The aim of the Bill is to create the Homes and Communities Agency which will support the delivery of social and affordable housing. This will allow the government to implement its pledge of three million new homes by 2020 as stated in the housing green paper. The Bill also reforms social housing and social housing regulation to promote better services for tenants. It will also provide the opportunity to modernise powers on establishing new settlements like eco-towns.

The Bill takes forward the work of the Cave Review on Social Housing Regulation and policies responding to John Hills’ assessment of social housing. It also fulfils the Labour 2005 manifesto pledge to increase the supply of social housing and increase home ownership.

The pledge to create three million homes has led to concerns over the impact to the environment and local infrastructure. Further, some critics argue that increasing housing supply will not have the desired effect on affordability of housing.

During second reading in the Commons, minister for housing, Yvette Cooper, explained that the Bill was a major part of the government's plans to build 3 million new homes by 2020. Those homes, she expanded, would be better built and conform to a new timetable for all homes to be zero-carbon.

Cooper stated that the UK needs more market housing, more social housing and more shared-ownership housing. The minister explained that Bill would offer hope to young first-time buyers who are increasingly being priced out of the housing market. Cooper stated: "Young families can face the greatest pressures. Many of them struggle to take their first step on the housing ladder, with 40 per cent of first-time buyers now having to rely on their family and friends to raise a deposit, which is simply unfair, and hundreds of thousands of families are on the waiting list for social housing. We owe it to them to do more."

The Bill would also cater for more sustainable and stronger communities taking forward the work of July's green paper on new eco-towns and better use of public sector land.

The Bill introduces the Homes and Communities Agency - bringing together the functions of English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation - to provide "essential support and help" to local councils to deliver on house build targets.

Another statutory body that the Bill would seek to establish would be the new Office for Tenants and Social Landlords, which would have a statutory objective to protect the interests of tenants.

Cooper concluded her comments with a call to the Conservatives to drop their opposition to the Bill "for the sake of first-time buyers in the future, for the sake of families waiting on council waiting lists, for the sake of all those in need of more, better and more sustainable housing".

For the Conservatives, their shadow housing minister Grant Shapps, spoke to a motion opposing second reading on the grounds that the Bill "creates a top-down, centrally-driven approach to development and regeneration".

Shapps began by taking issue with the role of the proposed Homes and Communities Agency. Shapps stated: "The aims of the Homes and Communities Agency are laudable enough, but the government have misjudged our housing challenge by creating a bulging piece of legislation that simply replicates the failed measures of the past. They are introducing a top-down, Whitehall-driven, centrally controlled, big-Government-know-best approach, while local people and their communities are having their powers stripped away."

He also criticised the government's record on encouraging affordable housing. He raised the example of the social homebuy scheme introduced in 2006, but which "managed to sell just 88 homes". He also told the House that the government has "consistently failed to meet their own home-buying targets".

Concluding his comments, Shapps stated: "They have simply published a Bill that proposes a bigger stick, a bigger state and bigger targets, but we simply cannot live in targets."

For the Liberal Democrats, Paul Holmes explained that one of the reasons why the UK was so desperately in need of social housing for rent was due to the lack of housing units being built now. "For 50 years after world war two, councils built an average of 120,000 properties per annum while the private sector built an average of 150,000 per annum. In the last 10 to 12 years—certainly in the last 10—councils have built only 4,000 council houses, and last year they built just 400. Housing associations, the Government’s preferred alternative for the provision of social housing, have managed an average of only 22,000 properties a year over those 10 years."

Holmes also stated that affordability "should be locked in from day one".

Holmes stated that the Liberal Democrats would not support the Conservative amendment as its charge that the Bill creates "a top-down, centrally-driven approach to development and regeneration" was not correct. Holmes quoted the Local Government Association which supports the broad aims fo the Bill and has stated that the creation of a single regulator - the Homes and Communities Agency - is a positive step.