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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what progress his Department is making on implementing the housing white paper of February 2017, Fixing our broken housing market; and if he will make a statement.

Our recent Housing White Paper sets out a long term, comprehensive strategy to fix our dysfunctional housing market by tackling failures at every point in the system, whilst also taking more steps to help people now so that housing is more affordable and people have the security they need to be able to plan for the future.

Since its publication in February 2017, the actions we have taken include the following:

• Launched the £2.3 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund. The fund will unlock up to 100,000 new homes by helping to fund much needed infrastructure in the areas of greatest housing need. We are currently assessing bids from local authorities.

• Launched the £45 million Land Release Fund to ensure local councils release some of their unused or surplus land for housing. This will help to meet the ambition to unlock enough council-owned land for at least 160,000 homes by 2020. Closing dates for bids is 3 November.

• Consulted on changing planning policy to support more Build to Rent homes, including affordable rental homes, as well as providing a £65 million boost to the biggest development of homes built specifically for private rent in the UK. Located at the Wembley Park Development in Brent, this will contain 6,800 homes for rent.

• Consulted on a range of measures to help tackle unfair and unreasonable abuses of the leasehold system. We are considering the responses and will respond in due course.

• On Affordable Housing, to deliver more affordable homes and to ease the way for councils to build more social housing, including at a social rent, we will invest a further £2 billion in funding for housing associations and local councils in England.

• On letting fees, we carried out an eight week public consultation to seek views on how the ban on letting fees paid by tenants should be implemented and enforced. The consultation closed on 2 June. We will be publishing the draft bill shortly.

• We are consulting on proposals to reform the planning system to increase the supply of new homes and increase local authority capacity to manage growth. The consultation closes on 9 November.

• Going further, we will bring forward a green paper on social housing in England which will be a wide-ranging top-to-bottom review of the issues facing the sector. The green paper will be the most substantial report of its kind for a generation.