BRE FB62 PDF

Introduction

There is a regular call for UK housing statistics, usually to compare them with statistics for other European or world nations, but each time they have to be compiled from the four separate and different housing stock surveys run by the governments of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Therefore, to have a summary document containing the key information in an accessible format was thought to be useful. Better still, would be to combine the data sets at a given time with a set of weights enabling analyses to be undertaken once, rather than four times. Unfortunately, this is not that simple.

The four surveys use four different methodologies. They are undertaken over different timescales, with different sampling criteria. Even questions that appear similar are often subtly different. Scotland and Wales do not inspect vacant dwellings, whereas England and Northern Ireland do. England has an additional form for houses in multiple occupation. Although some information is truly comparable across nations, the most interesting information – energy efficiency, repair costs, health and safety, space standards – is more problematic, and more difficult to compare.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of information that can be reliably compared. All the surveys have a common heritage, but each has taken a different course to meet its own national agenda. The physical inspection parts of the English Housing Survey and Northern Ireland House Condition Survey and large parts of the Living in Wales survey form are identical, and all three use the same consistent briefing provided by BRE. The Scottish House Condition Survey (SHCS) methodology is a development of that used in England before 1986.

This report first puts together a set of the most commonly asked questions about UK data in a tabular form, and compares them with published data from similar nations: Germany, France and the US.

It then undertakes a country-by-country comparison to explain the sometimes surprising differences between the housing stocks of the UK nations, and quantifies the total repair bill and cost of poor housing to the UK.

It does not provide a combined data set; this is a possible next step. Nor does it look at detailed household comparisons, which, if there is demand, might be the subject of an additional report, illustrating housing similarities and inequalities between the people of the UK nations.