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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will place in the Library copies of the (a) business case and (b) impact assessment conducted on the affordable housing strategic partnerships agreed by Homes England announced on 3 July 2018.

The Government has secured eight Strategic Partnerships between Homes England and housing associations, which will use £587.7 million of funding from the £9 billion Affordable Homes Programme to deliver an additional 14,280 affordable housing starts by March 2022.

This is a new way of working with housing associations and will accelerate the building of affordable homes, however it is using programme funding that has been announced previously. Therefore, the Department did not carry out a new impact assessment. The Department does not publish business cases for individual programmes.

The Affordable Homes Programme Budget was increased to £9 billion at Autumn Statement 2017. The fiscal impact of this increase on public finances was included as part of the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook November 2017, which can be found at: http://obr.uk/efo/economic-fiscal-outlook-november-2017/