HOUSING RENTS AND SUBSIDIES (SCOTLAND) BILL (Hansard, 27 March 1975)

§ Lord HUGHES
I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time. I do not think the House will consider it necessary for me to make a speech at this stage. Despite difficulties of timing and printing, the Bill has been well discussed and we now send it to another place very much larger than we received it and, I believe, better than we received it. My Lord, I beg to move.

Lord CAMPBELL of CROY
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, as I am sure are others, for providing a breathing space on this Bill between the Report stage and the Third Reading. There might have been Amendments still to be made on one or two points, and also consequential Amendments from the Government and from this side. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is the length of the Government Amendments which were received at very short notice, largely owing to the difficulties of printing and distribution in recent days, so that the time available for noble Lords and persons outside the House who were affected to consider the Government's Amendments was very short. Here I echo the feeling behind the remarks of my noble friend Lord Strathclyde at Report stage, about the very short notice and the difficulty of getting copies of the Amendment. The second reason is that we have had a chance to iron out anomalies in the later clauses of the Bill affecting private sector housing. I shall now, like the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, say only a few words.
In Scotland, the principle of balancing housing revenue accounts is to be continued, and this we of course welcome. Our concern has been whether this principle will be applied everywhere in Scotland. We have also been concerned at 1333 the lack of anything in the Bill to ensure that it is, but I know that many of the new local government councils which will come into operation and start their functions in a few weeks' time will apply the principle of balancing housing revenue accounts, which is being continued in the Bill. I very much hope that they all will. So I shall leave that point, which was the main controversial issue between us in that respect.
My Lords, I recognise that the lengthy additions at a very late stage by the Government, to which the noble Lord has referred, could be useful. Although we had little time to examine them in detail, I hope that when they go to the other place the Members there, whose concern it is, will understand when they see pages arriving as the Message from your Lordships' House that, on the whole, they are useful, if minor, additions to the Bill. I should like to take this opportunity of thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, as I did in respect of the last Bill—the Offshore Petroleum Development (Scotland) Bill—for his courtesy in replying to the points which we on this side of the House raised, and also for his stamina in the long sessions which we had at various stages of the Bill when he, on his own, had to deal with all the points and very often to field messages on technical matters. We are grateful to him for the way in which he has handled it.

§ Lord HUGHES
My Lords, I am grateful for the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy. I thank him very much. I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.