Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is a form of social housing support provided by all local authorities. HAP means that local authorities can provide housing assistance for households who qualify for social housing support, including many long-term Rent Supplement recipients.
The data held by the CSO relates to details of all tenancies, properties and participating landlords and tenants since the introduction of the HAP scheme in 2014. The dataset used in this publication contains an extract taken on 31 December 2022. Receipt of this data and subsequent analysis was undertaken by the CSO for statistical purposes in line with the Statistics Act, 1993 and the CSO Data Protocol.
For the purpose of the counts of HAP properties within this publication, properties are only counted whereby they have an active tenancy as of 31st December of the relevant year. The counts of HAP properties relate to the number of unique property identifiers - as detailed in the data provided. The Annexe Table below details the number of HAP properties - with active tenancies on 31 December each year - at a national level and includes the number of properties that could be assigned to an Local Electoral Area.
The number of Registered Tenancy Board (RTB) properties used within calculations relates to just those with an active tenancy in the third quarter of the year. The percentage of dwellings as a proportion of RTB data for 2022 will be updated when this data is available to the CSO from the RTB.
Local Electoral Areas (LEAs) are assigned through geocoding of addresses undertaken within the CSO (including using Eircodes provided in the HAP dataset). There is a small number of properties that could not bbe assigned to a LEA (see Annexe Table above). A new methodology of assigning LEAs directly from Eircodes has been used for the 2022 publication. The 2021 publication used a methodology assigning LEAs through Electoral Divisions (EDs). However, it was identified that this caused some discrepencies in a small amount of cases where EDs don't fit neatly into LEAs, an issue most noticeable in Cork due to changes in City/County and LEA boundaries in 2019 which didn't respect ED boundaries. The new methodolgy has been used to update all historical data within the PxStat tables.
The National Data Infrastructure (NDI) plays an integral part in facilitating the CSO to develop new and improved statistical products for the benefit of citizens and policymakers. The core concept of the NDI involves the collection, maintenance, and storage of all public-sector data holdings, of the associated PPSN, Eircodes and Unique Business Identifier (UBI) whenever they are relevant to Public Sector Body transactions with customers. The HAP dataset used in this publication has Eircode provided for 79% of property records with tenancies in 2022. This report demonstrates how the collection and inclusion of Eircodes on public-sector data holdings greatly facilitates the provision of official statistics broken down by area or region.
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