Government scraps empty homes statistics

DCLG has scrapped the collection of Neighbourhood Statistics on empty homes. The announcement was made in March n the Statistics Plan which you can reach from here. This is disappointing news. The most disappointing aspect is that these statistics were produced out of council tax data: in principle this should have been an automatic process, relying on existing council tax data coupled with geo-location codes. It doesn't say much for the ablitiy of our public services to manage data if technically undemanding tasks such as this cannot be accommodated. Amongst other things, this will impact the HCA's much-vaunted GIS mapping system as we think that any data below the level of local authorities could only have come from the neighbourhood statistics dataset. It seems perverse that considerable sums of public money would be invested in developing the GIS mapping and then a key data source removed. The neighbourhood statistics on empty homes were already moribund: The most recent statistics published appear to have been 2008, with the only other set of data being foe 2007, so publication, analysis and collection(?) were already years behind: public funding cuts have no doubt provided the coup de grace. For the time being the existing statisitcs remain on the Ness website. How long they will stay there is anyone's guess.