You asked
Please provide the following information:
Why have you stopped completing the House Price Paid data sheet when it is crucial to house buying decisions?
Also, who made the decision to suspend the House Price Index?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The decision to suspend the UK House Price Index (UK HPI) was made by the Office for National Statistics and the UK HPI joint producers (HM Land Registry, Registers of Scotland and Land & Property Services Northern Ireland). The decision was made taking into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the availability of housing transactions with which the UK HPI could be calculated.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the production of the UK HPI in two ways:
Firstly, the number of transactions taking place fell significantly in April and May 2020 for the joint producers of the data: HM Land Registry, Registers of Scotland and Land & Property Services Northern Ireland as a result of the restrictions in movement and social distancing policies brought into effect on 23 March 2020.
Secondly, as a result of these restrictions, the joint producers have had to adapt their operational process for recording applications and in some cases have moved from an office-based process to a remote process, carried out through homeworking. Whilst this switch has led to an increase in transactions being processed, compared with the early weeks following the 23 March. There are still insufficient records in the system to produce a UK HPI that provides a measure of house prices, which is representative of current market activity. The joint producers are working hard to process all the transactions they receive as the housing industry responds to this extraordinary period.
For the April 2020 index, given the issues already discussed, at the time of publication we had received less than 1% of the transactions that we would usually expect to receive at this time of year. The number of transactions available to us for the May 2020 index increased slightly to approximately 5% of the transactions that we would usually expect to receive at this time of the year.
We will continue to closely monitor the flow of transaction data and we aim to reinstate the UK HPI at the earliest opportunity, that includes providing estimates for both April and May 2020. We will ensure that users of the UK HPI are kept informed of the plans for reinstatement.