My Lords, perhaps I may seek clarification that we are talking only about nominations to boards of RSLs and not nomination rights over where the tenants who occupy their homes come from. All those homes that were transferred under LSVT were transferred on the basis that the host council which decided to transfer would maintain its nomination rights. I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is slightly conflicted by having to take an LGA position and an RSL position which are completely opposed to one another on this issue, but sometimes we all have to be Janus-headed.
My concern is not about who sits on the boards, because I think the RSL experiment has failed and I am not sure how many councils would want to be associated with it, but about the loss of nomination rights. Those LSVT units were all taken out council control; they are not private sector homes—or they were not when they left. The Labour Government who did the transfers assured everybody that they were not being transferred to the private sector. If we are now saying that they are, we must at least honour the agreements under which they transferred. While I will support the Government on this, because it is not an issue I would want to die in a ditch over, I think that it is a lost opportunity. We should take all social housing off the public sector debt book so that we can borrow money against it to provide the homes that we badly need. There are 4 million under-sweated assets out there and we should all be able to do the same thing.