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New ‘delivery units’ announced by Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, at the Civil Servants’ union conference last week, will not help meet housing targets, unless they map across multiple government departments, the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission has warned.
The plans for all government departments to have a dedicated ‘delivery unit’ outlined at the FDA union conference on the 14th May say people with experience of delivering frontline services will be brought in to lead these units.
However, the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission has urged the government to go much further to ensure that delivery units are cross-departmental. Otherwise, the Commission says, plans risk being compromised by siloed departments unable to take into account the full impacts and unintended consequences of recommendations.
They have reiterated their call for a cross-departmental Housing Delivery Unit to act as a prototype for the approach. Problems such as rising costs and stretched supply chains caused by war in the Middle East, ongoing skills and capacity constraints and an unpredictable economy since the government took office have laid bare the need for a multi-departmental response. In 2025, less than half of the required annual rate of homes were being built in England to meet the Government’s 1.5m new homes target.
Commission Chair and CEO of the Housing Forum, Alex Notay, said that: “The Chief Secretary to the Treasury is absolutely right to bring fresh thinking to address delivery issues, and seeking industry expertise is also a wise approach, but these units must be outcome-focused and joined-up across departments to have any chance of success.
As our first commission report highlighted in October 2024 there are eleven central government departments with policy influence over housing delivery and a long list of agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
We have heard from Commissioners across the industry that the volume and cumulative impact of new policy developed without sufficient coordination between departments is seriously affecting housing viability and delivery of new homes as well as progress on retrofit of existing homes.”
The Commission, which was recently described by Radio 4’s Today Programme as “playing a central role in informing the Government’s housing policy”, made several similar recommendations in their submission to the Treasury before last year’s budget.
A cross-departmental Housing Delivery Unit remains one of the only policy recommendations from the Commission’s Beyond The Perma-Crisis report, released in October 2024, that the government has yet to adopt.