Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to make housing more affordable for young people.

We are building the homes our country needs and helping a new generation to own their own home – and making sure young people are not priced out of their area.

We are investing over £12 billion in affordable housing over 5 years, the largest investment in affordable housing in a decade. This includes our new £11.5 billion Affordable Homes Programme which will leverage up to £38 billion of private finance and deliver up to 180,000 homes should economic conditions allow. Half of these homes will be for affordable home ownership, supporting aspiring homeowners to take their first step on to the housing ladder. This includes our new, fairer model for Shared Ownership and 1,500 First Homes for first-time buyers and key workers.

First Homes are homes which are sold to first-time buyers with a discount of at least 30 per cent from full market value, making both deposits and mortgage requirements cheaper and opening up the dream of home ownership to even more people. The discount will be funded by developers themselves as part of their contributions through planning obligations, without a direct cost to central Government or local authorities.

Crucially, the discount will be passed on to all future purchasers in perpetuity, so these homes will keep helping first-time buyers onto the property ladder for generations to come.

In future, 25 per cent of all affordable homes delivered by developers as part of their obligatory contributions will be First Homes. This new First Homes Requirement means that there will be a steady and sustained supply of these homes, helping first-time buyers across England.

This is in addition to our Help to Buy: Equity Loans, which have helped over 257,000 first-time buyers into homeownership since its launch in 2013 to 1 December 2020. The new Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme opened on 1 April 2021 and will run to March 2023. It is targeted at first-time buyers only and has regional property price caps based on average first time buyer property prices.

The mortgage guarantee scheme launched on 19 April 2021 and will be available until December 2022, enabling lenders to offer 95% loan-to-value (LTV) mortgages to both first-time buyers and existing homeowners, throughout the whole UK, on homes up to £600,000 in value. 95% mortgages supported through the scheme are open to all adults, including young adults.

For renters, in response to Covid-19 pressures, the Government has put in place an unprecedented support package to help renters and ensure they can continue to afford their housing costs, including retaining the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Universal Credit uplift until September.

In the long run we need to build more homes to tackle affordability. This is why we are bringing forward an ambitious near-£20 billion investment to underpin the Government’s long-term housing strategy. We are also pushing forward with our planning reforms to establish a simpler, faster and more predictable system and ensure that the right homes are built in the right places where they are needed.

We are making good progress towards achieving our supply ambitions of delivering 1 million homes this Parliament and building 300,000 homes a year over the longer term. Last year, around 244,000 homes were delivered – the highest level for over 30 years and the seventh consecutive year that net supply has increased.