Just 5% released and more than half the pipeline has been compromised.
A National Audit Office (NAO) report said this “slow start” means “significant delivery risks remain” over the pledge to release land for 160,000 homes by 2020.
According to Inside Housing:
“The NAO said by the end of March 2016, government had disposed of land with capacity for an estimated 8,580 homes – 5% of the total. However, it stressed this does not represent actual homes built and warned “development of these sites could take many years to complete”.
Departments have identified further sites with capacity to support an estimated 104,461 homes, representing a further 65% of the programme, the NAO said.
But the report also warned more than half of these sites are classified as “high risk” by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), which manages the programme.
This means they have “one or more issues preventing exchange of contracts before 31 March 2020 which are very unlikely to be resolved, meaning the site could slip out of the programme”.
Land for a further 4,853 homes has also been released, taking the total to 8% of the target, but the government has not yet received assurances that this land will be used for housing. “