Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown welcomes the deal to repurchase the MOD housing estate from Annington and asks if the Treasury are providing the further funds needed to pump-prime the housing refurbishments so desperately needed by our armed forces.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)
The Minister has already referred to his successful £6 billion deal to repurchase the MOD housing estate from Annington. It will give members of our armed forces the opportunity to have their homes refurbished, which they have longed for, for a very long time. Has he managed to persuade the Treasury that he will need to provide further funds to pump-prime these improvements? If so, how will he strengthen the hitherto very poor management of our military housing estate?
The Minister for Veterans and People (Al Carns)
As part of our new defence housing strategy, we will look at how we will manage that estate as a whole and whether we will do it completely differently. As part of the SDR, we will look at how we will pump-prime some of that to get building back across the whole defence estate, bearing in mind that there are 36,000 houses and some of them have been in situ for about 50 years and will need to be knocked down and rebuilt.