Indicating access to housing and housing exclusion
Housing Europe invited to thematic review meeting at the European Commission
Brussels, 25 November 2015 | Published in Research
On November 24th, Housing Europe was invited to contribute to a meeting organized by the European Commission and the Social Protection Committee group on indicators (SPC ISG), presenting key findings from the recent State of Housing in the EU 2015 report.
The aim of the meeting was to carry out a thematic review of available data and indicators on access to housing and housing exclusion. The event brought together representatives from the Member States experts in the field of social inclusion/protection (full list of group members), officials from DG Employment and Social Affairs as well as Eurostat, and Eurofound. Housing Europe and FEANTSA were identified as experts from the non-governmental sector.
During the meeting we put forward concrete proposals for the collection of better data at European level on aspects such as supply of affordable housing, public expenditure on housing, living conditions of specific groups (elderly people, youth, homeless), estimates of current and future housing needs.
Other points that came out from the discussion included the need for better data on the phenomenon of energy poverty, and the need to better capture the different realities at local level even in existing databases (as opposed to national averages).
Most importantly, participants pointed to a clear need to better understand, compare and integrate existing data sets relating to housing (including, but not exclusively: ESSPROS, MISSOC, SILC, EQLS, House price index). The SPC Indicators Sub-group will continue working on the issue of access to housing in cooperation with Eurostat, and will be involved in forthcoming work aimed at setting up a joint EC-OECD database on housing.