Explanatory Memorandum to COM(2023)31 - European statistics on population and housing - Main contents

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dossier	COM(2023)31 - European statistics on population and housing.
source	COM(2023)31
date	20-01-2023

1. CONTEXT OF THE PROPOSAL

• Reasons for and objectives of the proposal

Timely, reliable, detailed and comparable European statistics are needed to develop and implement policies and activities for the EU’s benefit in the areas the EU has competence in, as established by Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The Commission is monitoring and reporting on the demographic situation in the EU in line with Article 159 TFEU. For their part, EU institutions need accurate and comparable population figures for administrative and procedural purposes, e.g. for qualified majority voting in the Council. These statistics also provide essential inputs for public research by generating insights and keeping society informed of developments. Population estimates are also needed to obtain per capita indicators for statistics. Population statistics provide input for population projections for long-term EU economic and budgetary projections specifically and EU economic, social and cohesion policies generally. They are also something the public can easily relate to because they describe facts and events that concern each individual.

In the context of this initiative, European statistics on population (ESOP) mean official statistics at EU level on population, demographic events and migration and the various indicators based on these statistics. Eurostat has published statistics in these areas since 1960, when the first survey on the size and structure of the active population in the then Member States was introduced. Since then, population statistics have been produced mainly by taking results from direct population enumerations during censuses and interpolating intermediate periods with information on population changes taken from administrative systems for civil registration (on births, deaths and migration). The ongoing move from traditional field censuses to combined or even fully register-based censuses minimises the production burden on the general public by basing the compilation of these statistics mainly on administrative data sources.

Until 2007, Member States voluntarily transmitted all population data. This led to inconsistencies and a lack of completeness or timeliness, as the recent evaluation of the situation shows ¹ . Article 338 TFEU obliges the legislator to adopt measures for the production of official statistics where necessary for EU policies. Today, population statistics are based on a legal framework adopted between 2007 and 2013. In the first place, Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 ² set up requirements for migration statistics in line with the Action Plan for the collection and analysis of Community statistics in the field of migration ³ . Article 3 of the Regulation covers statistics on immigration to and emigration from the Member States’ territories, including flows from one Member State’s territory to another’s and flows between a Member State and a third country’s territory, statistics on the citizenship and country of birth of people usually resident in the Member States’ territory, and statistics on citizenship acquisitions. ⁴ In the second place, Regulation (EC) No 763/2008 ⁵ established common rules for the provision every 10 years of comprehensive census data on population and housing in the EU. This ensured the compilation of detailed data on predetermined demographic, social and economic characteristics of people, families and households, as well as on national, regional and local housing characteristics. Finally, Regulation (EU) No 1260/2013 ⁶ established the common rules for European demographic data, including data requirements on population stocks and vital events such as births and deaths. Regulation (EU) No 1260/2013 also obliges Member States to provide the Commission (Eurostat) with harmonised data on the total population at national level to be used as weights for qualified majority voting in the Council.

The evaluation conducted by the Commission has shown that the current legal framework of the three acts mentioned above has significantly improved European population statistics overall. EU added value has been increased significantly and all EU policy and institutional needs for population statistics have been met. However, the evaluation has also revealed the reduced – and further reducing – relevance, coherence, consistency and comparability of population data and statistics across Member States, with negative effects for the decision-making based on them. A new legal basis is therefore needed to provide a long-term framework for developments that are necessary for further harmonising European population statistics. The framework should also provide sufficient flexibility to better adapt to changing policy needs and seize the opportunities arising from new data sources. There are also potential opportunities for administrative simplification and process integration instead of the current fragmentary state of affairs in this area. This initiative is therefore being included in the 2022 Commission Work Programme as a regulatory fitness (REFIT) initiative.

As the evaluation acknowledges, statistical EU population data – including demographic and migration events and information on families, households and housing arrangements – are vital for evidence-based policymaking. High quality statistics on all Member States are essential for many EU policy areas and initiatives. Apart from the long-standing use cases mentioned above, four out of six Commission priorities for 2019-2024 ⁷ have identified clear needs for specific EU population statistics as data evidence for these policies: A European Green Deal, Promoting our European way of life, A new push for European democracy and An economy that works for people. The final proposals of the Conference on the Future of Europe ⁸ have also identified a need for further EU efforts to collect such data.

