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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to improve the mechanisms of support for people facing hardship while renting in the private sector.

Government spends around £24 billion a year on housing benefit to support people with their housing costs. Government is also providing local authorities with over £800 million in Discretionary Housing Payments funding between 2016 and 2021 to help support vulnerable claimants.

In addition, 30 per cent of potential savings from the Local Housing Allowance freeze will be used to create further Targeted Affordability Funding from 2017 to help tenants in those areas where local housing allowance rates have diverged the most from local rents.

The key to improving affordability in the private rented sector across England is to build more homes. Our Housing White Paper, published in February, included measures to deliver more homes and reform the housing market. A copy is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fixing-our-broken-housing-market