The Housing Stock of The United Kingdom

A BRE Trust report published in February 2020, The Housing Stock of The United Kingdom, combines the findings of housing condition surveys in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in a single UK-wide report.

With a legacy of massive house building during the industrial revolution, the UK’s housing stock is the oldest in Europe – probably the world – and is only very slowly being replaced. Older homes often present challenges when making them healthy, safe and suitable for the future. Housing condition surveys provide the detailed information needed to inform the housing policies required to deliver better homes.

Surveys in the four UK nations are conducted separately over different timescales, with different sampling criteria and survey techniques. However, the key information they use to describe housing in the four nations is comparable, and in 2017 the four surveys were – for the first time in nine years – all being conducted during the same year.

This presented the opportunity to gather the published findings from these four surveys and combine them into a single report providing UK-wide information on:

• Dwelling age and type, size, construction and materials.
• Tenure.
• Indicators of housing quality and condition.
• Heating, fuel type, insulation and energy efficiency.
• The cost of poor housing.
• Insights into the differences between the four nations’ housing stocks.

The report finds that: “UK housing stock is changing very slowly over time and it is clear that substantial replacement by newbuild is not an option. Improving our existing dwellings does not, however, need to be overly expensive and has multiple benefits to society as a whole, both economic and social. It is also more sustainable.”

The new publication follows the earlier ‘Housing in the UK’, which used data from the national surveys when they last aligned in 2008.

You can download the report here: https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the-United-Kingdom_Report_BRE-Trust.pdf

--BRE Group

[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki

• BRE articles.
• British post-war mass housing.
• Building Research Establishment.
• English housing stock age.
• Housing shortage.
• Housing standards review.
• Housing stock.
• Minimum space standards.
• The cost of poor housing to the NHS.
• The full cost of poor housing in Wales.
• The full cost of poor housing.
• The real cost of poor housing.
• What's the condition of your housing stock?