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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many (a) private and (b) public sector homes have been built in each of the last 30 years.

Statistics on house building completions by tenure in England are published in the Department’s live table 209 (annual) which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-house-building

Taken together, the housing association and local authority tenures provide estimates of total social housing completions, but these figures generally understate total affordable supply. This is because the house building figures are categorised by the type of developer rather than the intended final tenure, leading to under recording of affordable housing, and a corresponding over recording of private enterprise figures.

A fuller picture of all affordable housing new build completions is published in the Department’s live table 1009, which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-affordable-housing-supply