Migration and Housing Choice Survey, 1990

The original aims of the Migration and Housing Choice Survey (MHCS) were, firstly, to provide a comprehensive picture of the private housing market, including areas of search, criteria for selection of houses and the characteristics of first-time buyers; secondly, to support forecasts of housing requirement by providing an indication of the number and types of households which were being formed; and finally, to provide an input into future land allocation policies to meet housing requirements by, for example, illustrating movement between areas and tenure changes. It was hoped that the MHCS responses in Strathclyde would provide an input to the monitoring of Strathclyde's Structure Plan by providing information on the operation of the private sector housing market, in terms of migration patterns, search patterns and motivations. These developed into more general aims as the scale of the survey grew; firstly, to obtain information on the movers' characteristics; secondly, to explore their preferences for housing type and location; and thirdly and most importantly, to examine the motivation for their move. Generally, this national dataset aimed to examine the patterns and especially the processes involved in migration in Scotland.