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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the effect of the increase in the price of construction materials since 2010 on (a) house building and (b) the cost per unit of Government spending on housing.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that just over 50 per cent of the cost of house building comes from the cost of materials. The cost of construction materials for house building rose 15.3 per cent between 2010 and 2017, the equivalent of 1.8 per cent annual inflation. Over the same period, the Construction Output Price Index for New Housing rose by 17.8 per cent, the equivalent of 2.1 per cent annual inflation.

Annual net additional dwellings in England increased from 137,390 units in 2010/11 to 217,350 units in 2016/17, and our ambitious end-to-end reforms announced at Autumn Budget and in the Housing White Paper put us on track to transform the market to support delivery of an average of 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.