Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has made an assessment of the effects of overcrowded living conditions on children with special educational needs.

The Department for Education has not made any assessment of the effects of overcrowded living conditions on children with special educational needs.

The government is committed to reducing overcrowding by increasing the supply of affordable housing and enabling social landlords to make better use of their stock.

Through our affordable homes programme, we are making available £9 billion to March 2022 to deliver 250,000 new affordable homes of a wide range of tenures. Since 2010, we have delivered over 407,000 new affordable homes, including over 293,000 affordable homes for rent.

Through the Localism Act (2011) we have retained the statutory reasonable preference requirements that ensure that overcrowded households receive priority for social housing and introduced fixed term tenancies to make it easier for social landlords to manage their existing stock to reduce overcrowding.

In 2011, we introduced a national mutual exchange scheme, HomeSwap Direct, to make it easier for under-occupying and overcrowded households to help each other.