Overcrowded Accommodation

Mr. Drew
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government how many households are listed as overcrowded in (a) Gloucestershire and (b) Stroud; and how many children are in overcrowded accommodation.

Yvette Cooper
There are two measures of overcrowding—the statutory definition and the bedroom standard.

Using the bedroom standard, the only recent estimate of the number of overcrowded households in Gloucestershire is 3,000. This is from an ad hoc report based on combined data from both the Survey of English Housing and the Department for Work and Pension’s Family Resources Survey for the three years 2000-01, 2001-02 and 2002-03.

Reliable estimates for the number of children living in overcrowded accommodation in Gloucestershire are not available. Separate data for Stroud are also not available.

Estimates based on the statutory standard are not available because the underlying data are not collected systematically. A one-off estimate was made in the autumn of 2001 that there were approximately 25,000 households across the whole of England that were in conditions of overcrowding that breached the statutory standard. This estimate was based on data from the Survey of English Housing for the period 1997-98 to 1999-2000 and from the 1996 “English House Condition Survey”. Equivalent estimates for Gloucestershire are not available.

Tomorrow we will be publishing a discussion document entitled on “Tackling Overcrowding in England” which sets out options for revising the outdated definition of overcrowding and developing long-term solutions.