Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many and what proportion of (a) current and (b) former houses owned by his Department were unoccupied in May 2023; and what was the cost to the public purse of maintaining empty houses owned by his Department in the (i) 2020-21, (ii) 2021-22 and (iii) 2022-23 financial years.

The vast majority of Service Family Accommodation (SFA) is leased from Annington Homes Ltd (AHL). Any properties no longer required for Service personnel are handed back to AHL.

The number of unoccupied (void) SFA properties in May 2023, was 9,167 or 19.18% of the c.47,800 total SFA housing stock in the UK.

The total void maintenance costs for the four Future Defence Infrastructure Services (FDIS) accommodation contracts covering the North, Central, South East and South West regions for Financial Year 2022-23 was £5,902,941. This maintenance cost was for a total of 9,571 void properties at that time.

The Department is only able to provide the cost of maintaining void SFA for the FDIS accommodation contracts which came into force in April 2022. Under the previous National Housing Prime contract, there was no contractual requirement to record maintenance cost data by occupied and void SFA. This was rectified for the FDIS contracts.