Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what the (a) nature and (b) cause of the technical issue relating to the extraction of the underlying data was which caused the delay of the publication of Land Use Change statistics 2016 to 2017 from 24 January 2018 to 31 May 2018.

The Department will publish Land Use Change Statistics for 2016-17 on 31 May.

To produce these statistics, the Department obtains data produced by the Ordnance Survey. Over the course of this year, the Ordnance Survey has been making technical improvements to the processes it uses to capture up-to-date and robust information on land use change – these improvements are to ensure that the methodology continues to detect real world changes in land use during 2016-17 as accurately as possible and not changes in land use that are due to other regular Ordnance Survey data updates. These technical improvements meant that the methodology used to produce the final land use change figures also required updating, to ensure that the figures for 2016-17 are consistent with past figures and for this reason the release will be published later this month.