Government figures on land for property development questioned by watchdog
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Version 0 of 1. Claims by ministers that the government has sold off public land to developers for more than 100,000 starter homes have been challenged after the official public spending watchdog discovered that the data included sites sold off under Tony Blair’s government. The National Audit Office examined claims made in the runup to the general election that the Tories had fulfilled their goal and sold land for more than 109,000 new homes. The auditors found that land for 15,740 of these properties was sold off under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, with some sold off as far back as 1997. The findings, in a report issued on Wednesday, will be of considerable embarrassment to David Cameron, who promised in 2011 that he would sell off public land to ease the housing crisis by 2015. Auditors also disputed whether the government should have included land sell-offs meant for another 9,000 homes after they discovered that the land actually belonged to privatised entities such as Royal Mail and British Waterways. In March, just weeks before the general election, the then communities secretary Eric Pickles claimed that the government had reached and surpassed Cameron’s goal. Auditors disputed the government figures and argued that land for 26,523 of these homes – or nearly a quarter of the total – was either sold off before the policy was launched in 2011 or belonged to a private company. The report has been seized upon by Labour as evidence that the government has been playing “fast and loose” with official figures. Emma Reynolds MP, Labour’s shadow communities secretary, said: “It is unbelievable that the government should make such claims given that they have counted land that was released before the programme even started, including land sold under the last Labour government going back to 1997. “It also includes land belonging to the Royal Mail and British Waterways, which may not even be developed. I will be writing to ministers seeking answers about whether they authorised the release of these figures.” Auditors said the previous government had “applied a wide interpretation” of the plots of land that could be included in the tally and criticised the target the government had set after finding no economic evidence to support it. The figures measure a “notional” number of expected homes rather than how many properties are actually being built and some developments could take up to two decades to complete, the auditors said. By March this year, the coalition government had sold 942 sites, ranging from a plot with a single home to land expected to take 7,600 new properties. Surplus land owned by Royal Mail was categorised as sold when the organisation was privatised along with sites owned by British Waterways when it became a charitable trust, even if the plots were not developed. The watchdog also found there was “no consistent approach” in deciding how many homes could potentially be built on a site. Whitehall had not tracked progress after deals were done and no record was kept of development activity or start or completion dates, auditors said. The money raised from the sell-offs was not monitored centrally and it is not clear if departments have secured market value for the sites, they found. Government departments told the watchdog they were “not adequately consulted” over increases to their targets during the course of the programme and that new thresholds were “sometimes overambitious”. Progress in selling off land was “slower than expected” and the government had to take action to increase land sales, including buy now, pay later deals, it said. A new target has been set that means at least £5bn of land and property sales must be sold by 2020 and land released for up to 150,000 homes. Meg Hillier, the incoming chair of the public accounts committee, which scrutinises public spending for parliament, said that it was likely that the committee would examine the report because of the implications for the public purse. “It is hard to believe that it is not clear if all of this public land has been sold off at market rates. The government cannot assess the true worth, which is baffling. Housing is a key issue and this does not give me any confidence that the department has a grip on its own figures.” Jeremy Blackburn, head of policy at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, said: “The NAO report has shown what was suspected by many. That releasing public land across so many departments and agencies would not be easy and wouldn’t result in the homes we needed, in the places people wanted to live.” A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government insisted it had met the target, despite the report’s findings. “This was an ambitious programme to release surplus government land to build 100,000 homes to help families achieve their dream of home ownership and we broke our target more than a month early with enough land released to build more than 109,000 new homes.” |