The evaluation supported by the stakeholder consultation has also identified various major gaps in the current statistical framework, especially insufficient geographic and statistical detail and the lack of timeliness and frequency of statistical outputs. The evaluation’s findings were supported by the stakeholder consultation that involved institutional and other professional users at EU and other levels. In the impact assessment, the policy options for this initiative were assessed on their capacity to fill these gaps. This legislative proposal draws on the detailed findings of the evaluation and impact assessment to address these gaps effectively and proportionately.

In 2014, to meet emerging statistical needs, the Commission (Eurostat) began modernising social statistics, with the support of Member States’ national statistical institutes (NSIs). This led to the adoption, as Regulation (EU) 2019/1700 ⁹ , of a common legal framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples of persons and households. This framework is fundamental for laying solid foundations at European level for collecting data from samples. This initiative on European statistics on population is the second core component of this modernisation process. Early high-level support for the initiative in the European Statistical System (ESS) was expressed in the 2017 Budapest Memorandum ¹⁰ , endorsing action to flexibly respond to changing needs, further harmonise concepts and definitions, and expand annual data collection including data on migration and geographic detail.

On the basis of the findings of the evaluation and impact assessment, this legislative proposal contains ambitious elements to strengthen the links between and general consistency of all EU social statistics based on persons and households. The proposal contains provisions aimed at developing a harmonised definition of population based on sound statistical concepts for all outputs, and to facilitate access to available data sources that will improve the production processes and general quality of social statistics. The proposal also contains provisions to align population and international migration statistics more with statistics on administrative and judicial events related to asylum, legal and irregular migration under Articles 4, 5, 6 and 7 of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007.

2. LEGAL BASIS, SUBSIDIARITY AND PROPORTIONALITY

• Legal basis

The legal basis for this proposal is Article 338 i TFEU that provides the legal basis for European statistics. Acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure, the European Parliament and the Council adopt measures for the production of statistics where such statistics are necessary for the EU to carry out its role. Article 338 sets out the requirements for producing European statistics, stating that they must conform to standards of impartiality, reliability, objectivity, scientific independence, cost-effectiveness and statistical confidentiality without putting an excessive burden on businesses, authorities or the public.

• Subsidiarity (for non-exclusive competence)

The ESS provides an infrastructure for statistical information. The system is designed to meet the needs of multiple users in democratic societies.

One of the main quality criteria European statistics must meet is to be consistent and comparable. Comparability is very important for population and housing statistics because of its crucial role in supporting evidence-based economic, social and cohesion policies. Member States cannot achieve the necessary consistency and comparability without a clear European framework in the form of EU legislation setting out the common statistical concepts, reporting formats and quality requirements.

The objective of the proposed action cannot be achieved satisfactorily by Member States acting independently. Action can be taken more effectively at EU level, by means of an EU legal act ensuring the comparability of statistical information in the statistical areas the proposed act covers. Data collection itself can be done by the Member States.

• Proportionality

The proposal complies with the proportionality principle in the following way.

It will ensure the quality and comparability of European statistics on population and housing collected and compiled applying the same principles across Member States. It will also ensure that European statistics on population and housing remain relevant and are adapted so they respond to user needs. The regulation will make the production of statistics more cost-effective while respecting the specific characteristics of Member States’ statistical systems.

In accordance with the principle of proportionality, the proposed regulation confines itself to the minimum required to achieve its objective and does not go beyond what is necessary for that purpose.

• Choice of instrument

Proposed instrument: a regulation.

Given the proposal’s objectives and content, a regulation is the most appropriate instrument. Important EU policies such as economic, social and cohesion policies inherently depend on comparable, harmonised and high quality European population and housing statistics. These can best be ensured by regulations that are directly applicable in Member States and therefore do not need to be transposed into national law first.

