Sir Stephen Timms

I think we are all waiting to hear what the Chancellor says next week. I can certainly assure the hon. Member that my colleagues in MHCLG and the Treasury are continually talking about these issues and the right approach. Last time the uprating to the 30th percentile happened—April 2024—the cost over the full spending review period was, if I remember rightly, some £7 billion. If we are looking at effective measures to tackle homelessness, the approaches and specific funding that I have just described to address the problem and the risk of homelessness are the effective ways to do that. Those are the kind of factors that the Chancellor will certainly be bearing in mind as he reaches his decisions for next week. To further drive the shift from crisis response to prevention, we are setting a national target to increase the proportion of people supported by council homelessness services to stay in their homes or helped to find alternative accommodation. Our new duty to collaborate will require public services to work together to identify people at risk of homelessness and to consider what action they can take within their existing responsibilities to help prevent that. The Government’s key priority in all this is to secure an adequate number of decent affordable homes. We have announced the new 10-year, £39 billion social and affordable homes programme—the biggest boost to housing grant funding in recent memory. The aim is to maximise supply, with a target to deliver at least 60% of the homes under the programme as social rent. Initial funding allocations via the programme have been confirmed across England, excluding London; 33 providers will receive £9.5 billion to invest in new social and affordable housing and deliver 73,000 homes. Nearly two thirds of the homes built by strategic partners through the programme will be for social rent, and for the first time ever, three councils—Cambridge city council, Eastleigh borough council and Newcastle city council—have been awarded strategic partnership status with Homes England. Councils are increasingly stepping up to meet our bold ambitions. More than £16 billion in funding for outside of London is still yet to be allocated. In allocating that, the Government intend to prioritise social rent homes, particularly council homes, to achieve the Prime Minister’s ambition for the biggest council house building programme since the post-war boom ended in the early 1980s. Directing funding into that programme and others along those lines is the way to deal properly and permanently with the severe housing crisis that we face right across the country, which the hon. Member for St Ives and others have spoken very powerfully about in this debate. The new national housing bank was launched on 1 April, backed by up to £16 billion in financial capacity. We envisage that bank leveraging in billions of pounds of private investment to accelerate house building across the country. It is taking quite a pioneering approach to its role, and its status as a publicly owned subsidiary of Homes England, designated as a public financial institution, gives it a lot of autonomy in working out how to do this job most effectively. My colleagues in MHCLG have launched the national housing delivery fund, which includes £5 billion of grant funding to support housing delivery and address viability challenges, including through the remediation of brownfield sites and provision of unlocking infrastructure. Let me say in the final seconds that my colleagues in MHCLG have taken the view that rent controls would do more harm than good. Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).