I oppose the Bill presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman).

My hon. Friend's heart is, of course, in the right place; the problem is that her Bill has been so narrowly drafted that it does not, in my view, adequately address the problem that she has so properly brought to our notice. In my hon. Friend's immortal words, her aim is to bring lodgers back to the bosom of the landlady. That is a laudable aim. We know exactly what my hon. Friend means and exactly what she wants: she wants, as she said, to reduce the pressure on housing, especially for single people. She wants to do that by giving a boost to private renting, which always used to be a major source of accommodation—especially for single people.

I fear—and I know that my hon. Friend shares my view—that the problems of private renting go much deeper and are much more profound than the difficulties faced by those wishing to find private shared accommodation, although their difficulties are, of course, an inextricable part of the wider problem. Private renting in this country—unlike private renting in any other country in the western world—has collapsed. In the 1950s it represented about 50 per cent. of all accommodation; today it represents about 7 per cent. At the same time, there are about 600,000 empty private sector houses, as my hon. Friend pointed out. Many are not rented out because their owners are literally terrified of the consequences of doing so.

Thirty years of socialist denigration of the landlord and landlady has taken its toll. As a result, the potential penalties of renting out their property, or one room of it, are considered by most people far to outweigh the meagre rewards. My hon. Friend stressed that, and the implications for the use of the national housing stock are extremely serious. If even one third of the empty private sector housing were put out for rent many of the present pressures on housing would be removed without a single new building.

I know that in the current mood, we are not really allowed to be confrontational and far be it from me to disturb the tranquillity of the House, but I should like to make one small, innocent, well-meaning observation about the socialist party's policy towards private renting. Its programme, now printed formally in its policy documents, of reintroducing total security of tenure to new as well as to old lodgings, and presumably thus to shared lodgings, would, if implemented, finally kill the private rented sector stone dead with or without the Bill which my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay has brought before the House today.

Labour's policy is already acting as a serious deterrent to new landlords coming forward and it is directly and detrimentally affecting the position of thousands of people looking for homes.

I should have liked to see in my hon. Friend's Bill, with all its excellent intentions for the provision of extra accommodation, some mention of something that she herself has championed in recent years—the future deregulation of tenancies. We should at least ensure that people who succeed to existing regulated tenancies should do so through contracts freely entered into by them and their landlords, as is the case now for assured tenancies and for shortholds. It is also necessary to treat the operations of landlords for tax purposes in the same way as any other business would be. Their capital expenditure should certainly benefit from roll-over rules. I believe that it would have been better if my hon. Friend's Bill had addressed that point.

My hon. Friend has done the House a great service by raising the matter of privately rented accommodation. I want her to reapply her genius to the wider context in which lodging must be seen, take this Bill away and bring back an amended version, perhaps more along the lines of the one that she presented to the House some months ago.