Housing and planning statistics: 2024 to 2025 work programme

Initiative

We are undertaking a transformation of our statistics about private rental prices. This transformation work includes finding ways to:

• make better use of existing data sources
• improve methods and develop systems to provide more timely and detailed data

We currently produce the Index of Private Housing Rental Prices (IPHRP) and the Private Rental Market Statistics (PRMS). But, in the future, we envisage our rental price statistics to be a new, single, monthly publication that provides a more detailed insight into the rental market.

Target Date

Great Britain rents transformation was completed in March 2024. Northern Ireland rents transformation is expected to complete in March 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

The Great Britain rents transformation was completed in March 2024.

We are developing our Northern Ireland private rent statistics and aim to use our Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) methodology for Northern Ireland from March 2025. This will enable us to produce average rent levels for Northern Ireland and the UK, and comparisons with Great Britain.

Initiative

We will improve the ability to measure trends over time in our Private Rental Affordability Statistics by incorporating the new Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) statistics.

Target Date

This work was completed in September 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Private rental affordability: 2023, was published on 28th October 2024.

Initiative

Investigate publishing a coherence article on private rental sector policy and available data.

Target Date

We expect this work will be completed by Spring 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Initial scoping work has begun to establish user need which will determine the full scope of the article.

Initiative

Investigate publishing a coherence article on empty homes across the UK.

Target Date

We expect this work to be completed by Summer 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Scoping work is scheduled to start in January 2025.

Initiative

Investigate publishing a blog that will explore available data about affordable housing across the UK.

Target Date

We expect this work will be completed by Spring 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Initial scoping has begun with a user needs survey. This work will involve communicating changes in affordable housing data collections across the UK.

Initiative

This long-term project will improve the coherence of statistics on additions to the affordable housing for rent sector and losses from it.

Target Date

We expect this work to be completed by March 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Progress

The 2022 to 2023 edition of ‘Social Housing Sales and Demolitions in England’ further developed the official statistics in development on the net supply of affordable homes for rent including new analysis breaking down net supply by tenure. We will continue to develop the data and presentation of the statistics on this topic over the coming year.

Initiative

Update the Scottish homelessness data collection content and systems to better:

• reflect changes in homelessness policy
• meet user needs.

This includes updating the homelessness prevention data collection content and systems.

This is an extensive project which seeks to:

• identify the changes that will be needed to all homelessness and prevention data collection content to reflect current and future homelessness policy in Scotland
• identify any data gaps
• review data collection and processing system requirements, this also includes exploring options for future systems, and developing and building these systems
• determine the feasibility of changes to collection content and systems, as well as assessing the quality implications of these changes

Target Date

We expect the data specification to be issued to Local Authorities (LAs) by Summer 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Scottish Government.

Progress

The data review is undergoing its final agreements with our working group. Once complete, content will be signed off internally by senior members of the Scottish Government and Local Authorities (LAs). After sign off, we plan to issue a data specification, enabling LAs to alter/build their IT systems to accommodate the changes. The aim is to issue the data specification early Summer 2025.

Initiative

Develop and publish homeless deaths statistics for Northern Ireland based on death registrations.

Target Date

We expect this work will be completed by the end of 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA).

Progress

Due to delays in the data Quality Assurance (QA) process and resource issues within the Vital Statistics Unit in NISRA, we have had to delay production of an output on homeless deaths in NI until 2025.

Initiative

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has developed the capability to host and publish Power BI products. We are using this capability to make our statistical publications more accessible and engaging for users.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Progress

We have introduced interactive data visualisation tools, or dashboards, as part of our statistical publications on the MHCLG website on housing supply, dwelling stock, social housing lettings, planning applications, land use and green belt.

Initiative

Change the published statistical tables on housing and planning statistics to use formats that meet accessibility requirements and comply with accessibility legislation.

Target Date

We expect to complete this by December 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Initiative

Change the published statistical tables and other products on homelessness and rough sleeping to use formats that meet accessibility requirements.

Target Date

We expect to complete this by February 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Initiative

Enhance the accessibility of the:

• Scottish Government Planning Performance Statistics publication (this is published twice a year)
• Scottish Vacant and Derelict Land Survey publication (this is published once a year)

We are following the guidance produced by the Scottish Government Office of the Chief Statistician. We will concentrate on improving the accessibility of publication text, tables, and charts.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Scottish Government.

Progress

Work is ongoing on the Scottish Vacant and Derelict Land Survey publication. Accessibility improvements will be made incrementally to each successive publication of the Annual Planning Performance Statistics publication.

Initiative

The Northern Ireland Planning Monitoring Framework publication is being reviewed to:

• consider how to reduce the overall file size of the published document
• develop visuals
• work towards further meeting accessibility requirements
• engage with users

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led the Department for Infrastructure (Northern Ireland).

