Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what plans he has to reconcile the data tables published in (a) net additional dwellings and (b) housebuilding; new build dwellings.

The Department has recently undertaken a programme of work that (a) confirmed the accuracy and coverage of the annual housing supply; net additional dwellings estimate against other similar statistics and (b) explored the coverage of the quarterly house-building release.

The programme involved detailed discussions with a range of organisations, including the official producers of housing statistics in the other UK countries, the devolved administrations and with the Office for Statistics Regulation.

Officials in the Department have met the National House-Building Council and the associations representing approved inspectors and local authorities, to promote comprehensive data collection and plan to publish strengthened guidance and definitions.

We have implemented a new data collection system to make it faster and easier for building control starts and completions to be submitted. We will report progress on further improving the coverage of the quarterly data in the statistical release.