Introduction
In September 2015 the Committee reported on the previous government’s programme to “release enough public land to build as many as 100,000 new, much-needed, homes and support as many as 25,000 jobs by 2015”. We concluded that the Department for Communities and Local Government could not demonstrate the success of the programme in addressing the housing shortage or achieving value for money, and we made several recommendations for improvement. In light of its Treasury Minute response to our report, which failed to address our concerns adequately, and the start of the new programme in May 2015, we recalled the Department to give further evidence in January 2016. The new programme and the government’s commitment—“to sell land with capacity for more than 160,000 homes” by April 2020—is the subject of this report. The Department for Communities and Local Government again holds overall policy responsibility for the new programme and for meeting the programme commitment by 2020. Individual departments have been set their own target contributions, with the major contributors being the Ministry of Defence (land with capacity for 55,000 homes), the Department for Transport (38,000), the Department for Communities and Local Government itself (36,000) and the Department of Health (26,000).
1 November 2016