Housing: Construction

Mrs. Spelman
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether a full impact assessment has been produced relating to the costs of the provisions in the Lifetime Homes Standard on building a house.

Mr. Ian Austin
In June 2007 the Department published a consultation on “Making a Rating Mandatory” within the Code for Sustainable Homes. This included an impact assessment which identified costs and benefits of building to the Lifetime Homes Standards. The document can be downloaded at:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/doc/Thefutureofthecode.doc

We will be consulting on proposed changes to the Code for Sustainable Homes in due course, and this will include our proposal to make Lifetime Homes Standards mandatory at Code Level 4. The consultation will be supported by a full impact assessment.

Mrs. Spelman
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government whether his Department carried out an impact assessment of (a) the revision of Planning Policy Guidance 3 and (b) its policies on (i) density and (ii) brownfield classification in 2000.

Mr. Ian Austin
An Impact assessment was undertaken for PPG3 but the impact assessment undertaken for PPS3 has superseded the assessment for PPG3. This assessment is available on the Communities and Local Government website:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/pps3ria

Mr. Stewart Jackson
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what the errors were in the House Building Statistical Release published on 20 August 2009 which caused it to be withdrawn.

Mr. Ian Austin
The errors in the House Building Statistical Release published on 20 August 2009 affected the numbers of starts and completions reported for the June quarter 2009.

In line with the UK Statistics Authority's Code of Practice for Official Statistics, we will be publishing a revised release as soon as possible. Once a release date for the corrected figures is known this will be announced on the UK National Statistics publication hub and the Communities and Local Government departmental release calendar.