to do and on that basis, I beg to move the amendment.