Over the past few weeks my time has been taken up working on the new Housing and Regeneration Bill committee. It is a prolonged process which started in early December and finished on the last day of January.

It started with evidence-taking from charitable bodies, the private sector and local government politicians, and then after Christmas we got down to the nitty gritty of line by line consideration and amendment to the Bill.

The job of the MPs on a Bill Committee isto ensure that when the Bill becomes law it works in the way the Government intended, that Parliament is fully aware of what that is and that no unforeseen, unintended consequences occur as a result of sloppy drafting. But Bill Committees are also an opportunity to campaign on issues that affect constituents, and I have taken full advantage to bring to the attention of the Government the concerns that many Newham people have raised with me about housing in the borough.

This Bill, when it becomes law, will create a body called OFTENANT, a regulator that can help tenants ensure their landlords behave in a reasonable and proper way. To begin with it will assist people who live in Housing Association properties but in the near future this service will be extended to council and ALMO (Arms Length Management Organisation Tenants. I argued forcefully that we need to protect private sector tenants too. The Minister accepted my concerns and has established a review of the private sector which will consider further regulation of the private rented sector.

Each time I spoke and pressed the Minister for a change in the law, I used evidence provided by residents of West Ham to point out deficiencies in the current housing legislation.

Many, many times at the coffee mornings I hold, constituents have raised with me the issue of overcrowded homes, where due to the build for the Olympics, many workers are sharing houses made for small families. Residents have asked me to try and do something to change the law, prosecute landlords who flout it and to give powers to the council to regulate the numbers of people in homes. As I explained, hot-bedding might be acceptable on a nuclear submarine, but it does not make for sustainable communities.

One constituent told me of a two-bedroom house in Plaistow in which more than 14 men live. With homes too small for the number of people staying in them, sometimes they live outside the confines of the house - even in the street and the garden. It is insanitary and must stop.

The Minister was very sympathetic and stated that he was prepared to look at the evidence and change the regulations. He also said he would involve me in the future work of the Government department on proposed changes.

I was also somewhat successful on the issue of overcrowding. Newham has a real problem with families living in homes that are too small for them. It can lead to extra concerns for families, with education, health and stresses on family life. In the Bill Committee I spoke of a number of constituents and the problems they faced. I said that we needed to change the way overcrowding is assessed. Currently the law counts the numbers of rooms, not bedrooms, and it does not count babies, only counting children under the age of ten, as half people. These rules date back to a very different time before the Second World War, 1935, and change is long overdue.

Again the Minister was sympathetic agreeing with me that the law was "completely and utterly out of date", adding that he wanted to change it "as quickly as possible". After pushing him quite a bit I got a date - 2009.

Now I'm not naïve enough to believe that all of the people who come to me to ask for help in their housing difficulties will find themselves in a reasonable-sized home by 2009, or that we will be able to stop serious overcrowding in Newham homes simply because we change the regulations. We need to build more family-sized, affordable homes for that to work, but it is a start - the problems have been recognised and action promised. My job is to keep hammering home the stories from Newham to ensure we get the right type of change.

If you want to read the Hansard for the deliberations of the Housing Bill, it can be found on http://pubs1.tso.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmpbhousing.htm

If you have any comment please contact me in writing at Lyn Brown MP, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA, e-mail me at brownl@parliament.uk or call my office on (020) 7231 9969.