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The 2006 English House Condition Survey Annual Report was published on 25 November 2008. It provides a national overview of the condition and energy performance of the housing. The report provides a more detailed picture of non-decent homes, those with Category 1 hazards including the HHSRS and damp and mould problems.

For the first time the Annual Report will broaden its assessment of the energy performance of the housing stock using indicators based on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Alongside the Energy Efficiency Rating, the report will additionally housing stocks impact on the environment in terms of CO 2 emissions (based on standardised assumptions of occupancy, heating patterns and geographical location). Other EPC indicators to be included in the report are standardised energy use and costs. One of the key benefits of including these indicators in the EHCS are that that can be related to the more detailed information (about homes and occupants) collected through the survey.

The new English Housing Survey (EHS)

From April 2008 the EHCS has been integrated with the Survey of English Housing to form the new English Housing Survey (EHS), bringing together the key components of both surveys into a single fieldwork operation. Detailed work on the development of the new EHS questionnaire was undertaken in order to achieve as much consistency as possible for key topics from both the EHCS and SEH. The content of the physical inspection continues largely unchanged from the EHCS.

Following a competitive tender, the contract for the management of the fieldwork process was awarded to the Office for National Statistics working in partnership with Miller Mitchell Burley Lane - who were the EHCS contractors.

The EHS will become part of the new Continuous Population Survey (CPS) which the ONS launched in January 2008. This will bring together the ONS continuous household surveys into a single module-based survey based on an unclustered sample of around 200,000 households a year, all of whom will be asked a common set of core questions before branching into a range of topic based interviews. The surveys initially included are the General Household Survey, the Expenditure and Food Survey and the Omnibus Survey.

Within the CPS the EHS sample size will comprise around 17,000 household interviews and 8,000 physical inspections which, because of the unclustered sample, will deliver greater precision for many indicators than currently achieved by the EHCS and SEH. Being part of this major government survey initiative will also ensure key results from the EHS are consistent with other national estimates.

Please see the EHS section for details of the new survey.