last year found<\/a> two-thirds of homes for service families needed “extensive refurbishment or rebuilding” to meet modern standards.<\/p>\nUnder the new strategy, service family accommodation (SFA) will be refurbished with new kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems.<\/p>\n
About 14,000 will receive either “substantial refurbishment” or be completely replaced.<\/p>\n
The plans are part of the government’s wider defence housing strategy, to be published on Monday. A total of \u00a34bn in funding to tackle the housing problem had already been announced. <\/p>\n
The government says it has also identified surplus MoD land which could be used to build 100,000 new homes for civilian and military families.<\/p>\n
Healey said: “This is a new chapter – a decisive break from decades of underinvestment, with a building programme to back Britain’s military families and drive economic growth across the country.”<\/p>\n
Almost three years ago, the BBC was contacted by families in military accommodation in Sandhurst who had been living without heating for days.<\/p>\n
“We’re at breaking point and something has to change. The system is broken,” they said at the time.<\/p>\n
In response to the story, the MoD said it was working with its contractors to improve the service. But a report released in December last year found those problems “still exist”. <\/p>\n
“It is shocking that until a policy change in 2022, it was considered acceptable to house families in properties known to have damp and mould,” the report said.<\/p>\n
The MoD last year announced it would acquire 36,347 military houses from property company Annington Homes for nearly \u00a36bn, reversing a privatisation deal struck in 1996 under the Conservative government.<\/p>\n
The deal would save millions in rent and maintenance costs, the MoD said, money that would be put towards fixing military accommodation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of military homes across the UK will be modernised, refurbished or rebuilt over the next decade under…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-256788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}