Right to Buy

Andrew Stephenson Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

First, 86% of the people in our country want the chance to own their home, and we make no apology for supporting them. On right to buy, we are talking about the housing associations building more homes. As we have already heard, a number of them—including some of the largest, such as Sanctuary, Orbit and L&Q—see this as a way of ensuring that their asset base can be used to deliver the extra homes that we need, to ensure that housing supply goes up. For those people in the private rented sector, I absolutely want to continue to do everything possible to support their aspiration to own. That is what Help to Buy is about, and it is what the 200,000 starter homes announced by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer last week are about. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will support us in our programme of work.

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

I am pleased that my constituency’s largest housing association, Housing Pendle, is delivering 122 new affordable homes this year. Will the Minister confirm that extending the right to buy to housing association properties will mean more money overall, with money being released to build new affordable homes, thus helping more families to access the good quality, affordable homes they so desperately need?

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. He has a good example in his local authority area of a housing association that is keen to build, and this scheme will allow it to access its assets to build more and to use that income to make sure it is building more homes to increase supply across our country.