Overview of house building

Introduction

House building starts are considered to be a key indicator of economic conditions generally and for the construction industry and housing market in particular.

The data is used as one of the variables when the Monetary Policy Committee meets to decide the base rate of interest. The numbers of new starts and completions show how demand is being met. National figures for both starts and completions are released in a quarterly statistical release.

In this section you can find data on the number of new permanent dwellings started and completed for England and its Regions. We also publish data for UK by aggregating our England data with the latest data provided by the Scottish Executive, National Assembly for Wales and Department for Social Development (DSD), Northern Ireland. The data are split by tenure type.

The main sources for England data are:

Quarterly new starts and completions by tenure
Data for the quarterly Statistical Release (SR) come from a combination of two sources. One is from Local Authorities using the P2 Quarterly return, whilst the other is from the National House Building Council (NHBC) monthly return to complete the quarterly picture
Annual house building data
Data from the quarterly SR are also used for the calendar and financial year tables in the live tables and Housing Statistics Annual. The percentages of new starts and completions that are houses and flats by number of bedrooms are based solely on the NHBC figures

Note that house construction orders statistics are now published by the Office for National Statistics.

Data Collection

The purpose of the P2Q return is to collect quarterly information on the numbers of permanent dwellings started and completed (new build only) recorded by local authority building control departments. This information (allowing for any missing returns), is combined with the monthly data from the National House Building Council (NHBC) to give estimates of activity by each local authority area. Figures for each local authority are aggregated to give regional and national figures.