3. RESULTS OF EX POST EVALUATIONS, STAKEHOLDER CONSULTATIONS AND IMPACT ASSESSMENTS

• Ex post evaluations/fitness checks of existing legislation

As part of this initiative the Commission has evaluated the current legal framework for European statistics on population, consisting of Regulations (EC) No 763/2008 and (EU) No 1260/2013 and Article 3 of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007, and their implementing measures. On the positive side, the evaluation has shown that this current legal framework has significantly improved European population statistics overall. For instance, EU added value has been increased significantly and all EU policy/institutional topical needs for population statistics known before the previous intervention (around 2005) have been delivered on. However, the current legal framework has four weaknesses as follows.

One of the current legal framework’s weakness is that it does not fully ensure sufficiently coherent, comparable and complete statistics.

Although the framework has common definitions of key statistical concepts, there is often flexibility in how Member States implement them. In particular, they apply three conceptually different definitions of the population base (usual residence, registered residence, legal residence) that are allowed, sometimes using different definitions for different datasets. This has reduced the comparability and coherence of population statistics data from different Member States, to the detriment of the data collections’ EU added value.

Certain data gaps are currently filled using data supplied by Member States voluntarily. This results in incomplete statistics at EU level that may not be coherent with mandatory statistics. This makes voluntary statistics less cost-effective in terms of their EU added value, and it is why it is both necessary and important for them to be mandatory in the future. Voluntary collections may be useful initially when new statistics are being developed, but a clear legal base is necessary for their full implementation as official European statistics.

Another weakness of the current legal framework is that it does not ensure sufficient availability of population data in terms of the timeliness and frequency of data releases.

Existing legislation covers only annual demographic and migration statistics. Under existing legislation, most annual datasets are to be provided only within 12 months of the end of the reference period, and the ten-yearly census datasets are to be provided only within 27 months of the end of the census year. These frequencies and corresponding deadlines remain below user expectations and don’t match national statistical publications or other international statistics transmissions across most Member States. Under existing legislation, the legal deadlines and frequencies cannot be improved, e.g. to cover other multiannual population and housing statistics, or infra-annual population statistics (i.e. compiled more than once during a given year), such as those recently developed on excess COVID-19 mortality.

Yet another weakness is that the framework does not capture the characteristics and details of topics or population groups that have become politically and socially relevant during the past decade.

This is because existing legislation focuses on the data needs for policy priorities at the time the legislation was developed. Over time, priorities have changed, with the result that the available population statistics no longer adequately cover policy-relevant characteristics, topics or population groups. In particular, the gaps identified in the stakeholder consultation concern the characteristics of politically relevant topics and groups. Examples include housing data for the European Green Deal, migrants and EU mobility, the urban/rural population, and vulnerable minority groups. There are also gaps relating to statistics’ insufficient geographic granularity, including functional typologies and georeferenced data for urban/rural integration and cross-border analysis.

Finally, the framework is not flexible enough to adapt to changing policy needs or to enable the Member States or the EU to use new sources.

This is because existing legislation lacks the flexibility to enable it to adapt to new statistical needs. New data sources in Member States and at EU level (in particular, administrative data including interoperability systems and privately held data) offer potential improvements in costs and timeliness, but current legislation does not support their adoption.

Finally, the evaluation identified REFIT-relevant redundancies regarding compliance, enforcement and monitoring. These are due to current legislation’s being spread out over three legal acts that were not developed together. The current situation in which Member States produce many voluntary but incomplete datasets (with high but not full completeness across Member States) leads to significantly reduced efficiency at EU level.

• Stakeholder consultations

The consultation ¹¹ strategy mapped key stakeholder profiles in three main groups (providers of source data – such as holders of administrative data and other relevant data sources; statistics producers – mainly the NSIs – and statistics users) onto consultation activities. The consultation included public and targeted consultations, targeted workshops, expert group consultations, interviews with key stakeholders, and desk research.

The stakeholder consultation successfully reached the intended stakeholder groups, except administrative data providers and media organisations. Given the subject’s technical nature, respondents’ overall engagement was considered sufficient to support the back-to-back evaluation and impact assessment of European population statistics.

The consultation supported the Commission’s initiative and acknowledged that matters had significantly improved since the previous policy intervention in demography, international migration and population, and housing census statistics. However, it also identified statistical gaps and the emergence of new statistical needs that the current legal framework cannot meet.

