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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, with reference to his Department's press release, Government announces it will fully fund unsafe cladding removal in social housing, published on 16 May 2018, whether that funding has been provided by HM Treasury as an addition to his Department's existing budget.

The Government will fully fund the removal and replacement of dangerous Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding on buildings owned by councils and housing associations, with costs estimated at £400 million.

We want to get funding to local authorities and housing associations as soon as possible, so that they can focus on the job of replacing cladding. We will announce more details shortly about how councils and housing associations can apply for funding, including conditions attached to the grant.

The money is coming from the Affordable Homes Programme in this spending review period. However, the same amount of money will be replaced in the programme in 2021-22. Our Affordable Homes Programme remains over £9 billion, with £400 million of that now available in 2021-22. This responds to calls from social landlords for longer term certainty of grant funding for new homes. The programme will still deliver the same number of homes, but this does mean that fewer homes will be delivered in the short term. However, those housing associations and local authorities may have already had to scale back their existing house building plans to pay for new cladding or undertake other essential fire safety work but because we are providing grant funding, those landlords affected will be able to continue to focus on building new homes and undertaking other essential repairs and maintenance.