Better late than never. More than 18 months since the sale and rent back scandal first broke, the government finally introduced legislation yesterday. But with a maximum of 11 months until the next election, and a growing list of ministerial resignations now including Hazel Blears suggesting that it could be even sooner, the time to get other unfinished business completed is running out fast.
Housing minister Margaret Beckett - a candidate to take over from Blears but who could go anywhere in the reshuffle - spent much of her time in communities and local government questions yesterday defending the government against accusations of being slow to help repossession victims and slow to reform the housing revenue account (HRA).
Her clashes with the Conservatives over the mortgage rescue and homeowner mortgage support schemes got most of the coverage as Beckett was interrupted with Tory cries of ‘two’ - the number of households rescued so far - and hit back by accusing them of laughing at families in trouble. From a seemingly weak position, she did a reasonable job of arguing that for every family helped by the schemes, many more were benefiting from lender forbearance influenced by what the government was doing.
In the debate on the housing revenue account there was a palpable sense of urgency from MPs. David Taylor (Labour) called it a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ while Julia Goldsworthy (Lib Dem) questioned why the results of the review were so overdue. ‘In the current economic climate, surely what we need is swift action, rather than further delay,’ she said.
Beckett responded that: ‘The review has not, actually, been massively delayed—we had hoped that it would report in the spring, and we now hope that it will do so this summer.’ She added that she recognised all the criticisms of the current system and hoped to come forward with radical proposals for change that would attract support across all parties but that it was important to come up with something better than the current system.
But note that ‘hope’ that it will do so in the summer. Reform of the HRA will be fiendishly complicated and so will the even bigger prize of reform of the public borrowing rules but time is running out.
With sale and rent back, the scandal broke in October 2007 but it was 12 months before the Office of Fair Trading recommended statutory regulation. It then took another seven months before the Treasury introduced the secondary legislation. And that was with the same ministers in charge.
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