Council Housing: Rents

Mr. Oaten
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what recent discussions he has had on the system of council rent receipt payments to local authorities.

Mr. Ian Austin
In our consultation paper in July, we proposed to end the central pooling of housing capital receipts, so that councils can reinvest these as part of our proposals to move to a self-financing system. Since then we have met with a number of interested stakeholders including local authorities and tenant associations. We plan to make a further announcement in the next few weeks which will describe the progress we have made on self-financing, set-out more details on the proposals and provide a summary of responses to the consultation.