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 increase the strength of the housing market.

Government has set out a long term and comprehensive strategy to make the housing market work for everyone; including to release more land for homes where people want to live; build the homes we need faster; get more people building more of the kind of homes people want; as well as support people who need help now

We have acted to make our housing market work better, including:

• planning reforms to ensure more land is available for housing and maximise the potential of our cities and towns to build new homes whilst protecting the Green Belt;
• launching Homes England, bringing together money, expertise, planning and compulsory purchase powers;
• lifting Housing Revenue Account borrowing caps so local authorities can deliver a new generation of council housing;
• Providing more than £15 billion of new financial support over the next five years, taking total financial support to at least £44 billion to 2022/2023, which will boost the delivery of housing and use funds flexibly to unblock the barriers to more housebuilding;
• publishing a Green Paper which sets out a new deal for social housing in England;
• measures to rebalance the relationship between tenants and landlords to deliver a fairer, good quality and more affordable private rented sector;
• and reforms to make sure the leasehold system in England is fair and transparent to the consumer.

Taken together, our reforms will help create, fund and drive a fairer housing market that delivers 300,000 homes a year on average by the mid-2020s.