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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many homes were purchased by first-time buyers in (a) Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency, (b) Bexley Borough and (c) Greater London, in each month of the covid-19 outbreak.

We have taken steps to keep the housing market open during the Covid-19 and allow people to buy, sell and view properties during periods of national restrictions. This is supported by the temporary cut to Stamp Duty Land Tax for home buyers and underpinned by our guidance for consumers and industry on how the process can operate while minimising the risks presented by the virus.

This Government is committed to helping people get on the housing ladder across the country. Over 717,000 households have been helped to purchase a home since spring 2010 through government-backed schemes such as Help to Buy: Equity Loan and Right to Buy. New initiatives including First Homes, improving shared ownership and a new £11.5 billion affordable homes programme will bring more affordable housing to those who need it.

In addition, the Government has launched a new mortgage guarantee scheme to support a new generation in realising the dream of home ownership. This will increase the availability of 95% loan-to-value mortgage products, enabling more households to access mortgages without the need for prohibitively large deposits.

The English Housing Survey is published annually and reports on housing trends in England, including homeownership rates. Data for 2019-20 is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/english-housing-survey. Data for 2020-21 will be published at the end of this year.

Data on the number of first-time buyers using Help to Buy: Equity Loans is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/help-to-buy-equity-loan-scheme-data-to-31-december-2020.This data indicates that, despite a drop in the earlier stages of the pandemic, the number of first-time buyers who bought a home in England in Q4 2020 using a Help to Buy Equity Loan, exceeds the number in Q4 2019 before the pandemic, with 17,348 and 12,262 first-time buyers respectively. A similar rate of recovery can be seen in the number of first-time buyers in Bexley Borough and across London. Data for Help to Buy: Equity Loan first-time buyer purchases are not published at monthly or parliamentary constituency level.