Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment his Department has made of the likely effect the UK leaving the EU will have on the number of new houses needed in future years; and what guidance he has provided to councils on reviewing their housing targets in response to the outcome of the EU referendum.

My department has been keeping developments in the housing market under review since the UK voted to leave the EU. However, it is too early to make a full assessment of the impact on housing need.

This Government is clear that building more homes is central to our vision of a country that works for everyone. Our ambition is to deliver a million more homes by 2020, and we will set out further measures helping us towards our ambitions in a Housing White Paper.

Our guidance issued to local planning authorities makes it clear that the household projections produced by the department should be the starting point for calculating housing need. These projections are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-household-projections. The Office for National Statistics population projections on which these are based already assume a significant decline in net migration: a fall of 45% by 2021 from the level in mid 2015.