PURPOSE: to establish a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples.

LEGISLATIVE ACT: Regulation (EU) 2019/1700 of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples, amending Regulations (EC) No 808/2004, (EC) No 452/2008 and (EC) No 1338/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council, and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1177/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council and Council Regulation (EC) No 577/98.

CONTENT: this Regulation establishes a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples of those persons and households.

Domains and data sets

The statistics covered by the Regulation shall be organised into specific domains and themes detailed in Annex I to the Regulation.

For all domains, the data sets shall cover the following common topics:

technical items; persons and households characteristics; labour market participation; educational attainment and background; health: status and disability, access to, availability and use of health care and health determinants.

In addition to the topics common to all domains, the data sets shall cover the following topics:

job tenure, work biography and previous work experience; working conditions including working hours and working time arrangements; participation in education and training; income, consumption and elements of wealth, including debts; living conditions, including material deprivation, housing, living environment and access to services; quality of life, including social, civil, economic and cultural participation, inclusion and wellbeing; participation in the information society, and allocation of time (optional).

The Commission may adopt delegated acts in order to:

amend the detailed themes listed in Annex I in order to take into account relevant legislative, technical, social, political and economic developments and to respond to new user needs; establish a multi-year rolling plan covering a period of 8 years.

The Commission shall also be empowered to adopt implementing measures on the technical specifications of data sets, technical formats for the transmission of information, characteristics of sampling frames and quality reports.

Member States shall start transmitting the data to the Commission under the provisions of the new Regulation from 2021.

Five annexes provide detailed information on the topics to be covered, accuracy requirements, sample characteristics, frequency and deadlines for data transmission.

Pilot and feasibility studies and financing

In accordance with the objectives of this Regulation, the Commission shall institute feasibility and pilot studies aiming to improve the quality of the data sets and social indicators. Such studies shall cover data comparability, developing new methodologies, modernising data collection and meeting users’ new demands, especially addressing populations that are difficult to reach, data on specific sub‐populations, in particular those that are the most vulnerable, making available statistics at NUTS 2 territorial level, and producing data at detailed local level in a cost‐effective and responsive manner.

Member States shall cooperate with regard to those feasibility and pilot studies and the Commission should be able to provide financial support for their implementation.

Where appropriate, a Union financial contribution should also be provided to Member States in the form of grants, in particular for capacity‐building.

ENTRY INTO FORCE: 3.11.2019.

APPLICATION: from 1.1.2021 (1.1.2025 for some areas).

The European Parliament adopted by 592 votes to 52 with 9 abstentions, a legislative resolution on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples.

Parliament’s position adopted in first reading following the ordinary legislative procedure amended the Commission proposal as follows:

Purpose

The proposed regulation establishes a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples of those persons and households.

The amended text stresses that that quality statistics collected in a harmonized way represent an important added value for policy making at Union and Member State level.

High-quality social statistics are needed to improve the resilience of the Union and its cohesion targets, and to preserve its welfare levels. Sound data are also of utmost importance as a bulwark against misinformation.

Domains and data sets

For all domains, the data sets shall cover the following common topics:

technical items; persons and households characteristics; labour market participation; educational attainment and background; health: status and disability, access to, availability and use of health care and health determinants.

In addition to the topics common to all domains, the data sets shall cover the following topics:

job tenure, work biography and previous work experience; working conditions including working hours and working time arrangements; participation in education and training; income, consumption and elements of wealth, including debts; living conditions, including material deprivation, housing, living environment and access to services; quality of life, including social, civil, economic and cultural participation, inclusion and wellbeing; participation in the information society, and allocation of time (optional).

The statistical population shall consist of all persons having their usual residence in private households in each Member State.

The Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts on the basis of a feasibility study in order to : (i) amend the detailed topics listed in Annex I for the purpose of reflecting relevant legislative, technical, social, policy and economic developments and respond to the new needs of users ; (ii) supplement this Regulation by establishing or adapting a multiannual rolling planning which will be adopted for a period of eight years.

The Commission shall ensure that the delegated acts comply with the principle of proportionality and do not impose a significant additional burden or cost on the Member States or on respondents.

