Housing statistics quarterly update: June 2020

2. Delays to new housebuilding statistics due to COVID-19

This Housing Statistics for Scotland Quarterly update was due to include an update on all-sector new house building starts and completions to end December 2019, with more recent figures on social sector new builds to end March 2020.

However due to focussing efforts to respond to COVID-19 and the impact of lockdown on some local authorities being able to access their new house building Management Information Systems, this has led to usual new build data collection deadlines being unable to be met by some local authority data suppliers, meaning that the new house building data cannot be published to the original June timelines.

We are closely monitoring the situation, and are working to agree reasonable extensions to submission deadlines. We plan to publish the new house building statistics as soon as we can.

Previous quarterly publications on new housebuilding statistics can be found on the Housing Statistics webpages of the Scottish Government website: https://www.gov.scot/collections/housing-statistics/.

The most recent published Excel tables on all-sector house building starts and completions to end September 2019, and social sector new build figures to end December 2019, can be accessed at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/housing-statistics-for-scotland-new-house-building/.

The quarterly affordable housing supply statistics have been unaffected by these data supply delays, given that the data is sourced from the Scottish Government Affordable Housing Supply Programme database, which has continued to operate as usual.