Asked by: Caroline Spelman (Conservative - Meriden)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many authorised pitches each local authority in the West Midlands has been granted.
Answered by Kit Malthouse
The Department collects official statistics on the count of Traveller caravans in England. Data is collected from local authorities on a bi-annual basis to reflect winter residence and summer travelling trends. All datasets and publications can be found online on our statistical series page here - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/traveller-caravan-count.
The Traveller caravan count covers data on the number of caravans and traveller sites in England; it does not cover the number of occupants residing in these caravans, or caravan sites or the potential drivers for any observed change. In addition, the count does not capture the total number of pitches in each local authority, only those which are occupied at the time of each count.
Asked by: Caroline Spelman (Conservative - Meriden)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps he will take to monitor the loss to development of land in England and Wales during the UN International Year of Soils in 2015.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
The Department for Communities and Local Government has previously published national statistics on Land Use Change. These statistics report the amount of undeveloped land, including agricultural land, changing to a developed use changing to a developed use.
In 2013, the Department let a tender to secure these statistics and a 30 per cent reduction in costs using an innovative new methodology. The first publication of these new statistics will cover the year 2013-14 and has been provisionally announced for June/July 2015. Subsequent years publications will be preannounced for publication in due course.