Feasibility and pilot studies

In order to improve the data sets and social indicators, the Commission shall institute feasibility and pilot studies.

These studies shall aim at developing alternative methodologies in order to:

improve the quality and comparability of data sets; extend the coverage of the data collection to persons not living in private households or to sub-populations that are difficult to reach; develop, assess and implement techniques allowing better coverage of the territorial diversity at NUTS2 level and at local level; follow up on statistical coverage of migrating citizens changing their country of residence; develop and test new detailed topics for data collection.

Member States shall cooperate in these pilot and feasibility studies, and the Commission shall provide financial support for their implementation.

The Committee on Employment and Social Affairs adopted the report by Tamás MESZERICS (Greens/EFA, HU) on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples.

The committee recommended that the European Parliament's position adopted at first reading in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure should amend the Commission proposal as follows.

Subject matter : Members stated that this Regulation establishes a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households , based on data at individual level collected from samples of those persons and households in accordance with the European Statistical Programme .

The report recommended, inter alia :

collecting high-quality, gender-segregated and age-segregated data in order to identify issues specific to gender and age and allow for a solid factual basis to assess progress with regard to gender equality and tackling gender and age-based discrimination ; strengthen data in areas such as the living conditions of the citizens, the inequalities, the quality of life and their well-being, the Union's objective enshrined in the TFEU; developing high-level indicators reflecting other dimensions in particular social aspects of progress , such as quality of life (including work-life balance), inclusion, well-being and social cohesion; measuring consumption, wealth and debts , including possible debts in foreign currencies, which sometimes represent considerable sums for some households in relation to their income; examining poverty , taking into account its multi-faceted nature, involving not only the material aspects such as income, consumption, wealth or debts, but also health, education and access to and use of services; better describing disability (autonomy, adjustments in the labour market and barriers to social and labour integration) while making the surveys accessible to people with disabilities; obtaining better coverage of hard-to-reach vulnerable sub-populations (e.g., people living in care homes and the homeless); in the meantime, Member States should report on the extent and extent of non-coverage of these specific subpopulations; better describing the three dimensions defining the material well-being of households: income, consumption and wealth; ensuring more systematically the collection of European social statistics, including the labour force , income and living conditions, time use , consumption, health, education and training and participation in lifelong learning , as well as the use of information and communication technologies; obtaining reliable statistics at national and regional level . In this respect, Members stressed the importance of having access to aggregated data for comparable territorial units such as NUTS2, while taking costs into account and providing Member States with the appropriate financial resources.

Fundamental principles : Members believe that the development, production and dissemination of European statistics are governed by the statistical principles of professional independence, impartiality, objectivity reliability and cost-effectiveness. It is essential to invest more in high-quality, more accurate and holistic data collections and not to reduce investments.

Access : policy-makers, public administrations, researchers, trade unions, students and civil society representatives, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which should access data freely and easily through Commission (Eurostat) databases on its website.

Furthermore, the Regulation shall ensure the right to respect for private and family life and to the protection of personal data , as provided for in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This Regulation also ensures the protection of individuals as regards the processing of personal data

Union contributions : since the implementation of the Regulation could require major adaptations in national statistical systems, limited derogations should be granted to the Member States. Where appropriate, a financial contribution from the Union should also be provided to the Member States in the form of grants , in particular for capacity-building purposes and to support feasibility studies and pilot studies.

Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) on the proposed common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households.

The EDPS was asked by the Commission and the Council for its opinion on this proposal, which aims to establish a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households based on data at an individual level collected from samples.

The EDPS’s main concern is the ambiguity in the current draft surrounding the possibility of the use of ‘administrative’ data and ‘big data’ sources such as telephone location data, corporate and tax records, social security and medical records, records of unemployment offices and organisations managing social security.

