The government remains committed to promoting fairness and transparency for homeowners and ensuring that consumers are protected from abuse and poor service

We have set out a strong package of measures to tackle unfair practices in the leasehold market. This includes a commitment to bring forward legislation to ban the unjustified use of leasehold for new houses, reducing future ground rents to zero financial value, and introducing new rights to challenge fees for freeholders on private and mixed tenure estates. We are also working with the Law Commission to make buying a freehold or extending a lease easier, faster, fairer and cheaper, as well as reinvigorating Commonhold and making Right to Manage easier, to provide greater choice for consumers

The government is also working to ensure charges related to leasehold properties are transparent and communicated effectively and that there is a clear route to challenge or redress if things go wrong. Last October we established an independent working group chaired by Lord Best to raise standards across the property sector, which also considered how fees such as service charges should be presented to consumers. The working group published its final report to government on 18 July. We are considering the report’s recommendations and will announce next steps in due course.

We remain committed to legislating on leasehold reform as soon as parliamentary time allows.

The government is committed to rebalancing the relationship between tenants and landlords to deliver a fairer, good quality and more affordable private rented sector.

In April this year the government announced that it proposes to consult on the future of Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. This would provide tenants with more stability, protecting them from having to make frequent moves at short notice, empowering them to challenge poor property standards and enabling them to put down roots and plan for the future. Our consultation on how the new system should operate closed on 12 October. We are now carefully considering the responses received and will publish our response in due course.

In January 2019, the government committed – in response to the Strengthening consumer redress in housing consultation – to requiring all private landlords to belong to a redress scheme, so that all tenants have access to redress when things go wrong. This will require primary legislation, which will be introduced at the earliest appropriate opportunity

The government will also shortly lay regulations to introduce mandatory five yearly safety inspections and tests on electrical installations in private rented sector properties.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Since the repeal of the corn laws, the UK has stood up for free trade. We were one of the founding members of the general agreement on tariffs and trade in 1947. There is a huge opportunity for us as we leave the EU to retake our independent seat, to make the case for free trade and to be prepared to stand up for the values that we believe in as a country.

It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.

It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.

The Government, working in partnership with industry, launched the Construction Sector Deal in July 2018, in order to deliver a substantial improvement in the productivity growth of the sector. At the heart of the deal is a joint public and private sector investment of £420m in the Transforming Construction Programme, which will accelerate the adoption of digital and manufacturing technologies to improve building performance and reduce waste, with the aim of reducing lifetime carbon emissions by 50%. In particular, £32m has been invested in the Advanced Building Centre which is developing energy generation and storage technologies for use in buildings.

Through the Green Construction Board, we are working with industry to achieve the Buildings Mission goal of halving the energy consumption of new buildings by 2030, and halve the cost of retrofit over the same period. The Board is also working with Government to develop a road map to zero avoidable waste in the sector. The road map will be delivered by the end of next year. By reducing waste and encouraging the use of sustainable materials we can further reduce Green House Gas emissions.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for highlighting neighbourhood plans, which I believe in very strongly, and how we garner that greater consent for development to take place. I underline the sense of how we speed up the process with planning, with development and with those plans. That is what the accelerated planning Green Paper is all about. I would be delighted to continue to discuss this matter with my hon. Friend and others to ensure that we make that effective.

Those countries that have benefited from free and open trade, and enjoy the prosperity that we do today, have not only a duty economically to ensure the best outcomes but a moral duty to ensure that those in developing countries are able to benefit from the same trading systems that we have. Simply to say that we are more advanced and are pulling up the ladder behind us would be a betrayal of all those who have believed in free trade and practised it in recent years.

Free trade is a driver of economic growth that can trigger positive changes in a country’s economy, helping to raise incomes, create jobs and lift people out of poverty. The poorest countries have enjoyed some of the benefits of global free trade through receiving preferential access to the UK, the world’s fifth-biggest market.

As I mentioned in answer to the previous question, we are conducting a number of joint trade reviews with India, China and Brazil—some of

the largest economies in the world—to ensure that we address some of these access barriers; to ensure that, for example, Chinese-language contracts are translated into an official English version; to ensure that service providers understand what the rules and regulations are; and to ensure that qualifications are matched across the piece. There is a great deal we can do and more that we will do.

My hon. Friend highlights the need for the Mayor to step up to the mark and ensure that he delivers on the housing agenda in London. I recognise that delivery has increased in recent years, but the latest net additions data for 2017-18 are worrying; London demonstrates a 20% drop, compared with a 2% rise nationwide. I hope that the Mayor will focus broadly on the housing agenda. We are providing support on infrastructure and other aspects to see that London does deliver.

The Government’s consultation response on bus open data explains that the Government will bring forward a statutory instrument later this year which will require bus operators in England to publish various forms of data.

The key requirements are for data on routes and timetables to be published from January 2020; real time information and simple fares by January 2021; and complex fares by January 2023. The difference between simple and complex fares is explained in section 4 of the consultation response.

To support this, the response also explains that the Government is developing a Bus Open Data Digital Service, which will allow app developers to access all of the information in a machine-readable format. We are currently developing the digital service and expect it to be available for use by all bus operators towards the end of the summer.

We will celebrate UK Export Finance’s centenary throughout the year, notably at the UK Trade & Export Finance Forum in June. I am delighted that in its centenary year UK Export Finance was awarded ‘Best Export Credit Agency’ at the 2019 International Trade Finance Awards. As the world’s first export credit agency, UK Export Finance will continue to innovate as it has done for the past 100 years.

We have signed a memorandum of understanding with the five biggest banks so that they can encourage businesses to utilise UK Export Finance. One of the main areas where it is under-utilised is small businesses, but the positive side is that last year more

than 70% of the agreements signed by UKEF were with small businesses. That is a trend that we would like to see continue.

My hon. Friend, an expert in this area, rightly points to the excellent Select Committee report on high streets. He will be aware of the recommendation of Sir John Timpson, one of Britain’s best loved and best known retailers, that local leadership should be key to driving forward the future of the high street, and we will certainly be looking at that as part of these fund applications.

I agree with my hon. Friend about the Homeless Reduction Act—a really ground-breaking piece of legislation very much emphasising a preventive agenda to prevent people from becoming homeless at all. Local authorities have received an additional £72.7 million to implement the Act, and the homelessness advice and support team has been providing support. But we need to ensure that more is done and we will certainly be reviewing the implementation of the Act by March next year.

The Export Strategy sets out how the Government will encourage, inform, connect and finance UK businesses to enable them to take advantage of the international demand for British goods and services. Last month we launched an enhanced digital service on great.gov.uk, connecting businesses to over 20,000 export opportunities.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue. I recognise the concerted work and effort that is going on to deliver homes and infrastructure through the local plan in his area. He rightly says that combined authorities with strategic planning powers will be able to introduce a strategic infrastructure tariff, but charging authorities can already pool their community infrastructure levy receipts to fund infrastructure jointly. We are updating the guidance to make that clearer, but I would be happy to continue that discussion with him.

One of the demands of the business community during the consultation was to give them better online communities so that they can speak to one another. We discovered that businesses did not necessarily want to talk to Government advisers, but wanted much more to speak to those who had faced similar business challenges and to ask how they had overcome them. That is under way, and we have recruited more staff to make that happen.