Consultation outcome

Summary of responses to the housing supply; net additional dwellings statistics consultation

Updated 26 November 2020

Between 30 January 2020 and 26 March 2020, users of the Housing supply; net additional dwellings statistics were asked to provided comments on proposed changes to the revisions policy for this statistical release. The department produces this statistical bulletin in November each year. See the consultation.

Housing supply; net additional dwellings statistics (also know as ‘net additions’) is the department’s main officially published measure of housing supply. The current revisions policy is to revise the figures every 10 years when the latest census estimates of dwelling stock are made available.

This means that currently any updates to the figures provided by local authorities are not picked up in the estimates until the census data are made available. The department is proposing to change this revisions policy to allow local authorities to revise previous year’s figures.

This will bring the revisions policy in line with the departments other housing and planning statistical releases and will have the effect of making the figures more accurate in between census periods. The department is not proposing any changes to the definitions, underlying data or outputs. The change is only to allow the timelier revision of previously submitted data.

Summary of responses and next steps

Nine responses to the consultation were received. Eight responses agreed with the proposed change to the revisions policy. One response was neutral (specifically, they stated they were unable to respond due to limited resources but asked for consideration as to how these issues will impact upon blocks of flats and estates that are collectively managed, legislation and leasehold issues).

Overall, users’ views were that the changes will ensure greater consistency between national and local statistics, particularly between statistics reported in the Housing supply; net additional dwellings statistics and those reported in the Local Authority Districts Authority Monitoring Report. As the Housing supply; net additional dwellings figures inform the Housing Delivery Test results, this will also mean that the test results will be more accurate and up to date.

Responders also made the following suggestions:

• Further breaking down the figures by tenure to more accurately monitor the net delivery of affordable housing.
• For more accurate historical results, it may be appropriate to revise all figures for the preceding decade. Revisions could be taken back to the 2011 Census which could be used as the base data for these statistics.

Our view is that the suggestion to more accurately monitor the net delivery of affordable housing, should be considered within the remit of the separate Affordable housing supply statistical series, as this is the best source of information on affordable tenure.

The net additions statistics do not currently collect breakdown by tenure (the net additions previously requested data by tenure in the 2010-11 collection, but data on tenure was missing from many local authorities returns and we did not believe the completeness and quality of these tenure data were adequate to allow the production and publication of a tenure breakdown for net additions statistics).

Our view is that revision period, for the previous two years initially (and one year after that) represents a good balance between improving the accuracy of the historical time series and minimising the burden on local authorities. Revisions for the statistics for the period from 2011 to 2021 will be made following the release of data from the 2021 Census.

Therefore, MHCLG will go ahead with the proposals outlined in the consultation:

• We will continue to publish the Housing supply; net additional dwellings statistics annually in the current format on the same page as previous years.

• We will start allowing annual revisions, beginning when the 2019-20 figures are published in November 2020. This will be to the previous two years’ published figures, allowing local authorities to initially update their figures over a longer period. Then in future years the revisions period will cover the previous year’s figures only.