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Not one Starter Home built with £174m spent, says NAO
David Cameron’s flagship policy to build 200,000 discounted new homes for first-time buyers has not delivered a single home, the government’s spending watchdog has said.
In a report published today, the National Audit Office (NAO) said the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) spent nearly £174m acquiring and remediating land for Starter Homes between 2015/16 and 2017/18.
But all of these sites are now being used for other housing programmes.
Starter Homes, announced in 2014, were billed as homes built exclusively for first-time buyers under 40 to be sold at a 20% market discount.
The government set aside £2.3bn for the first tranche of 60,000 Starter Homes at the November Spending Review in 2015.
However, the NAO said the necessary legislation was never put in place and that no homes have been built to date.
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The Housing and Planning Act 2016 set out the legislative framework for Starter Homes, but none were able to come forward through the programme without additional secondary legislation.
MHCLG had expected to introduce this secondary legislation this year along with the required planning guidance, the NAO said, but has not yet presented the regulations to parliament and no longer has a budget for Starter Homes.
Ministers abandoned a Conservative manifesto pledge to deliver 200,000 Starter Homes in the Housing White Paper published in February 2017.
Meg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee and a Labour MP, said: “Despite setting aside over £2bn to build 60,000 new Starter Homes, none were built.
“Since 2010, many housing programmes announced with much fanfare have fallen away with money then recycled into the next announcement.
“The department needs to focus on delivery and not raise and then dash people’s expectations.”
A spokesperson for MHCLG said: “We are committed to building more homes and supporting people into homeownership.
“We have a great track record, with housebuilding at its highest level for all but one of the last 30 years – with 222,000 homes delivered last year and 1.3m in total since 2010, including over 430,000 affordable homes.
“The number of first-time buyers is currently at an 11-year annual high, and over 560,000 households have been helped into homeownership through government schemes like Help to Buy and Right to Buy.”
It added that the £76m not spent through the Starter Homes Land Fund for purchasing sites is being used by Homes England to support building more homes.
Shadow housing secretary John Healey said: “The Conservatives’ flagship housing announcement for first-time buyers has been a total failure. It’s clear you can’t trust the Tories to do what they promise.”
