Well, I can assure the leader of UKIP that there is nobody in my constituency living in social housing and earning £100,000 a year. That much I can guarantee. The response I give to him about what happened in—he mentions one part of London—is Wandsworth and what was done there, where people were forced out of houses and flats and those houses and flats were sold at a huge profit to the council, trying to socially engineer an area for political gain. That’s the way it happened in Wandsworth. Look, if people wish to buy a house, that’s their right, but they should not buy a house that is then removed in terms of it being available for people who need social housing. We know that the outcome of the right to buy and the right to acquire has been a huge deficit in the number of houses available to people. For many, many years, councils were actually forbidden to build council houses and to make up the deficit that was being created by the houses being sold. That’s why we have a situation where we are forever trying to play catch-up. We cannot catch up and provide our people with the right level of housing if we constantly sell off houses at the same time, finding, as England is finding, that the amount of money that is received as part of that sell-off is not enough to replace the house in terms of building a new house. That’s the debate we’ll be having, I’m sure, in the future, as this legislation proceeds.

When it comes to land transaction tax—stamp duty—it’s obviously a tax that is going to be devolved. We want to use that in the most constructive way possible as far as the construction sector are concerned. They’ve been very much part of the discussions that we have been having. When it comes to red tape, it’s a familiar refrain when people say, ‘What we need to do is to cut red tape’, but they never specify what they mean by ‘red tape’. One of the things we have to understand is that, if it wasn’t for the EU—we’ll return to this in a moment—Britain’s environment would be as poisoned as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the EU that dragged Britain out of the torpor it was in then, where one of the rivers in Yorkshire would catch light if you threw a match into it. The reality is that much of the environmental legislation has been a force for good, and people appreciate it and want to see an environment around them that is not needlessly poisoned.

I grew up in Bridgend, where the river used to run different colours according to what had been dumped in at the top: black if it was the mines; if Revlon had thrown lipstick in, quite often you’d see that; sometimes, some of the operations up there would throw dye in and it would run red, green—any colour you want. We don’t have that any more. That is not a situation that we want to return to. I hear what he says, of course, about his desire to play a constructive role and we look to see how that will pan out over the course of the next year.