The Housing and Planning Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons this afternoon, and though Labour has been making angry noises about it, it won’t encounter as many problems as it might have done. This might ultimately be a bad thing for the Tories, though.
The rebellion that won’t happen would have been on the right-to-buy for housing associations, which the Tories put in their manifesto, but which a number of their own MPs were deeply worried about. Housing associations were so worried about the impact of the government legislating to force them to sell off their homes that they made a voluntary offer to ministers to design their own scheme so that the government didn’t need to legislate.
The National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations predicated their offer on two main threats: the first being that if the government did legislate, it might tip the balance in the debate about whether these organisations are public bodies.
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