The home building industry has reiterated its call for immediate progress on the four priority recommendations recently announced by the Housing Supply Task Force.

Ahead of his first meeting later today with the new Housing and Communities Minister Alex Neil, Jonathan Fair, Chief Executive of Homes for Scotland, the organisation which represents companies building 95% of the country's new homes, pointed to the statistics' time lag and highlighted more immediate figures from the National House Building Council (NHBC) which paint an even bleaker picture: "The Scottish Government's quarterly figures show a worrying drop in new build starts. However, such information is already many months behind the ever-worsening climate for the home building industry, as evidenced by the staggering 88% decrease in registered starts reported by NHBC for January 2009 compared with the same period a year ago.

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"The scale of the potential housing crisis facing us is therefore huge and will require fundamentally different thinking when recovery begins.

"There is simply no time to waste in addressing the key points identified by the Task Force Report if we are to avoid a potential return to double-digit house price inflation and the people of Scotland are to have the opportunity of accessing new housing that meets their needs and demands."

(GK/JM)