Source and scope of the Housing Assistance Payment
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 2021. 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 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.
Local Electoral Area assignment
Local Electoral Areas (LEAs) are assigned through geocoding of addresses undertaken within the CSO (including using Eircodes provided in the HAP dataset).
National Data Infrastructure
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 73% of property records. 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.
The Annexe Table below details the number of HAP properties - with active tenancies on 31 December as detailed above - at a national level and includes the number of properties that could be assigned to an LEA.
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