Stephen Timms – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Communities and Local Government

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2015-11-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the likely effect on house building of the Office of National Statistics reclassifying housing associations as public sector bodies.

Brandon Lewis

The Office of National Statistics has concluded that housing associations should have been classified as public rather than private since 2008, due to several of the regulatory requirements imposed by the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 introduced by the last Labour Government. This decision is purely a statistical change. Reclassification makes no material changes to the operation of housing associations. The Government is committed to developing deregulatory measures to help housing associations build more homes and help more people into home ownership.