Recommendation 2

The Department has no meaningful targets or high-level performance framework to incentivise it to develop an affordable estate that better supports defence needs. The Department missed two short-term government targets set in the 2015 Spending Review to release land for 55,000 new homes by March 2020 and raise £1 billion from the sale of land by March 2021. It raised £538 million and released land for just 9,200 houses, having never thought it could meet the target. The Department did not seek to update its targets to reflect changing circumstances, such as the decision of the United States to retain three large airfields in East Anglia that the Department had planned to sell. Furthermore, since 2016 the Department has shifted emphasis from primarily identifying land to sell to ‘optimising’ its estate, which renders a target to reduce the estate’s size less relevant. The Department now forecasts its estate will shrink by only 16% and has just abandoned its one remaining target to reduce the built estate by 30% by 2040. It has not yet introduced any targets to replace this and acknowledges that it needs more specific, shorter-term targets focussing on deliverables to encourage it to identify and dispose of land it no longer needs, but it does not know what these should be. Recommendation: By 31 December 2021, the Department should reset its estate optimisation targets, developing specific shorter-term deliverables, including reductions in the size of estate; sale proceeds; and savings in estate running costs.