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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment he has made with Cabinet colleagues of the potential impact of increases in housing costs on households that spend more than 40 per cent of their household income on those costs.

We recognise the current context of higher interest rates and cost of living pressures is concerning for mortgage holders. Decisive action has been taken to support households across the UK through cost of living challenges, and the Government will continue to provide cost of living support in 2023-24, designed to target the most vulnerable households. That is why the new Mortgage Charter of June 2023 sets out commitments by the Government, lenders and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to support existing borrowers who are struggling with their mortgage payments.

We recognise the cost of living pressures that tenants are facing and that paying rent is likely to be the biggest monthly expense.

Affordable Rent was introduced in 2011 to make it possible to deliver a larger number of affordable homes for a given amount of public investment. This has helped to support the delivery of over 659,500 affordable homes since 2010. Of that total, more than 468,700 were homes for rent - and of these, more than 166,300 were Social Rent homes.

The Government is committed to delivering more Social Rent homes, and a large number of the homes to be delivered through our Affordable Homes Programme will be for Social Rent. In addition, we recently consulted on a proposal to amend national planning policy to make clear that local planning authorities should give greater importance in planning for Social Rent homes. We will publish a response to that consultation in due course.