asked the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will make a statement on his recent announcement of his intention to allocate £37 million to 28 local authorities to enable them to repurchase defective prefabricated reinforced concrete houses previously sold to tenants.

My predecessor announced on 9 August 1985 that an additional £37 million would be made available for 1985–86 to help those local authorities which were unable to meet their obligations under the Housing Defects Act 1984. Of the 119 authorities which applied for assistance, 28 seemed unlikely, on the basis of their own estimates, to have sufficient resources to meet these obligations. Additional housing investment programme allocations will be made retrospectively, after the end of the financial year, if these estimates are confirmed by actual expenditure.The estimates submitted were drawn up early in the financial year and were inevitably subject to some uncertainty. For this reason I have asked all those local authorities which applied for assistance to send updated returns to my Department at the end of December.A list of the 28 authorities is given below: