An influential committee of MPs has strongly criticised the Government for failing to collect information on the actual number of houses built or under construction under its high-profile public sector land disposal programme.
The Department of Communities and Local Government has previously claimed that by the end of March 2015, the Government had disposed of land with capacity for an estimated 109,950 homes, across 942 sites.
The biggest contributors were the Ministry of Defence (around 39,000 homes), the Homes and Communities Agency (around 21,000, on behalf of the DCLG) and the Department of Health (around 15,000).
But in a report, Disposal of public land for new homes, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the DCLG was unable to demonstrate whether the programme had succeeded in addressing the housing shortage or achieving value for money.
The Department had also not ascertained the proceeds from land sold, or whether the parcels of land were sold at market value, the MPs said.
“Instead, it chose to focus only on a notional number for ‘potential’ capacity for building houses on the land sold by individual departments in order to determine ‘success’,” the PAC said.
The committee noted that the DCLG had also counted towards the programme’s target the capacity of land sold before the programme had even started.
“It did not collect basic information necessary to oversee the programme effectively and, where it did collect programme-level data, there were omissions and inconsistencies, the report said.
East Devon Watch 