All stakeholders confirmed the need to plan statistical improvements, although they did not always agree on the level of ambition of such improvements. Statistics producers were somewhat more conservative than statistics users about this.

Statistical topics that all stakeholder groups agreed were priority topics were better migration statistics, greater geographical detail and more timely and frequent statistics. All stakeholders acknowledged that harmonising the population base was very important, some statistics producers opposed change.

The main statistical topics on which producer and user views diverged concerned equality data and making existing voluntary data collection mandatory. To a lesser extent, producers’ and users’ views diverged on statistics on housing, legally induced abortions and infant mortality.

• Collection and use of expertise

The Commission has regularly asked its relevant expert groups to seek advice and input on the progress of evaluation and impact assessment. The European Statistical System Committee ¹² has also been kept informed of progress. The three expert groups are (Register of Commission Expert Groups ¹³ ):

–the Working Group on Population and Housing Censuses ( E01544 ) and its subgroup, the Task Force on the Future of Censuses;

–the Working Group on Population Statistics ( E03076 );

–the European Directors of Social Statistics ( E01552 ).

The Commission carried out the back-to-back evaluation and impact assessment with support from a contractor study carried out by ICF SA, Belgium. For the evaluation, the support study provided an economic and subsidiarity analysis and case studies on population definitions. For the impact assessment, the study provided the quantitative cost analysis and methodological support for scoring and ranking the policy options. The contractor also supported various stakeholder consultation activities including the open public consultation, the targeted consultation of NSIs and several topical workshops with specific stakeholder groups.

• Impact assessment

The impact assessment for this initiative ¹⁴ , discussed by the Regulatory Scrutiny Board in a formal meeting on 16 March 2022, received a positive opinion with reservations ¹⁵ . A revised version of the impact assessment report addressing the deficiencies identified in the opinion was endorsed by the interservice steering group at its meeting on 16 June 2022.

The general objective defined in the impact assessment is to better respond to users’ needs and to modernise and enhance the relevance, harmonisation and coherence of European population statistics. This can be broken down into four specific objectives to address the weaknesses outlined above, namely to:

ensure complete, coherent and comparable European population statistics;

ensure timely and frequent statistics to meet users’ needs;

provide statistics that are sufficiently comprehensive in terms of relevant topics and sufficiently detailed in terms of characteristics and breakdowns;

promote legal and data collection frameworks that are sufficiently flexible to adapt datasets to changing policy needs and seize the opportunities presented by new data sources.

Policy options have been developed by grouping granular policy measures addressing the specific objectives according to four characteristics: harmonisation of statistics where the main focus is defining the population base; integration of statistical processes; statistical outputs; framework flexibility.

–Option A is the baseline scenario, with separate statistical processes and legislation, limited harmonisation of the population definition, and no new statistical outputs.

–The main features of options B.1 and B.2 are an upgrade, with increasing ambition, of the statistical outputs and the framework’s flexibility, but limited harmonisation of the population base.

–Options C.1 and C.2 are the same as B.1 and B.2, but with a more ambitious attempt to harmonise the population base. Options B.2 and C.2 involve a more expansive upgrade of the statistical output and framework flexibility than options B.1 and C.1.

–Finally, options D.1 and D.2 would involve full harmonisation and a major upgrade of outputs, as well as sufficient flexibility for the future development of statistics to meet new needs. Option D.2 also includes the introduction of a statistical population register in all Member States.

The costs of all options have been quantified as much as possible, using these criteria: (i) the level of harmonisation of the population base; (ii) the upgrade of statistical outputs; and (iii) the integration of statistical processes through national statistical population registers. Finally, the benefits were itemised, but most could not be quantified due to their often indirect or dispersed nature, and were therefore assessed qualitatively.

