National statistics

English Housing Survey, 2020 to 2021: feeling safe from fire - technical notes

Published 7 July 2022

Applies to England

National Statistics status

National Statistics status means that our statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value as set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. It is the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ statisticians’ responsibility to maintain compliance with these standards.

The designation of these statistics as National Statistics was first confirmed in April 2011 following an assessment by the UK Statistics Authority. The Office for Statistics Regulation carried out a compliance check on the English Housing Survey in Autumn 2020 and reconfirmed the survey’s official outputs as National Statistics.

Data collection

A full account of English Housing Survey data collection procedures can be found in the Technical Report, which is published annually.

In summary, The EHS has two components, an interview survey undertaken with approximately 13,300 households each year and a physical inspection of a random sample of the dwellings of about 6,000 of the households included in the interview survey. The interview surveys are conducted by trained interviewers and the physical surveys are carried out by qualified surveyors. Data collection on the EHS operates continuously over all four quarters of the year.

Results in this statistical release, are presented for ‘2020-21’ and are based on surveys conducted between April 2020 and March 2021. In order to cover a wider range of questions, some questions were asked of half of the responding sample in 2020-21, including questions about how safe people felt from the threat of fire in their homes. This represents a sample of 3,763 households, referred to in the release as the half household sample.

Data quality

A full account of data quality procedures followed to collect and analyse English Housing Survey data can be found in the Quality Report, which is published annually.

The reliability of the results of sample surveys, including the English Housing Survey, is positively related to the unweighted sample size. Results based on small sample sizes should therefore be treated as indicative only because inference about the national picture cannot be drawn. To alert readers to those results, percentages based on a row or column total with unweighted total sample size of less than 30 are italicised. To safeguard against data disclosure, the cell contents of cells where the cell count is less than 5 are replaced with a “u”. Due to the smaller sample in 2020-21 (see below), there are more statistics in this year’s report that are italicised or suppressed than in previous years.

Where comparative statements have been made in the text, these have been significance tested to a 95% confidence level. This means we are 95% confident that the statements we are making are true.

Impact of COVID-19 on the English Housing Survey

The 2020-21 English Housing Survey data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic which necessitated a change in the established survey mode. Face-to-face interviews were replaced with telephone interviews and internal inspections of properties were replaced with external inspections and linking administrative data sources. Ordinarily such changes would not be done without thorough testing to examine the impact on survey response rates, data collection and reporting. Given that such testing was not possible, it is not clear to what extent changes observed in 2020-21 are the result of the change in mode, or real change (e.g. a change in people’s housing circumstances as a result of COVID-19).

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that the composition of the EHS achieved sample changed significantly between 2019-20 and 2020-21. For example, in 2020-21, there were significantly more outright owners and fewer renters in the sample. There was also a skew toward older respondents (aged 65 or over), and fewer households with children than in 2019-20. These changes may be the result of changing housing circumstances, but it also likely that household circumstances prevented some households from taking part in the survey during the pandemic (e.g. home schooling, caring responsibilities, and ill health and well-being meant that some households would be less inclined to take part in the survey).

The changes made to the English Housing Survey as a result of COVID-19 also resulted in a significantly smaller sample size with 7,474 interviews in 2020-21 (down from around 13,300 in a usual year) and 5,288 physical surveys (down from 6,200 physical surveys) in 2020-21. The effect of the smaller sample size is particular acute for the survey questions – like the ones included in this release that were only asked of half the sample.

On the basis of these methodological changes, we advise caution when interpreting some of the larger changes observed in 2020-21 and reported in this statistical release.

Further details on the impact of COVID-19 on the English Housing Survey can be found in the EHS Technical Report.

Definitions

The population or key units of interest of the EHS are residential households and dwellings in England. A dwelling is defined as a unit of accommodation where all the rooms and amenities are for the exclusive use of the household(s) occupying them. The EHS collects information about the respondents’ main home so it defines a household as one person or a group of people (not necessarily related) who have the accommodation as their only or main residence, and (for a group) share cooking facilities and share a living room or sitting room or dining area. This definition is slightly different from the definition used in the 2011 Census^{[footnote 1]}.

Further details about the terms used in this publication can be found in the Housing statistics and English Housing Survey glossary published by DLUHC.

Accompanying tables

Accompanying tables are available alongside this release in the Feeling safe from fire data spreadsheet. These are:

Table 1 Feeling safe from fire, by tenure

Table 2 Feeling safe from fire, by dwelling type

Table 3 Feeling safe from fire, by age

Table 4 Feeling safe from fire, by ethnicity

Related statistics

Find further information and releases from the English Housing Survey

Enquiries

Media enquiries:

Email: newsdesk@communities.gov.uk

Public enquiries:

Phone: 0303 444 1209

Email: EHS@levellingup.gov.uk

1. Unlike the EHS, the 2011 Census’ definition of a household did not require household members to have the accommodation as their only or main residence. So the 2011 Census defined a household as one person living alone, or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who shared cooking facilities and shared a living room or sitting room or dining area. ↩