Recommendation 11

We were disappointed that the Department remained unwilling to clarify how it will achieve this rate of building, which it now refers to as an ambition rather than a target. We asked why it thought that there should not be greater transparency about how it would achieve 300,000 new homes per year. The Department argued that the ambition was an incredibly challenging one because of uncertainty in the housing market, which made it impossible to be transparent over the path to meeting this ambition. It further explained that the levers for delivering new housing were “not entirely within” Government’s control and were dependent on developers and how they respond to market conditions. It asserted that while it bad been making considerable progress towards the target before the pandemic, the current economic uncertainty had made forecasting what would happen in the housing market far more challenging.30