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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to support people with mental health conditions applying for social housing.

Local councils are responsible for drawing up and operating their own allocation scheme within the framework of legislation. By law, certain people must be given 'reasonable preference’ (priority) under an allocation scheme, including people who need to move for medical or welfare reasons. Statutory guidance issued to councils in 2012 includes ‘a mental illness or disorder’ as one of the indicators of the medical and welfare reasonable preference category.

The Social Housing Green Paper, published on 14 August 2018, sets out our intention to undertake an evidence collection exercise to help us better understand how the allocations framework is playing out in local areas and if it is striking the right balance of fairness, support and aspiration