My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have contributed to this long and important debate. I notice that what was the awkward squad last time has now been transformed
into three wise men, so we are obviously making progress. On a more serious note, this debate is of enormous interest to thousands of leaseholders, many of whom have bills they cannot afford to pay on the mantelpiece. We have thousands of leaseholders who would like to sell but cannot, because their property is blighted. We have all wanted to come up with a solution this afternoon; I think we are making progress, as I will come on to in a moment.
One issue the Government will have to face is that leaseholders do not read 24 pages of legalese amendments to a government Bill. They remember the soundbites that I mentioned right at the beginning—the polluter should pay, not the leaseholder; the leaseholders are innocent; we have statutory protection. There is a risk that the exclusions in the small print will erode the good will that the Government have generated so far in the progress they have made. We need to do a little more to address those exclusions, which stop us achieving the principle to which the Government are committed—the polluter should pay, not the leaseholder.
The other thing I take from this debate—I hope the Minister will agree with this—is a point that I, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, made, which is that we have to make an early start. We simply cannot wait until the money has come in from the levy to do the work. I will come back to this in a moment, but there was a suggestion from both the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and my noble friend Lord Blencathra that the Government should provide the bridging finance—I think that was the word the noble Earl used—in order to get the show on the road and make an early start, rather than wait for the money to come in after long and expensive litigation.
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The good news from this debate has been what my noble friend said at the beginning and again at the end. Right at the beginning, he said that what we need is a mixed approach—in other words, not total reliance on the approach that the Government have come up with so far but an approach that adopts some of the ideas that have been shared this afternoon. I very much welcome that and the spirit in which he said it.
The other bit of good news was that my noble friend said, again earlier on, that there are different types of freeholders. The ones I was particularly concerned about were the leaseholders who were enfranchised and are the freeholder. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, came up with other freeholders, and my noble friend said at the beginning that we will need to subdivide freeholders. At the moment, they are all lumped in together. I am not sure we can leave that entirely to secondary legislation. I hope we can have some clarity between now and Report on exactly which freeholders are in the frame and which should not be.
I am very grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, who agreed that we both share the same objectives. I agreed with the point he made that we should avoid judicial review; there is a real risk that we could end up there. This may not be the place to drill down into the details of proposed new Section 36A(1). I am very happy to do what Ministers sometimes do and offer to write to the noble Earl to address some of the issues he raised.
My noble friend Lord Blencathra added his own suite of solutions in his own inimitable way, and I will look at Hansard tomorrow to see how they coped with the Greek quotation at the beginning of his speech.
The right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, focused on social housing, housing associations and local authorities. I had not envisaged that they would pay the levy, and I am not sure whether that is the Government’s position. They obviously may apply for building control and planning consent. I had not envisaged them being caught by the levy; perhaps we need a bit of clarity on that.
Despite what my noble friend the Minister said about housing associations bearing responsibility, they are in a slightly different position from local authorities in terms of the resources that have been made available. Even if local authorities have to pay for their own defects being put right, at some point somebody is paying for that. It is either some social housing that was not built or a reduction in social care. They can put it right, but there is a cost—