Background to the report

The government has set a milestone to deliver 1.5 million new homes over this Parliament to July 2029. This will require building more than 300,000 homes per annum on average, a level of housebuilding that was last achieved in the 1960s.

The government says a chronic undersupply of land underpins the housing crisis. It believes there is suitable land in England for housebuilding that is not being developed by the market as it is not profitable or attractive enough for developers to build on in its current form. This can be due to factors such as the need for remediation work, a lack of infrastructure such as roads, or pieces of land making up a site being owned by different people or companies.

The Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) aims to address these market failures, boost the supply of land for housing development and ultimately increase the supply of housing via several ‘unlocking land’ programmes. These programmes include providing grant funding, recoverable loans, acquiring land and providing capacity support.

MHCLG is accountable for the support delivered by its delivery partners: Homes England (the government’s housing and regeneration agency in England), One Public Estate (a partnership between the Cabinet Office, the Local Government Association and MHCLG), the Greater London Authority and mayoral strategic authorities.

MHCLG plans to launch the National Housing Delivery Fund (NHDF), from 1 April 2026. The NHDF will comprise grant funding to be delivered by Homes England and other partners, and financial transactions such as loans and investments delivered through a new National Housing Bank (the Bank) created as a subsidiary of Homes England. MHCLG expects both the NHDF and the Bank will support wider activity beyond the scope of the unlocking land programmes that are the focus of this report.

Scope of the report

This report assesses whether MHCLG’s programmes to increase the supply of suitable land for housing development are effectively supporting the government’s ambitions to build the right homes in the right places. These programmes include activities such as capacity support, funding for infrastructure, land assembly, or viability gap funding; they are aimed at ‘unlocking’ sites.

It examines whether MHCLG:

  • has unlocked land to deliver the right homes in the right places
  • is learning and innovating to improve the productivity of its land unlocking programmes
  • alongside Homes England, is putting in place an approach to unlock the right land in the right places to support future housing targets

Video summary

Helen Hodgson, the report’s director, summarises our findings.

Conclusion

Since 2016-17, the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) has allocated £10.5 billion of funding to unlock land for housing, through a variety of programmes that utilise different funding types, including grants, loans and equity investments. MHCLG expects that this funding will have been spent on unlocking land by March 2034. This land will provide the capacity for building 713,000 homes, with homes expected to be built on this land for decades to come.

MHCLG monitors the status of unlocking land activity for the projects it helps fund, it also knows how many homes have been built by housing developers on the land it has helped to unlock across the majority of its funds. However, it did not set out to track how many homes have been built on land unlocked by the Home Building Funds and the Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land Fund but is now working with Homes England to do so on these funds.

To be able to fully demonstrate value for money on these programmes, MHCLG needs to continue to monitor housebuilding over the long term and should consider what further measures it can take to embed monitoring of housebuilding across all its programmes.

MHCLG and Homes England have ongoing evaluations and have drawn on an understanding of what works in their existing programmes to evolve their intervention strategies. Efforts include implementing ongoing engagement instead of set bidding periods, maintaining continuous pipelines of projects, and offering a more flexible mix of funding options. It has also revised its assessment criteria to better account for non-monetisable benefits to facilitate more investment in areas of lower land values.

MHCLG aims to establish the new National Housing Delivery Fund to bring together all the funding for unlocking land and set up a housing bank, as a subsidiary of Homes England, from 1 April 2026. To be able to demonstrate value for money and be successful, MHCLG will need to swiftly build on the work it has started and set out its long-term ambitions, provide clarity about its investment priorities to the market and decision-makers in local authorities, and to have a clear articulation and management of risk.

Press release

View press release (11 Feb 2026)

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