Housing crisis scrutinised by PAC: How will government unlock land for homes?
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will examine the level of progress made by the government on its plan to unlock land for housing.
Meeting details
If the government is going to meet its ambition to deliver 1.5m new homes in England by July 2029, it will need to achieve average annual housebuilding levels not seen since the 1960s. Central to this will be ‘unlocking’ land that developers had previously dismissed due to concerns about its profitability.
Government has allocated £10.5bn to programmes intended to unlock land for around 713,000 homes since 2016-17. As of September 2025, just over 33,000 homes have been built on land government helped unlock.
In spring 2026, the government launched the £21bn National Housing Delivery Fund, an undisclosed amount of which is expected to contribute towards efforts to unlock land for housing.
In this session, MPs will question officials from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) on the value for money of its current and legacy land-unlocking programmes.
The Committee will consider how the MHCLG is implementing lessons learned from previous programmes and examine how it plans to oversee the management of new and preexisting projects. MPs are likely to question the reliability of the data available and could ask for an update on the government’s progress towards building 1.5m new homes.