When we tally what the Gauteng department of human settlements did last year, the easy place to stop is the number of houses. We built 7 976 of them in 2025/26, against a target of 7 503. It is a good number and I am proud of it. But it is not the number I think about most.
A house is a structure. A home is what that structure becomes when it stands on well-located land, near work, schools and a clinic that functions, with services that work and a title deed that says the family living there owns it. The distance between the two is where our real job lies. The Annual Report I tabled this month is an honest account of how far we travelled along that distance and how far we have to go.
We committed to allocating 4 000 completed homes to approved beneficiaries and we allocated 5 445. We set out to acquire 200 hectares of well-located land and we secured almost 280ha. Through First Home Finance, we planned 30 subsidies for working households and paid out 64, helping families who earn too much for a full subsidy but too little for the banks to take them seriously. We put 38% of our budget into the priority development areas that need it most, against a target of 33%. Where we planned 31 serviced sites, we finished 139.
The last numbers matter more than they look. Serviced land is where the next house begins. So are the 1 961 foundations, 1 596 wall plates and 1 565 roofs standing at the end of the year, which the rules do not yet let me count as completed homes. They are the pipeline. Turning that pipeline into houses and those houses into homes people own is the work of this year.
This is also where I want to be clear about the point of it all. Gauteng carries the weight of apartheid geography. For decades, poor and black families were pushed to the edges of the city, far from work and opportunity and told to be grateful for a roof. A housing programme that repeats that pattern is not delivery; it is the old injustice in new brick. Well-located land, densification and our Mega Projects are how we refuse to repeat it. The aim is communities connected to the economic life of this province, not shut out of it.
Accountability means being as plain about failure as about success. Our overall performance against the year's plan was 69%. That is not the standard I hold this department to. We fell short on title deed registration, on parts of hostel management and on the Rapid Land Release Programme, which did not do what we needed it to. We have gone back over that programme, taken the lessons honestly and we are relaunching it on a better footing.
The title deed problem deserves a word of its own because it exposes something larger. A family can hold the keys to a house for years and not hold the deed that makes it legally theirs and, therefore, an asset they can borrow against, insure or pass on. Many of the delays sit in processes we do not fully control: municipal approvals, rates clearances, the Deeds Office and old property disputes. That explains the delay. It does not excuse it. When the parts of government do not move together, it is the resident who waits. I am not willing to let the wait become permanent.
On the money and the governance, the record is sound. The auditor general gave us an unqualified opinion for the fourth year running and we spent 97% of a R6-billion budget. A clean audit is worth having. But a clean audit does not house anyone. Our task is to make our delivery as consistent as our bookkeeping: better planning, tighter contract management, earlier warning when a project is drifting and real consequences when commitments are missed.
Behind every housing application in this province is a person or a family waiting for a turn that has been a long time coming. That is the pressure we work under. It should be. It is what should push us to build faster, to protect the fairness of how homes are allocated and to promise only what we can deliver. The 2025/26 report says we made progress. It does not say we are done. We are not.
Tasneem Motara is the MEC for human settlements, Gauteng