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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment his Department has made of the impact of (a) housing benefit levels and (b) the benefit cap on (i) new starts of social housing and (ii) his Department's homelessness strategy.

Government spends around £30 billion a year on housing support through Housing Benefit and Universal Credit. In April 2020, we boosted investment in the Local Housing Allowance by nearly £1 billion and have maintained LHA rates at this same cash level so that everyone who benefitted from this increase will continue to do so.

The benefit cap provides a strong work incentive and fairness for hard-working taxpaying households and encourages people to move into work, where possible. The proportion of households capped remains low in comparison to the overall working age benefit with a caseload of 2.7%. Further data on the benefit cap can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/benefit-cap-statistics#latest-release

Our £11.5 billion Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) will provide up to 180,000 new homes across the country, should economic conditions allow. Since 2010, we have delivered over 574,100 new affordable homes, including over 403,400 affordable homes for rent, of which over 154,600 are homes for social rent.

We have made excellent progress on our manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping, with the number of people sleeping rough at an 8-year low.

We will deliver a bold, new Rough Sleeping strategy which will set out how we will end rough sleeping, building on recent success ensuring rough sleeping is prevented in the first instance and is effectively responded to in the rare cases where it does occur.