PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Housing: Construction (20 December 2018)

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, at what rate he estimates the UK needs to build houses in order to cope with the additional demand created by current levels of immigration.

Asked by:
Sir John Hayes (Conservative)

The Government is committed to delivering the right homes in the right places. We are making progress, and latest figures show over 222,000 new homes were delivered in 2017/18 in England - the highest level of new homes delivered in all but one of the last 31 years. But we are determined to do more in order to deliver the homes communities need. That is why we have set out an ambitious package of measures to deliver 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s. These measures include over £44 billion of financial support, planning reforms and scrapping housing revenue account borrowing caps so councils can deliver a new generation of council housing.

Household growth projections are used in Government’s standard method for assessing local housing need—the starting point for establishing local housing requirements. These projections are derived from the population projections which in turn take into account immigration, projecting these trends forward. It is for local authorities to decide how many homes their communities need through their plan-making process.

Answered by:
Kit Malthouse (Conservative)
10 January 2019