The government has started taking legal action against developers who built shoddy houses for the poor, Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale said on Wednesday.

"The department is taking civil and criminal action against companies/developers or contractors who built flawed houses for government housing schemes," he said in a written reply to a parliamentary question by the Africam National Congress (ANC).

His department would also take disciplinary or criminal action against officials who accepted sub-standard work or colluded with unscrupulous contractors.

Sexwale said that the legal steps followed a national audit of housing schemes and an ongoing probe by the Special Investigating Unit.

The civil action aimed to recover money lost by the department. Some contractors have "already signed acknowledgements of debt with the department for failure to deliver when money had already been paid to them".

The ministry could not immediately be reached to give an indication of the sums involved.

Sexwale said that where structures needed to be demolished, the department was bearing the cost while litigation was underway to establish the cause of the structural defects. This was done in order not to delay service delivery, he added.

The minister said that the department was resolving problems with 500 sub-standard houses in Cala in the Eastern Cape. It would do the same with defective homes in a development of 2 000 low-cost houses in Tarkastad, in the same province, in the current financial year.

It was currently working on houses in Tarkastad that were unfinished rather than flawed. This project should be finalised by the end of the month, he said.

Sexwale launched a national audit of housing projects in November last year to get to the bottom of what he termed "chronic" and "massive" problems with delivery.