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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking as part of the loneliness strategy to ensure that community cohesion is considered in the assessment process for prospective Garden Communities.

Prospective garden communities were required to outline how they would achieve ten design qualities in their proposals. These qualities help create places that support cohesive communities, and proposals were assessed against these criteria.

More broadly, we included tackling loneliness as a theme at our national design quality conference in February and are currently developing proposals around housing and placemaking for phase 2 of the loneliness strategy.