Post: 21 February 2017
As mentioned most recently in this month’s Housing White Paper, the Government has an “ambition” to release surplus public land with capacity for 160,000 homes during this Parliament.
Progress has been somewhat difficult to track. It emerged in 2014 that the responsible government department DCLG wasn’t even maintaining central records of housebuilding on surplus sites following their disposal.
In 2015 the National Audit Office questioned the Government’s claim that it had sold land for more than 109,000 new homes; DCLG had accidentally included some sites sold off under the Blair government. MPs on the Public Accounts Committee also criticised DCLG for its failure to produce credible data on land disposal, in reports in 2015 and 2016.
DCLG finally committed to publish regular reports containing site-level performance data, including the planning status, postcode, local authority and the number of homes started and completed each year.
We now have the first such report, published yesterday: Public Land for Housing programme 2015-20.
The report does include site-level data. Appendices A and B contain data on disposals in 2015-16 and 2016-17 Q1/Q2 respectively, and Appendix E contains data on disposals from the previous Parliament, in 2011-15.
However DCLG has published the data only in PDF format. The report also hasn’t been linked into the Housebuilding collection on GOV.UK. It’s almost as if DCLG doesn’t want to make this information easy to find and explore.
So anyway … I’ve extracted the site records from the three appendices, geocoded them based on the postcode locations, and packaged them into an open data download on my Datadaptive website. The data is included both as an Excel workbook and as a set of shapefiles for GIS use, with documentation.
Image credits: A photo of a street in Loughborough by Duncharris (GFDL / CC BY-SA 3.0); Map by me, contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, ontains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2016, and contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2016