Progress

Progress on this initiative is delayed due to ongoing resource pressures.

Initiative

We aim to improve the quality, reliability and timeliness of our housing statistics publications by following best practice from elements of RAP.

Target Date

We expect this work to be ongoing throughout 2024-25.

Lead

This work is being led by Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Work towards this initiative is ongoing. We have made great improvements to our code and implemented RAP for some of our outputs, helping reduce the time and resources needed to publish our statistics. We will continue to seek opportunities to utilise RAP.

Initiative

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will develop and publish statistics on UK short term lets based on data provided by:

• Airbnb
• Booking.com
• Expedia Group.

Target Date

This work was completed in March 2024, with further editions in May and November 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Completed. The first release of Short-term lets through online collaborative economy platforms, UK was published on 4 March 2024, with further editions in May and November, allowing analysis of short term lets.

Initiative

We plan to make improvements to the ONS’s UK Dwelling Stock publication, including improved:

• metadata
• quality and accessibility standards

This will improve the overall effectiveness and quality of the publication.

Target Date

This work was completed in April 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Additional metadata has been added to the dataset, allowing users to compare quality notes across the four UK countries.

Initiative

We aim to produce affordability ratios for local Middle layer Super Output Areas (MSOA) to improve local level statistics. This will use small area income estimates and small area house price statistics, similar to the Housing affordability in England and Wales methodology.

Target Date

This work was completed in June 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

Housing affordability for local areas in England and Wales: year ending March 2020 was published in June 2024.

Initiative

We will move data ingestion, storage and processing to the department’s strategic data store. This will enable us to:

• introduce more automation
• reduce risks
• increase quality assurance and analysis work.

This will help produce better quality statistics more efficiently.

Target Date

We expect this work will be completed by December 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Progress

Some further work is needed to complete these improvements as intended this year.

Initiative

Update the newly launched publicly available map of Scottish Vacant and Derelict Land Survey data with the latest data.

Target Date

We expect the latest data to be available by December 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Scottish Government.

Initiative

Finalise plans and specifications for the analysis of data on housing and households from Scotland’s Census 2022. This will include Census data comparisons with:

• data from the previous censuses
• data from Census 2021 for the rest of the UK

Target Date

We expect this work to be completed by the end of 2024.

Lead

This work is being led the National Records of Scotland (NRS).

Progress

A topic release on housing data from Scotland’s Census 2022 was published on 22 August 2024. Multivariate analysis of census data on housing and other topics are expected to become available towards the end of 2024.

Initiative

Welsh Government will continue developing the Administrative data on Homes in Wales (AD|Homes) project. We will:

• bring together a range of data on the condition and energy efficiency of housing stock
• consider the need for any future housing conditions evidence programme

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Welsh Government.

Progress

In September 2024, we refreshed all external data feeding into the Fuel Poverty in Wales dashboard. We have prepared an update to the Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) for Homes in Wales dashboard, which we intend to publish in late 2024/early 2025 alongside an article exploring the quality of EPC data.

We are working with the Welsh Government Data Science Unit to understand the feasibility of using machine learning to create a more representative EPC dataset for Wales.

We have expanded our use of Council Tax billing data, publishing analysis of movement of homes between different council tax classifications in Gwynedd and Dwyfor between April 2023 and April 2024. We plan to update figures of council tax chargeable second homes across Wales in 2025, working with the ONS and local authorities to improve the quality of data collected where necessary.

We are continuing to explore how we can use administrative data to supplement routine housing supply statistics and intend to publish an update to this work in 2025.

We are gathering evidence requirements and exploring options for a future housing conditions survey. This work will be completed by March 2025.

Initiative

Investigate sources to produce data on the EPC ratings of domestic properties in Northern Ireland.

Target Date

This work was completed in July 2024.

Lead

This work is being led by the Department for Communities (Northern Ireland).

Progress

The Energy Rating of housing in Northern Ireland up to March 2023 was published in July 2024.

Initiative

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) will continually look to make improvements to both the quality and content of this annual release by incorporating feedback obtained from users. We currently publish our statistics on the gov.uk website as html narrative and Excel/csv files. We are looking at possibly doing this through the Integrated Data Service.

Target Date

We expect this work to be completed by Summer 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA).

Progress

We have identified changes and improvements that can be made as part of the introduction of new data and IT systems planned for implementation in December 2024.

Initiative

Continue to publish and improve statistics on the deaths of homeless people in England and Wales.

Target Date

This work will re-start in October 2024 with timescales for delivery TBC.

