§ Mr. Austin Mitchellasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will publish in the Official Report the table showing the estimated value of owner-occupied housing compared with the total stock of assets enclosed with the letter sent by the Chief Secretary to the hon. Member for Grimsby on 21 December 1979; and if he will now update these figures to include estimates for 1979.
§ Mr. BiffenThe figures requested are given in the table below including revisions and estimates for 1979.
209W
All the figures are in £ billion; n.a. denotes not available Sources: See paragraphs 2–4 SOURCES AND NOTES 1. No official series for the value of owner occupied housing is published. The number of owner occupied houses is taken from Housing and Construction Statistics, various issues and refers to Great Britain. The Department of Environment provides a long run index of market prices for dwellings (including land). This is an index of transactions and it may, at times, be a misleading guide to the price of the stock. A rough market value index can be constructed as the product of these two series. A benchmark figure of the value of the owner occupied housing stock (again including land) for the end of 1976 has been calculated by the Department of the Environment. The value index has been used to project this benchmark figure back to 1952 and forward to 1978. This method provides only a very approximate estimate of the value of owner occupied housing, particularly in the earlier years. No account is taken of the value of outstanding mortgages. 2. Date for gross United Kingdom capital stock (i.e. without allowance for depreciation) at 1975 replacement costs, and fornet capital stock (allowing for depreciation) at current replacement costs, are published by the CSO in the blue book in 'National Income and Expenditure'. Estimates of both variables at current replacement cost are available for the whole economy and for assets owned by the manufacturing industries. These series relate to end-years and cover dwellings, other buildings and works, plant and machinery, and vehicles, ships and aircraft, but not land. They are compiled from historic series for capital expenditure and replacement cost price indices for capital by making assumptions about the life-lengths of different kinds of assets. The estimates of net capital stock also assume that depreciation of assets is linear over these lives. The different basis of valuation (current replacement cost), as well as the exclusion of land, make comparison of either gross or net capital stock with estimated market values of owner-occupied housing difficult. 3. The value of net personal wealth may be useful for illustrating the share of housing in aggregate personal assets and liabilities. The figures for net personal wealth for 1957–1965 are obtained from The Financial Interdependence of the Economy, 1957–1966 (Chapman and Hall). The same source provides figures for the value of ordinary shares at market prices held by individuals for 1957–1965. Figures for both net personal wealth and individuals' holdings of ordinary shares for the period 1966–1974 are taken from Economic Trends, January 1978, page 103, and for the period 1975–1978 are taken from Financial Statistics, February 1980, Supplementary Table C. The figures for holdings of ordinary shares relate to United Kingdom companies and include unlisted shares. They also include holdings by unincorporated businesses.