Government addresses PAC recommendations on housing market

The Government has responded to the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) report “Planning and the broken housing market”, and has agreed with recommendations that the Government should set out what measures to take when local authorities fail to produce local plans.

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The report set out recommendations by the Committee – whose remit is to scrutinise value for money on public spending – on the Government’s plans to build 300,000 new homes per year from the middle of 2020.

It also agreed to setting milestones for the Planning Inspectorate’s performance improvements across the full range of all its services, and to monitor whether reforms to the Community Infrastructure Levy and section 106 are having the impact that is necessary and adjust or adapt accordingly.

However the Government disagreed with recommendations that it should set out, in a single publicly available document, the full set of actions it is taking to achieve the target of 300,000 new homes and include year-on-year projections for the number of new homes it expects to be built.

It also rejected recommendations to set out its expectations for the types, tenures, and amounts of affordable and social housing to be delivered, and on what a sufficient quantity of final build should look like.