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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I was not here to hear what my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby said, and he is not here to gesticulate at me wildly, so I will have to interpret what he said, which is always a dangerous thing to do when we are talking about my hon. Friend. We are at one in believing that there is role for local authority housing, but I have to say that if my local tenants chose, completely objectively, to find some other owner or manager of their stock, that would be a matter for them. What I object to is the fact that they are always asked to do so with their arms twisted behind their backs and their mouths taped over. They are expected to ““do the honest thing””—that is, to go for something that they do not want. That is entirely unfair. The Stroud transfer process debacle was expensive—and unfair, because the tenants and I had to try to determine who the council tenants were. It was a rigged process; we had to go round to anything that looked like a council house and determine whether to knock on the door and try to put the argument to them. There was no other way to do it.