Mr. Pat Montague:

I reiterate the point about the importance of the transfer. We have been in suspended animation. I will give a very simple example of that and the impact it has. There is a commitment in Housing for All to regulate under sections 18 and 19 of the Act. Section 18 refers to service charges while section 19 refers to sinking funds. Those regulations were supposed to be issued this time three years ago. The regulations were drafted in February 2022 by the Housing Agency and have been sitting in suspended animation. There have been oodles of parliamentary questions on this. There has been ping-ponging between the two Departments. I will not get into the rights and wrongs of that because the impact of it is that the regulations, which are desperately needed, have not yet been put into effect. They were drafted three and a half years ago and are sitting in suspended animation somewhere in the ether between the two Departments. This is a practical example of the impact of that.

Coming back to what we would like to see, first and foremost is the register. There has to be provision for OMCs to register. There needs to be a central register. There is also a need for them to provide very important information relating to governance and finance, such as, for example, that their annual reports are presented to a regulatory body. I will come to that shortly.