Sarah Gibson

Absolutely. I recognise that this Government are working towards that, which is why I feel very strongly that the Bill is adding to the work that the Government are doing, not detracting from it. Over the years, we have seen the squeezing of affordable housing. It is what gets removed every time there is an economic crisis or an economic case for its removal—the social housing, the infrastructure and the quality of the housing itself. I particularly welcome the compulsory purchase provisions in the Bill, as they deal with the issues of affordability for housing associations and local government being able to actually provide this housing. Authorities need to be able to secure the land at a value that makes these homes deliverable, rather than allowing the inflated expectations of future development value to consume the viability of the scheme before a single home is built. We also need to look again at who actually builds the homes. I speak regularly to the social housing providers in my area, and one problem in relying on developers to construct the affordable element of a large scheme, and then asking the housing association to acquire it, is that those homes have not necessarily been built with what the provider needs. The homes may be the wrong type of house or built to the wrong specification, and increasingly they may leave the provider with the additional costs of bringing them up to the standards the provider will shortly be required to meet. By 2030, social landlords will need to meet new minimum energy-efficiency standards, and providers are therefore being asked to retrofit thousands of their existing homes while simultaneously finding the money to build new homes designed and built by somebody else.