“The Public Accounts Committee said the Government will have to order a “significant acceleration in the last years of the programme” to sell land for the remaining 149,000 homes still to be built, over the next three and a half years.
Officials in charge of the policy at the Department for Communities and Local Government had “taken their eye off the ball” before the last election, they said.
The MPs said the Government’s plans to build 160,000 new homes between 2015 and 2020 were “back-loaded, which increases the risk that government will not meet its commitment”.
The Government told the MPs that only enough land for 8,380 new homes – five per cent of the total – had been sold.
They said the “slow start to the new programme” was either because they “took their eye off the ball at the end of the previous programme that ran up to 2015 or are struggling to find suitable sites”.
Meg Hillier MP, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “There is a desperate need for new homes and public land is an irreplaceable asset.
“Taxpayers clearly have a right to know whether they are getting a good deal from its sale and how many homes are being built as a result.
“Sluggish sales have hindered progress towards the 2020 target while questions continue to hang over the potential of many sites earmarked for sale and whether homes will be in the places people want to live.
“Ultimately the public will judge the success of this programme on the basis of the homes built and the Government must make clear who taxpayers should hold to account for this.”
Earlier this year the Government was criticised after it emerged that officials were not required to keep track of whether new homes were actually being built on public land sold for housing.
It then emerged in January this year that only 1,800 new homes had built on public land out of the 109,000 promised by former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011.”
East Devon Watch 
So why is it slow?
Is it because their sales contracts include a clause to insist that developers build within a certain time and developers don’t like this because they would prefer to land bank it?
Or is it because developers are not interested in building more new houses and risk reduced market prices as supply increases?
Or perhaps because there just are not enough building tradesmen to be able to build them?
Whichever way, yet another indication that the government hasn’t got a clue how to create policies that will actually work, and that Conservative market forces dogma is not always the right answer.
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