MPs set to quiz government on its housebuilding target

A group of influential MPs will quiz officials from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) later this month over the government’s ambitions to build 300,000 homes a year in England from the mid-2020s.

The 16-strong Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Labour MP Meg Hillier, will grill officials in Westminster on how the MHCLG expects to meet ministers’ housebuilding target.

The inquiry, entitled ’Planning and the broken housing market’, will also pose questions around local authorities’ spending on planning and on their processes for dealing with planning applications, as well as investigating long-term funding for infrastructure to support the building of new homes.

The PAC has investigated the housing market before, with two reports published in 2017 – Homeless Households and Housing: State of the Nation – highlighting its concerns around England’s long-running housing shortfall and the consequences, including homelessness, rent affordability and issues people have with getting onto the property ladder.

The committee said a recent report from the National Audit Office (NAO) found serious flaws in the government’s planning system concluding that, in its current state, it could not demonstrate it is meeting housing demand effectively.

Between 2005-06 and 2017-18, an average of 177,000 new homes per year have been built and the NAO found if it was to meet its housebuilding ambitions it would need to oversee a 69% increase in the average number of new homes built since 2005-06.

“This is a challenge because the number of new homes being built per year has never exceeded 224,000 in the last decade,” the committee said.

Written submissions to the committee, which is sitting on 29 April, can be lodged here. The deadline for submissions is 23 April.