Lord Bird (CB)

Unfortunately, I was not in a position to sit up last night or the night before because I have a full-time job. Yesterday, I was in Cardiff working with people in the Government there. We had a big event around the Big Issue. It was wonderful to be there and to be given the opportunity, I hope, to work with the Welsh Parliament on the idea of social housing, social justice and all that. So I hope noble Lords will forgive me for not being here last night to see all their noble work. I want to say a few things. I think one of the real problems is that people do not understand the role of a tenant. They know the role of a landlord: the landlord owns a piece of property, and they rent it out to somebody. But the role of the tenant over the last 50 years has been to enrich the landlord. If you look at what has happened to the property market over the last 40 or 50 years, the role of the tenant has been to make sure that the landlord gets richer and richer, because we know the way the property market has been going. It has been going in a direction where people can buy a house in one decade—my ex-wife did so—and sell it later in the decade for maybe two or three times as much. The landlord would often have done not much more than rent the property out and keep it going.