So far the Department for Communities and Local Government has released enough land for 8,580 homes, the NAO said.
In the first 10 months since the new land disposal programme was launched, DCLG has only met five per cent of its commitment.
It released an additional 3 per cent of land, although the Homes and Communities Agency – which is responsible for collecting information from government departments – has yet to find sufficient evidence to prove this additional land will be used for housing.
The NAO said DCLG must dispose of more sites in each of the next four months than the best performing year in any of the previous land disposal programmes.
The 160,000-home target was laid out in the 2015 Spending Review to help the government deliver one million homes by the end of this parliament.
The government’s first land disposal programme was set up in June 2011 and ran until March 2015. It had a target to release enough land for 100,000 homes by 2015.
In June 2015, an NAO report found the government disposed of land with enough capacity to build 109,590 new homes over 942 sites.
However, the target measured the notional number of expected homes, not actual homes built.
According to the latest report, government departments have so far identified additional land with capacity for a further 104,461 houses, or 65 per cent of the programme.
However, a little over half of the housing capacity is on high risk sites.
High risk sites, by the DCLG’s definition, have at least on issue preventing the exchange of contracts before 2020. The NAO said this included operational sites.
The head of the NAO Amyas Morse said: “While progress has been made, DCLG still has a lot to do to meet the government’s commitment to dispose of land for 160,000 homes by 2020.
“The current programme has had a relatively slow start.”
She added: “At most, 8 per cent of the overall commitment has been achieved in the first full ten months of the programme, meaning departments must now dispose of more land in each of the remaining four years than they achieved in any year of the previous land disposals programme.”
