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 to encourage the growth of housing co-operation; and if he will make a statement.

Co-operative housing is an important element of the community-led housing sector. The community-led sector offers significant potential for helping to meet housing need across England. In addition to helping increase the rate of delivery of new housing, it will help deliver a range of benefits including diversifying the housebuilding sector, improving design and construction quality, developing modern methods of construction and sustaining local communities and local economies. The support and close involvement of the local community enables the community-led approach to secure planning permission and deliver housing that could not be brought forward through speculative development.

In December 2016, the Government launched the Community Housing Fund to put local groups who know their area’s needs best in the driving seat and help them deliver housing that is affordable to the local community. For the 2016/17 financial year, grants were awarded to 148 local authorities which were particularly affected by local affordability issues or high rates of second home ownership. That funding has been used to build capacity within local authorities and other organisations to support the development of community-led housing projects. It has also been used to directly contribute to the cost of schemes through capital subsidy.

We recently announced that a new programme to deliver the Community Housing Fund will be launched shortly and delivered by Homes England. We will be inviting any appropriate organisation – including community groups, registered providers and local authorities – to apply for capital and revenue funding. The new programme will run until at least 2019/20. The announcement can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/community-led-housing

The department does not hold data on the number of homes delivered by housing cooperatives. We will be collecting data on the number of homes supported by the new fund.