A committee of MPs has called for the government to tell taxpayers if it has secured value for money under its programme to sell public land for housebuilding…
The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the government’s decision not to collect “basic” information on how many homes have been built or the amount of cash raised by sales of public land.
Chair of the committee Meg Hillier said it was an “insult to taxpayers” and accused the government of “short-sighted” mismanagement.
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has already been criticised for failings regarding its programme to sell public land for housebuilding after the National Audit Office raised concerns in June. The scheme, which aims to free up enough land for 100,000 properties to ease the housing shortage, was recently expanded to release more land to build a further 150,000 homes by 2020.
The committee said the DCLG and the Homes and Communities Agency has a responsibility to assess what value was offered by the scheme, stating: “Taxpayers deserve to know how many homes have actually been built.”
Under the previous coalition government, DCLG said enough land was sold to build an estimated 109,950 homes by the end of March 2015. This included 15,740 on land disposed of before the target of 100,000 was set. The department said it had a “robust” system in place to check how many properties the land could provide for.
However, the committee said the DCLG was unable to specify certain elements of the programme, including the number of jobs that have been created as a result. The DCLG had previously suggested the scheme would support 25,000 roles by 2015. The committee suggested the department should collect and audit data to ensure new jobs were in fact being created as promised.
The committee’s report stated: “With much greater ambitions for land disposals in the new Parliament, the department must address the weaknesses in the current programme, and the department has accepted that it needs to improve its general monitoring.
“If it is to oversee the new programme effectively then this must specifically include tracking sale proceeds and progress with the actual construction of new homes, and overseeing the programme in a way that gives Parliament and the taxpayer much greater assurance over the value for money achieved from all disposals.”
The report did note the DCLG had begun to check some buildings on certain sites following the NAO review. However, Hillier said the government showed “alarming complacency” over the disposal of land. She added because of this fact there was no way of knowing whether the taxpayer had secured a good deal or not.
She said: “It is an insult to taxpayers that the potential economic benefits arising from the sale of public land should be put at risk by such short-sighted Government mismanagement.
“With the next housing target already announced, the Government needs to learn from its mistakes.”
A spokesperson for the DCLG said: “Previous governments allowed valuable brownfield land to go unused whilst housebuilding levels crashed to their lowest levels since the 1920s.
“We have got the country building again and are releasing surplus Government land to protect taxpayers from paying for their upkeep and build the homes families need.
“This has released enough land to build 109,000 new homes and we now want to go further and faster with land sales for a further 150,000 homes by 2020, helping people achieve their dream of home-ownership.”