Lord Lansley (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend in her amendment. I should declare this first time in Committee my interests, as recorded in the register, as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and adviser to other development forums, although all the views I will express will be entirely my own and not attributable to any members of those forums. We arrived at a position back in 2024 when the Government radically reduced the discount rate for existing tenants. I felt very strongly, as I think my noble friend did, that there were significant legitimate expectations on the part of those who were tenants that they would be saving over a period of time and would have the opportunity to buy at a significant discount. I can see that the Government had the right as an incoming Government to adjust the discount, and they chose to do that, but I think they went too far. I firmly support my noble friend in saying that we want to continue to give tenants the feeling of hope that they will buy and that there has to be a sufficient discount to make it worth their while to do so, especially in many parts of the country where property prices these days are not necessarily increasing. We do not want them to not take the opportunity to buy because they fear that the property they would buy would no longer be of the value they have paid. The discount that my noble friend is recommending in Amendments 14 and 15 firmly puts us in the right sort of territory for continuing to meet, to some extent, the legitimate expectations of many tenants and is sufficient to make it clear that we are not giving them an undue incentive to buy. When you combine my noble friend’s amendments with some of the Government’s amendments and others, which mean the right to buy is able to be established only over a significant period of time, as we have just recently discussed, that is quite a manageable combination. The Government should be willing to entertain that people who have been tenants for a long time, or are tenants for a long period of time in the future, are given a worthwhile discount of the kind my noble friend proposes.