The National Audit Office (NAO), the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, examined whether government programmes aimed at increasing the supply of land suitable for housing are effectively helping to build more homes. The UK government has set a target to deliver 1.5 million new homes by July 2029, a level of housebuilding not seen since the 1960s. The NAO’s review focused on whether the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) and its delivery partners, such as Homes England, are unlocking land that the private market won’t develop on its own — because it’s unprofitable due to remediation costs, lack of infrastructure, or fragmented ownership.

Since 2016‑17, MHCLG has allocated about £10.5 billion across several land‑unlocking programmes using grants, recoverable loans, and equity investments. These are intended to overcome barriers that make development uneconomic and open up sites for housing. By late 2025, MHCLG and Homes England had committed much of this funding to land unlocking activity. Although the programmes are designed to create land capacity for an estimated 713,000 new homes, only around 33,000 homes (about 5 %) are known to have been built so far on land that the government helped unlock. This relatively low number reflects the long‑term nature of large housing developments and the fact that many sites are still at early stages of remediation or infrastructure work. The NAO also found that MHCLG did not consistently track whether homes on unlocked sites were actually being built, especially for several large funds covering half of the total expected homes.

To build on these efforts, MHCLG plans to introduce a National Housing Delivery Fund (NHDF) starting on 1 April 2026, which will bundle different forms of financial support — including a new National Housing Bank within Homes England — into one framework to help unlock more land and accelerate delivery. The NAO says that for this new fund to be effective, the government needs to set clear priorities, articulate long‑term goals, and ensure robust monitoring so that unlocked land turns into actual homes.