Housing
The cabinet wants to add 100,000 homes annually in our country. It is a good example of a theme where the improved information provision from CBS comes in handy to create more targeted policy. The Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning (VRO) can now monitor based on data that better corresponds to the actual situation. For example, we now know that municipalities in our country are granting more permits for new homes than previously thought, says Remko Duursma, senior researcher and project leader at CBS.Better picture
Duursma: For the first time, we are now showing a better picture of how many permitted homes there were in the past month. This means: the number of homes that municipalities are allowed to build, for which a building permit has been granted. A permit is requested by, for example, a private individual, project developer, or housing corporation. Also new is that we provide better insight into the exact number of homes that will be added thanks to a so-called permitted addition. For example, a dwelling can be split into two dwellings. Or an existing building is raised with one or more new floors: adding floors. Now it becomes clear how many permits have been granted for such renovations.Withdrawn permits
But information about permits does not tell everything, Duursma continues. Not every permit actually leads to a home. A permit can, for example, be withdrawn. Therefore, it is important to know whether there are more than 100,000 permitted homes and additions per year, in other words, whether there is a surplus or shortage of permits. We will now meet that information need with data on the exact number of homes for which a building permit has been granted and that are ultimately built for the most part.Municipalities register
In the statistics about the life cycle of homes and other buildings, CBS relies on the BAG. It has been in use between 2010 and 2011. Municipalities keep the registration. Thus, for each residential and non-residential building, it is known when the municipality granted the building permit, when construction began and was completed, or if and when the function changed and when a demolition permit was granted and the building was demolished. Municipalities continuously send new data to the Cadastre, which manages the BAG. CBS receives the information monthly via the Cadastre.Challenges
Duursma: One of the oldest statistics of CBS is about the housing stock in our country. Before the BAG, we worked with other sources, but since 2012 we have based ourselves on the BAG. The use of this information source has recently been accompanied by challenges. Why? Duursma: It is often thought that the BAG is a simple-to-use source. A list of buildings with all the information from which you can easily extract the desired information. But it is not that easy. For example, you cannot see at a glance that a dwelling is new construction. You need to do very careful analyses in the timeline of the dwelling.New system
Therefore, CBS has invested in the development of a new system over the past four years to process information from the BAG better and extract more information from it. Duursma: We knew that the BAG contains information about permitted homes. But without adjusting our processing system, we could not extract it well enough to create reliable statistics.
Remarkable insight
The renewal has immediately provided a remarkable insight: the number of permitted homes is significantly higher than thought. Duursma: The existing figures are based on surveys. CBS asks municipalities to fill out a questionnaire about the number of permitted homes. Retrospectively, we established based on the BAG that more homes had been permitted than were reported according to the surveys. The difference between both sources grew over the years from 15 to more than 30 percent. It was one of the reasons to develop a new processing system. This way, we could get a different view of the number of permitted homes and track these homes during their life cycle. By the way, we notice that the quality of the BAG has improved in recent years.Permitted non-residential buildings
Another enrichment is the data on permitted non-residential buildings. We have never published data on building permits that municipalities grant for, for example, schools and factories, says Duursma. Previously, we had no information source. There are 11 categories of non-residential buildings. For example, healthcare functions, gathering functions - such as hospitality - and other usage functions.First time
At the end of June, the first time will be: data processed via the new system will be published for the first time. It concerns data from 2015 to May 2025. After that, the latest data will be added monthly.Duursma: The establishment of the new system has been an enormous project. We are pleased with the result: monthly robust, transparent, and well-calculated new information. The new data are not only favorable for external users but also for CBS itself. We now have the complete picture: all data about the life cycle of residential and non-residential buildings come together.
Important step
How do users of CBS statistics respond to the possibilities of the new processing system? Peter Boelhouwer is a professor of housing systems at TU Delft. He says: It brings important improvements. Researchers can now gain much better insight into the process between granting the building permit and the eventual delivery of the dwelling. We have long known that the BAG leads to more accurate data on permits than municipal surveys. A significant step has been taken.New data
Henk Verduin, director of living environment statistics at CBS, emphasizes that it is also about new data that did not exist before. Function changes - for example, an office becomes a dwelling - are now counted separately from other additions. And for the first time, we have a picture of withdrawn permits. Boelhouwer adds that the political and societal discussion benefits from these more accurate statistics. The housing market involves many interests. In the past, disagreements could arise over figures. One thought they were correct, the other did not. The new CBS information positively changes that.Earlier in the process
Policymakers will also experience an improvement, Boelhouwer says. The housing market is under pressure. This has led to more policy attention for construction production in recent years. From now on, you can get better insight into that process: how many homes are in the pipeline, how many homes have construction started, and how many homes have recently been completed? This gives policymakers earlier indications in the process of whether things are going well or not.Relevant links
- Website - Building and housing - Key figures