Recommendation 2

The Department and Homes England have not been fully transparent about their plans for tracking the number of homes built on land unlocked by legacy programmes. The Department and Homes England are retrospectively tracking how many homes were built on land unlocked by the various legacy programmes that they initially did not track. The Department reports that as at the end of December 2025, 57,671 homes had been delivered by legacy programmes, 24,400 of which were identified through retrospective analysis. The Department is continuing this process and expects to understand the total number of homes built on land unlocked by all its legacy programmes by May 2027. The Department explained it is using geospatial analysis of site boundaries to do this, but it can be hard to assess which homes to attribute to unlocking land investments in certain cases, such as where the funding has provided infrastructure like road junctions. There is a lack of transparency about the Department’s approach to tracking the number of homes built on land unlocked in these more complicated cases. It is essential for the Department to understand the outcomes of its investments in order to make good quality assessments of performance and judgements on value for money which can lead to improvements in the design of future programmes. recommendation a. As part of its Treasury Minute response the Department should set out its methodology for tracking the number of homes built on land unlocked by legacy programmes, and how it plans to evaluate the success of this methodology b. Within the next twelve months the Department should report to the committee with the final number of homes completed on the remaining legacy funds.