Ms Rosalind Carroll:

No, it is not. In the English environment, there might be a commercial element to some of what is being done. However, in the overall business, if it is meant to be a not-for-profit business, the dominant factor must be the not-for-profit housing provision, even within the UK. Among the provisions in this Bill is a consent on disposals. If an AHB sought to sell a property or to give away the security of a property, it would have to go to the regulator for consent to that. That gives the regulator the power to oversee that it is not unnecessarily giving away security to fund commercial activities just on a whim. One of the difficulties experienced in the English market would have been where a particularly large body went off and secured social housing assets to conduct a risky commercial venture without seeking the consent of the regulator. The regulator had to step in at that point. They did so and then transferred the asset.