The European Expert Group on the Transition from Institutional to Community-based Support (EEG) has submitted feedback to the European Commission consultation on the draft Implementing Regulation on European statistics on population and housing.

We welcome the inclusion of people living outside private households and the category of people living in “institutional households”. Comparable EU-level data on people living in institutional settings remains extremely limited.

At the same time, we see a risk that some definitions and classifications could leave certain forms of institutionalisation statistically invisible.

Among other recommendations, the EEG calls for:

🔹 better identification of people with disabilities across different housing and household arrangements;

🔹 clearer and more consistent definitions of institutional households, collective living quarters and conventional dwellings;

🔹 better data on the type and size of institutional settings, recognising that size alone does not determine whether a setting is institutional;

🔹 sufficiently frequent and comparable data to track changes in living arrangements over time;

🔹 a broader approach to homelessness, with reference to ETHOS Light, developed as a harmonised definition for statistical purposes.

Population and housing statistics cannot replace dedicated monitoring of deinstitutionalisation. But they are an important part of the picture.

If people and living arrangements are invisible in the data, they risk remaining invisible in policy too.

We hope these recommendations can contribute to European statistics that better reflect how people actually live and provide stronger evidence for the transition from institutional to family- and community-based support.

👉 Read the full EEG feedback.