Statistics on population and housing

2023/0008(COD)

PURPOSE: to establish a common legal framework for the design, production and dissemination of European statistics on population and housing.

PROPOSED ACT: Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council.

ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the European Parliament decides in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and on an equal footing with the Council.

BACKGROUND: European statistics on population and housing are required for the design, implementation and evaluation of Union policies, in particular those addressing the demographic change, the green and digital transformations, the promotion of energy efficiency, economic, social and territorial cohesion, and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda.

The evaluation of existing statistics on the population and housing censuses in the Union, statistics on international migration flows, migrant stocks and acquisitions of citizenship and demography statistics has shown that the current legal framework comprising Regulations (EC) No 862/2007, (EC) No 763/2008 and (EU) No 1260/2013 of the European Parliament and the Council has led to significant overall improvements of statistics compared to the 2005 situation without the current legal framework in force. That framework, however, has potential for a lack of coherence and comparability, which should be addressed.

Recent migration trends have created demands for timelier, more frequent, and more detailed European statistics on population, vital events and housing including details of topics or groups that have become politically and societally relevant during the past decade. Furthermore, the existing legal framework is not flexible enough to adapt to evolving policy needs and to enable the use of new sources at national and Union level. Furthermore, the structure of the existing legal framework in the form of three separate regulations, adopted at different times, has led to intrinsic inconsistencies of the statistics.

It is therefore necessary to replace the current legal framework by a new, more coherent and flexible one.

In the context of this initiative, European statistics on population mean official statistics at EU level on population, demographic events and migration and the various indicators based on these statistics.

CONTENT: the proposed regulation establishes a new framework for European statistics on population and housing. Integrating current statistics on demography, migration and censuses, it specifies that Member States must provide statistics on 3 domains (demography, housing, families and households), 11 related topics and 23 detailed topics.

The proposal contains:

- provisions to establish a harmonised definition of population based on sound statistical concepts for all products and to facilitate access to available data sources which will improve the production processes and the overall quality of social statistics;

- provisions to align population and international migration statistics more with statistics on administrative and judicial events related to asylum, legal and irregular migration

The new proposal is based on a common definition of the population based on the statistical concept of usual residence, without default exemptions. Moreover, scientific statistical estimation methods (such as ‘signs of life’ or ‘rate of stay’) are explicitly encouraged to make it possible to implement the definition starting from administrative data sources.

The details of data requirements would be specified in implementing acts, but the proposed regulation makes it possible to amend the list of detailed topics and their periodicity and reference times using delegated acts.

The proposal also provides the possibility of responding to upcoming data requirements with ad hoc data collections. It also requires pilot and feasibility studies to be launched as appropriate and offers potential co-financing to further modernise statistical production systems and test new topics.

In addition, a specific article on data sharing describes how confidential data can be shared under Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council for the specific purpose of population statistics.