Lead

This work would be led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Progress

A proposal to stop publishing these statistics was included in the consultation on Health and social care statistical outputs published by DHSC (including OHID), NHSBSA, UKHSA, ONS and NHS England. However, following analysis of the feedback provided, this decision has now been reversed. Instead, an improvement programme of work will be undertaken to improve the quality of these statistics. This improvement programme will commence in October with a TBC delivery date.

Initiative

Develop a new data framework to measure and track progress towards ending rough sleeping in England.

Target Date

This work is now complete.

Lead

This work is being led by:

• the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI)
• Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Progress

We recently published the third quarterly publication of the rough sleeping data framework management information which covers monthly information up to June 2024.  Three further phase two indicators were rolled out to all Local Authorities (LAs) in June, which collect data on moves into accommodation, the number of nights people sleep rough and people returning to sleeping rough after being in settled accommodation. We plan to publish this information in the next quarterly update in November/December. This will cover data up to September 2024.

Initiative

Use Homelessness Case Level Collection (H-CLIC) data in England to improve the evidence base for homelessness through the:

• Homelessness Data England (HDE) project
• BOLD (Better Outcomes through Linked Data) shared outcomes project

Both projects facilitate the linking of H-CLIC data over time and across geographical boundaries. The projects have been enhanced with information from other government departments. This aims to help us develop our understanding of how households and individual people cycle in and out of homelessness over time and across the country.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by:

• the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)
• the Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK.

Progress

Initial linked datasets have been created using data from 52 pilot Local Authorities (LAs). This data has been integrated across these areas, including with prisons and probation datasets. Analysis is underway to better understand how households and individuals’ cycle in and out of homelessness over time and across the country. Analysis will include the relationship between homelessness and incarceration.

Initiative

We aim to improve the quality, reliability and timeliness of our homelessness and rough sleeping statistics publications. This will enable us to increase capacity for analysis work.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Initiative

Review homelessness statistics specification to improve the quality of case level homelessness data in England.

Target Date

To be confirmed.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Progress

Delivery plan pending.  Work is continuing to review and update the data specification, which will involve further engagement work with LAs.

Initiative

Improve the evidence base for homelessness in England through an ambitious program of mixed-methods research. The aim of the systems-wide evaluation is to understand what works at a systems level and identify the most effective and impactful levers for change. Test and Learn (T&L) is a programme of 8 trials testing different approaches and interventions to reduce and end homelessness and rough sleeping.

Target Date

We expect to complete this by April 2026.

Lead

This work is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI).

Initiative

Continue to publish and improve statistics on the deaths of people experiencing homelessness in Scotland.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the National Records of Scotland (NRS).

Progress

Homeless Deaths in Scotland 2022 was published in November 2023. The next homeless deaths publication for Scotland has a provisional publication date of November 2024. This publication will consider 2023 death registrations.

We hold regular meetings with other statistical producers to:

• share developments and ideas
• consider the UK coherence of statistics on the deaths of people experiencing homelessness

As part of the work to make continual improvements to this output, NRS are investigating a new data stream for the identification of homeless deaths in Scotland. This involves asking local authorities to report any known homeless deaths in the data they submit to NRS. The statistics will be calculated as normal, and the new data will be analysed alongside the usual process to assess its quality.

Initiative

Work towards introducing case level homelessness data in Wales.

Target Date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Welsh Government.

Progress

High-level proposals for taking forward work to replace current aggregate homelessness data collections and moving towards implementing an individual-level homelessness data collection have now been agreed.

Data collections options under consideration, including potential timelines for delivery.  Data governance structures have been established.

Initiative

Explore the feasibility of implementing the Ending Homelessness Framework in Wales.

Target date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI).

Progress

CHI will continue to support National Governments in the development and implementation of their respective definitions of ending homelessness and accompanying indicators.

Initiative

The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) continue to work together in the form of an Impact Partnership. CHI provides support on:

• developing indicators
• exploring success measures
• plans for implementation.

Target date

This work is ongoing.

Lead

This work is being led by the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) and Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE).

Progress

CHI will continue to support National Governments in the development and implementation of their respective definitions of ending homelessness and accompanying indicators.

Initiative

We will explore improving the methodology of our Subnational estimates of dwellings and households by tenure in order to publish more accurate statistics.

Target Date

We expect this work will be completed by March 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Initiative

At the Valuation Office Agency, we are committed to publishing statistics that follow best practice across government. We are mindful that our statistics are part of the wider context of statistics on property, which other parts of government produce. We are working with colleagues across government to publish coherent statistics which meet the wider user need.

Target Date

We expect this work to be completed by Summer 2025.

Lead

This work is being led by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA).

Progress

We have identified changes and improvements that can be made as part of the introduction of new data and IT systems planned for implementation in December 2024.