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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their assessment of the impact of the removal of the requirement for developers to provide a certain proportion of affordable housing in developments of ten homes or fewer on the number of small and medium-sized enterprise builders over the last two years.

Government does not have data on the number of small and medium-sized (SME) builders over the last two years, but the National House Building Council (NHBC) estimated that the number of homes registered by small builders fell from 44,000 in 2007 to 16,000 in 2016.

Our Housing White Paper published in February this year recognised that small sites create particular opportunities for smaller developers, as well as custom developers, and set out a number of proposals for national policy changes so that local planning authorities have policies that support the development of small sites.