In the absence of quantified benefits, it was not possible to do a direct ranking of options. The efficiency assessment, however, showed qualitatively that none of the options is obviously more cost-effective than any other. Rather, they offer increasing benefits (directly for statistics users and indirectly for the whole society) at increasing costs (mostly for statistics producers, i.e. national statistical production systems). The great difference between statistics producers and users reflects this, as producers focused on costs while users were more concerned with the benefits. However, the assessment has clearly shown that ambitious action to meet data needs for EU policy priorities has its price, in the form of additional resources needed for statistics producers that are substantial compared to current baseline costs (up to roughly 10% for option D.2). In particular, only the most ambitious options, D.1 and D.2, contain far-reaching measures to address the needs of key EU policy areas such as urban/rural integration, the European Green Deal, and fundamental rights and non-discrimination. What’s more, only option D.2 includes statistical population registers to make statistical production more efficient, thereby helping to achieve the ambitious output goals.

The preferred option overall was therefore D.2. The most ambitious in terms of statistical output and framework flexibility, it achieves the best result thanks to a similarly ambitious simplification and integration of statistical production systems and sustainable long-term efficiency gains. However, uncertainties remain about subsidiarity and proportionality, in addition to the significant adaptation costs of introducing interoperable statistical population registers in all Member States. For this reason, an alternative (conservative) approach preferring option C.2 would also be reasonable if option D.2’s proportionality and efficiency concerns are given more weight – this would also be more acceptable to statistics producers as key implementation stakeholders.

The most notable deviations of this legislative proposal from the impact assessment’s preferred options are the reduced ambition on equality data and on setting up statistical population registers in Member States. On the latter, the impact assessment does mention specific doubts about the proportionality and subsidiarity of requiring such statistical registers in all Member States. The proposal therefore takes a line following rather option C.2, i.e. focusing more on the output oriented aspects of statistical infrastructures without specifying procedural constraints. NSI experts consulted have also shown a strong preference for such an output oriented approach. The proposal would still strengthen the legal basis and encourage the development of innovative solutions to enable data sharing between Member States to address cross-border quality issues related to the freedom of movement of EU citizens. In particular, privacy-enhancing technologies are supported explicitly to implement data sharing fully in line with the EU’s personal data protection legislation (see ‘Fundamental rights’ below).

• Regulatory fitness and simplification

The preferred options D.2 or C.2 are likely to generate some scope for possible REFIT-relevant cost savings resulting from the simplification, streamlining and integration of statistical processes. Simplifications are expected especially in data sharing between source data owners and NSIs, in regulatory adaptations to changing data needs for NSIs and Eurostat, and in data transmission procedures from NSIs to Eurostat. Users will benefit from simplified and centralised access to statistics on the Eurostat website.

In line with preferred option C.2, statistical population registers are not required under this proposal, but the legal and technical prerequisites for data sharing between Member States are strengthened. Data sharing using modern technologies may offer more effective and efficient solutions for statistical quality assurance in the long term.

• Fundamental rights

The impact assessment has identified two main sources of potential indirect impacts on fundamental rights. On the one hand, various stakeholder groups raised concerns in the stakeholder consultation about possibly greater personal data protection risks related to improved and modernised statistical infrastructures linking all kinds of relevant sources efficiently and enabling data sharing between Member States. On the other hand, increased availability and better quality of statistics on social phenomena (including better data on socio-economic characteristics of vulnerable groups or on grounds for discrimination) would improve fundamental rights policies.

This proposal takes these findings into account by proposing proportionate and targeted improvements of relevant statistical outputs, while sticking to the principles, and bearing in mind the legal implications, of EU legislation on personal data protection in Regulations (EU) 2016/679 ¹⁶ and (EU) 2018/1725 ¹⁷ .

4. BUDGETARY IMPLICATIONS

The proposal does not include funding regular data collections, but it makes provision for EU co-funding of relevant modernisation efforts including pilot and feasibility studies in Member States. The Commission (Eurostat) also commits itself to developing a secure infrastructure for data sharing. Finally, human and operational (IT) resources in the Commission (Eurostat) will need to be increased to handle the increased regulatory, monitoring and production workload the significantly enhanced data collections will result in.

The overall financial impact of the proposal is of unlimited duration. The estimated budgetary implications over the first 10 years after the regulation enters into force are set out in the legislative financial statement.

5. OTHER ELEMENTS

• Implementation plans and monitoring, evaluation and reporting arrangements

The proposed regulation is expected to be adopted by the European Parliament and the Council in 2023, with the Commission’s implementing measures to be adopted shortly after that. The regulation will be directly applicable in all EU Member States without any need for an implementation plan.

