Recommendation 3

We are disappointed that the Department remains unable or unwilling to clarify how it will achieve its ambition of 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s. We are wearily familiar with the Department’s lack of clarity over how it intends to meet its ambition—not target—of 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s. The Department asserts that the ambition is ‘incredibly challenging’, made more so by the current uncertain housing market conditions. It claims that this makes it impossible to be transparent over the path to meet this ambition as it is in part dependent on how developers respond to market conditions. The Department has plans to increase the range and variety of new homes that are built, speed up building, and encourage more small and medium-sized developers to build homes and encourage developers to build out sites and not land bank. However, if the Department does not set targets and map the path to meeting its ambition for 300,000 new homes a year, it cannot measure progress or assess value for money across its array of housing policies. Recommendation: We are frustrated that once again we must repeat our recommendation that the Department should clarify how its range of housing schemes, including First Homes, will each contribute to its ambition of building 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s. It should write to us within three months, including an assessment of how many homes of each tenure it expects will be delivered and what types of homes count towards its 300,000 ambition.