Housing in England is in a torrid state, with secretary of state Michael Gove under fire for handing back a third of the Department for Levelling Up and Communities’ (DLUHC) housing budget to the Treasury.

This included as much as £255m set aside for affordable housing projects in 2022-23. To add to the sense of crisis, a new report from the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee says that while the Government is on track to deliver one million new homes over the course of this Parliament it is hard to see how it will achieve its target of 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s if mandatory local housing targets are dropped.