After my last comment appeared in Housebuilder before Christmas, some readers were kind enough to get in touch to express agreement with what I had written about the hazards of mismatching the industry’s output and its customers’ aspirations. Interestingly, a significant minority came from people involved in regeneration. As an illustration of how the debate about housing tenure has moved on in the last 25 years, this is fascinating. As a new MP in 1983, I made my maiden speech on housing, and it supported the then proposal by the government to extend the right to buy to the tenants of housing associations. I felt that whether people ended up as tenants of the council or HAs was random, since both groups of tenants were picked by the council off the same lists, and since the government was supplying virtually all the money for new developments, I felt that tenants should have the same rights in both cases. Needless to say this proposal went down to defeat in the House of Lords and the government was forced back on to a limited grant enabling tenants to purchase in the ordinary private sector. At this time, I met a lot of …