Member States are expected to start providing data to the Commission under the new regulation in 2026.

In line with the impact assessment, the implementation of the adopted regulation will be monitored and evaluated regularly. The impact assessment also contains monitoring arrangements including proposals for indicators to be used.

• Detailed explanation of the specific provisions of the proposal

The proposed regulation establishes a new framework for European statistics on population and housing. Integrating current statistics on demography, migration and censuses, it specifies that Member States must provide statistics on 3 domains (demography, housing, families and households), 11 related topics and 23 detailed topics. These are to be supported by articles on subject matter, definitions, statistical population and units, periodicity and reference times, data sources and methods including specific enablers for the reuse of administrative data sources, statistical confidentiality, quality specifications, data sharing, pilot and feasibility studies, and potential financial contributions.

As a key aspect of the definitions, this proposal aims to resolve a structural problem in current legislation identified in the evaluation: the lack of harmonisation of the population base definition. The new proposal is based on a common definition of the population based on the statistical concept of usual residence, without default exemptions. Moreover, scientific statistical estimation methods (such as ‘signs of life’ or ‘rate of stay’) are explicitly encouraged to make it possible to implement the definition starting from administrative data sources. Achieving a harmonised population definition that is properly implemented across all Member States would significantly improve the comparability and coherence of European population statistics, in line with the impact assessment’s preferred options.

The details of data requirements would be specified in implementing acts, but the proposed regulation makes it possible to amend the list of detailed topics and their periodicity and reference times using delegated acts. The proposal also provides the possibility of responding to upcoming data requirements with ad hoc data collections. Lastly, the proposed regulation requires pilot and feasibility studies to be launched as appropriate and offers potential co-financing to further modernise statistical production systems and test new topics. These implementing and delegated powers conferred on the Commission, as well as the possibility to launch pilot/feasibility studies, are proposed to maintain a certain flexibility of the new framework to address emerging user needs and opportunities from new data sources over a longer time into the future.

Moreover, an article specifically on data sharing describes how confidential data can be shared under Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council ¹⁸ for the specific purposes of population statistics. On the one hand, previous experience has shown that cross-border cooperation between NSIs based on individual records is needed to effectively address coverage issues related to the freedom of movement of EU citizens. On the other hand, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 strictly limits data sharing in this context, based on six principles including purpose limitation, data minimisation, and integrity and confidentiality. To enable effective data sharing for quality purposes in line with Regulation (EU) 2016/679, this proposal requires the testing and use of privacy-enhancing technologies that implement data minimisation by design. The Commission (Eurostat) must also set up a secure infrastructure to facilitate such data sharing while ensuring the technical integrity and confidentiality of data processing.

1. Finally, the part of the proposal amending Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 serves three distinct purposes:

to reduce its statistical scope by deleting Article 3, whose statistical topics are moved into the new ESOP framework;

to add more legal enablers for statistical authorities on timely access and reuse of administrative data sources for the purposes of that Regulation, in line with extended enablers added to the ESOP proposal itself;

to ensure that the lists of countries and territories used for the purposes of that Regulation are harmonised with the lists used in the new ESOP framework.

To ensure consistency, Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 needs to be amended through the ESOP proposal because statistical topics are moved from that Regulation to the new ESOP framework. There are important statistical and methodological reasons for this approach:

– ‘Migration’ as currently covered under Article 3(1)(a-c) of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 refers to the fundamental demographic concept of people moving to live in a different country, i.e. a part of the flows that change the demographic balance of a country. The ESOP proposal aims to introduce – for the first time – a single, coherent legal basis for all elements of the demographic balance. This should cover all flows including vital events (births, deaths) but also migration flows and stocks – in the sense of changing residence from one country to another.

–‘Acquisition and loss of citizenship’ currently covered under Article 3(1)(d) of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 is a statistical topic that is in nature closely related to the demographic balance in that it complements vital events with the changes (in-flows and out-flows) of the citizen population that resides in the country.

All other amendments proposed to Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 (change of title, deletion of subject matter paragraphs in Article 1 and of definitions in Article 2) are consequential to the resulting reduced scope of that Regulation.