Welsh Housing Conditions Survey, April 2017 to March 2018: publication plan

Headline, national level results were published on the WHCS website on December 6 2018. The purpose of this release was to provide a good indication of the data available from the survey and effectively release it into the public domain. The release was accompanied by a Results Viewer which enables users to explore data on a range of topics. The Results viewer will be updated as each topic report is published. A number of supporting documents were also published, such as a Quality report and Technical report.

The report on how the WHCS assessed elements of the Welsh Housing Quality standard was published in April 2019. The Welsh Housing Quality Standard is the Welsh Government’s quality standard for social housing in Wales. Although the standard only applies to social housing, analysing those elements that were assessed by the Survey allows us to present a comparisons across all tenures.

The WHCS report on energy efficiency of dwellings was published in October 2019 and includes statistics on Energy Performance Certificate and Environmental Impact ratings of dwellings. It also includes breakdowns of energy saving measures, fuel types and use of renewable energy and heating systems.

The accessibility of dwellings report will be published in the next few months and will include information on accessibility of the Welsh Housing Stock as well as the adaptations present in homes.

This will be published as a slide pack and will contain statistics on the characteristics of the Welsh Housing stock (for example age of stock, type, tenure, construction, amenities, parking provision, outside space, accessibility, local area) and the characteristics of the households (such as occupancy levels, age of head of household, household composition, housing finance etc). We aim to publish this before the end of the year.

The Housing Health and Safety Rating System is a risk-based evaluation tool to help local authorities identify and protect against potential risks, and hazards, to health and safety from any deficiencies identified in dwellings. It is used to determine whether residential premises are safe to live in, or whether a hazard exists that may cause harm to the health and safety of a potential occupant. 26 of the 29 hazards were measured in the survey or modelled using WHCS data. We aim to publish a report from the WHCS data providing analysis of those elements of housing hazards and safety that were measured early in 2021.

The fuel poverty headline results were published in May 2019, and more detailed fuel poverty analysis followed in August 2019. Local authority modelled estimates were published in April 2020.

There is a lot of interest in linking housing condition data from the WHCS with data on the health and wellbeing of households (be this from the National Survey for Wales or data sources held in the SAIL Databank). This is something that the Housing Conditions Evidence Programme (HCEP) team and Welsh Government is keen to facilitate and will look into over the next year.

The WHCS 2017-18 provides national level estimates only, initially. The HCEP team will be working to use the WHCS data alongside various other data sources including those accessed as part of the other project within the Programme, the Housing Stock Analytical Resource for Wales, to model housing condition data down to lower geographies. This is something that the team will be looking at after completing the detailed topic analysis mentioned above.

A high level WHCS dataset will be filed with the UK Data Archive in the coming months. More detailed datasets may be made available to users subject to a suitable case being made and establishment of a Data Access Agreement with the Welsh Government’s Knowledge and Analytical Services. Data will also be available on request as per our usual ad-hoc process.