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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to increase the provision of social housing in England.

The Government is committed to increasing the supply of genuinely affordable homes. We have made £9 billion available through the Affordable Homes Programme, delivering approximately 250,000 new affordable homes to March 2022. Councils can bid into this programme to secure funding for new council homes. We also abolished the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap and have given councils a longer-term rent deal for 5 years from 2020. The total number of households on local authority waiting lists is down by 37 per cent compared to 2012. 464,000 affordable homes have been delivered in England since April 2010, including 141,000 new social rent homes.

We will also fulfil our manifesto commitment to renew the Affordable Homes Programme, building hundreds of thousands of new homes for a range of people across the country and providing further stability for councils to build new social homes.