MHCLG revises up figure for homes built on land it unlocked following NAO report

She said: “As the NAO reflected in its report, MHCLG and Homes England were already taking steps to rectify this and monitor completions across all programmes. 

“Through this work, we are therefore pleased to be able to provide to the committee an updated figure of 57,671 completions delivered to the end of December 2025 through the six legacy programmes.”

During the evidence session, Amy Rees, chief executive of Homes England, said that of the homes already delivered, the government estimates that 40% “would not have been built at all – let alone sped up – without unlocking the land”.

Ms Rees also said Homes England is responsible for delivering 16% of the government’s 1.5 million homes target within this parliament.

She told the committee: “We believe we are on the hook for delivering 240,000 homes, of which we have already delivered 80,000, so we will need to bring forward another 160,000 completions over the next three years.”

Ms Rees continued: “This year, we outturned 40,200. That is up 9% on last year and it is the highest completion figure since 2019-20. 

“In order to deliver in this parliament… we will need to increase that by 150%. We will need to get that to circa 60,000 over the next three years. My targets are very clear and stretching.”

MPs on the committee asked MHCLG and Homes England officials if they can provide a specific target for the number of homes it will unlock under the new National Housing Delivery Fund (NHDF), which totals £21bn.

Dame Sarah told the committee that the NHDF “currently does not have a pipeline of projects” so cannot provide a number.

“Obviously, there are ranges within which we would be unbelievably disappointed if that amount of public money had not delivered a substantial amount of housing, but we cannot give you a specific number,” she said.

Cathy Francis, co-director for new towns, infrastructure and housing delivery at MHCLG, said: “It is not that we do not have a target; it is that we want to work through the NHDF process and build a kind of baseline of what those projects individually are claiming to deliver. 

“Then we will have a new portfolio that matches our existing portfolio, where we can say, against the submissions that were made by developers and local authorities, ‘this is the number’. So we recognise that we need to have a number, but at this point, it is about modelling.”

The NHDF will provide £5bn of capital grant funding for infrastructure and land from 2026 to 2030, and some grant funding will be administered by the mayoral strategic authorities. 

Ms Francis said: “Part of what we have learned from the earlier funds is that working constantly with local authorities and mayoral authorities to build a pipeline of schemes that are developed over time with support from Homes England has got us to the position where, although the fund was only launched in April, we have already been able to make allocations to the established mayoral authorities.

“We think they will deliver an additional 20,000 homes during the course of the parliament as a result of the maturity of the pipeline they now have, which is a position very different from the one we were in when we first launched our infrastructure programmes in 2017.”

Ms Francis also said that so far, the mayoral authorities have been “oversubscribed in terms of projects that have come forward”.