Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, I am continuing the discussion that I brought to the Committee with Amendment 182. At the time, I referred to the fact that there were other amendments that were relevant to that debate but, because they were not before your Lordships, I could not speak to them. That was because there was a bit of a dispute about whether this amendment was in scope. It comes back to the issue of people in social housing and whether they have the right to buy or to acquire, which we discussed at length on Monday. I recall that one of your Lordships expressed some damning doubt about all this, but the whole point of this amendment is to address the question: “what is rural?” One thing that noble Lords may not be aware of is that, when these powers were set up, what actually happened—particularly on right to acquire—was that in 1997 a whole bunch of statutory instruments were put into place naming individual parishes and parish areas. County by county, right across the country, whole lists were put in place. Curiously, some of the places not included were perfectly rural and below that so-called 3,000 threshold, used generally by government to consider the difference between somewhere considered rural and not. With reference to this amendment, what has happened over the years is that places have grown. Some of these villages have deliberately become areas of growth. I will mention a couple. I happen to know parts of Suffolk and Hampshire reasonably well, having lived there for many years. There are places such as Four Marks, near Alton, in Hampshire, or Colden Common near Winchester. I was particularly inspired by the story that I told the Committee about my discussions with residents of Rendlesham in Suffolk—but there are more and more. Instead of trying to get into some kind of hybrid situation, I thought that it would be worth while to not deprive people due to the fact that, if they lived in a different place where the population was over 3,000, they would not have that arbitrary rule—because then they would be able to have that, if we did it by the threshold of what is considered rural rather than what is named, or not. To that end, this was supposed to be a combined debate, as I still feel that it is somewhat unfair that many people cannot acquire their house from social housing, particularly in the countryside, and I still think that the issue needs redressing. This is a mechanistic way of making sure that the threshold applies for rural social housing—if it is still in a genuinely rural area—but if it is no longer realistically a rural area people should be able to acquire the right.