Recommendation 12

The stages that the Department must complete before it can rehouse displaced units and sell vacated sites can be slow and complex. The Department’s planned site disposal projects are scheduled to take an average of six years to complete, although on occasion it has achieved faster disposals, including for the Strategic Command chaplaincy and the joint bands. The Department said that it shared our frustration with the time taken, and explained that it has started to look at ways it might speed up disposals. It is working with commercial teams to support quicker construction and delivery of sites, which it expects will reduce timescales by 12 or possibly 18 months. It is also engaging with the government-wide Project Speed, which aims to reduce the time to deliver government infrastructure projects.18 While the Department told us that it works closely with the Government Property Unit, it could not point to any systematic exercise to identify good practices in other departments.19 Incentives to develop an affordable estate