My Lords, before we conclude this group, I start by saying that I do not know how any Government with a social conscience could listen to our debate for the last couple of hours without feeling an urgent desire to scrap the right to buy.
I support Amendment 438 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, concerning the sale of higher-value council residential properties. We must not forget that a lot of them are very old, they may have a lot of bedrooms, and they may be under-occupied, as we understand it, and very expensive to maintain—all good reasons for selling them. But we have a chronic shortage of housing. We all know that; we have heard it repeatedly today. If you geometrically increase that to the chronic shortage of social housing, or affordable housing, it is a crisis. The proceeds of all council residential property sales should be reinvested into social housing and affordable housing. They are not, as we have heard again and again. The failure to replace the units lost by the right to buy—the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, referred to it very eloquently—is a disgrace.
The private developers, who build large numbers of residential units for private sale are under an obligation to provide an allocation under the Section 106 agreements for affordable housing, but this is abused by developers—everyone in the industry knows that. The affordable housing obligation is subject to something called a financial viability appraisal. The bigger developers are frequently huge, multi-million-pound public companies; they have the resources, expertise and firepower to employ legal advisers at the highest and most expensive level to provide the financial viability assessment that suits their purposes. There is no possibility of local authorities being able to take on this challenge, partly because they would have to do it so frequently, and partly because they are short of funds in the first place and hardly able to challenge planning applications even on a private level from time to time. I am afraid that there is very little likelihood of the numbers of social or affordable housing being increased in the short-term. I conclude that—