In order to provide effective protection for the right of privacy and the right to the protection of personal data, the EDPS recommended:

substantially revising Article 8 (on data sources and methods) in order to ensure: (i) that any data processing involving administrative records and other data sources must be done in compliance with applicable data protection laws and; (ii) that any direct provision of data by individuals (apart from certain exceptions as provided by law and subject to appropriate safeguards) must be made on a voluntary basis on the basis of the consent of the data subjects providing the data under Article 7 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); ensuring that linking administrative records , as foreseen in Article 11 must be done in compliance with data protection law, subject to necessity, proportionality, and specific safeguards under Member State or Union law; including a reference to the ePrivacy Directive when referring to applicable law in Recital 20 as well as making the necessary updates to all relevant references, if needed, in light of the current review of the data protection framework; clarifying references to ‘ substantial public interest ’ in Recital 20 by adding the appropriate reference of the GDPR to enable easier reference for non-experts; considering a revision of the definition of ‘administrative record’ as it seems to be too broad and appear to include, not only administrative records of public bodies but also sources such as mobile phone location data, which is, in the sense as the term is commonly used in everyday language, not always considered as an ‘administrative record’.

PURPOSE: to establish a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected from samples.

PROPOSED ACT: Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council.

ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the European Parliament decides in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and on an equal footing with the Council.

BACKGROUND: in the context of the Europe 2020 Strategy and the strengthening of economic governance, social indicators play an essential role in informing and supporting the Union's key priorities for growth and job creation, the reduction of poverty and social exclusion, skills, mobility and the digital economy.

The EU needs reliable and timely social statistics to monitor the social situation and the impact of economic developments and policies on social conditions in the Member States and their regions, and on the situation of different groups in the population.

European statistics relating to persons and households are currently collected on the basis of a number of legislative acts covering surveys on persons and households, demographic statistics, population and housing censuses and statistics mainly collected from administrative sources. Some data are also gathered from business surveys.

Despite significant improvements in recent years there is a need to further integrate the collection of statistics based on surveys conducted on persons and households.

IMPACT ASSESSMENT: on the basis of the results of the impact assessment, the policy options consist of: (i) consolidating existing Regulations, ‘defragment’ production processes; and (ii) in the longer run, integrate governance of European social statistics collected from samples, defragment production processes used for different data collections were selected to address the fragmentation of European social statistics collected from samples.

CONTENT: the purpose of the Regulation is to establish a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households , based on data at individual level collected from samples.

The statistics covered by the Regulation are organised into the domains and topics detailed in Annex I of the proposed Regulation.

The data collection shall be organised into the following domains: (a) labour market, (b) income and living conditions, (c) health, (d) education and training, (e) use of information and communication technologies, (f) time use, (g) consumption.

The Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts :

to amend the detailed topics listed in Annex I so as to reflect relevant technical, social and economic developments and respond to the new needs of users: to establish or adapt a multiannual rolling planning in order to meet specific users' requirements that result from technological, social and economic changes.

The Commission should also be empowered to adopt implementing measures on the technical specifications of the data sets, the standards for transmission and exchange of information, the characteristics of the sampling frames and the quality reporting.

Member States are expected to start data transmission to the Commission under the new Regulation in 2019 .

In addition, the proposal:

allows and promotes the use of new forms of data collection and of alternative data sources , including administrative data and estimates obtained from modelling and big data; requires Member States to use high quality sampling frames ; covers a number of other important aspects of the modernisation of European social statistics collected from samples: (i) it introduces representative feasibility and pilot studies, in order to improve the quality of the statistics and support the development and implementation of new methods; (ii) it includes provisions for financial support to be offered to Member States under certain conditions; (iii) it includes provisions for derogations to be granted that would allow Member States more time to adapt to the new requirements.

Lastly, the proposed Regulation consists of five Annexes which set out the detailed information on the topics to be covered, the precision requirements, the sample characteristics, the periodicity and the deadlines for the transmission of data.

BUDGETARY IMPLICATIONS: there is a phasing-in period for the implementation of the proposal lasting seven years, from 2019 to 2025, the programme should however continue afterwards. Only the years of the current Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) have been considered in the legislative financial statement.

For years 2019 and 2020, funding will come from the existing allocations to programmes and no additional funding is required. The total appropriations for 2019 and 2020 are estimated at EUR 28.814 million .

DELEGATED ACTS: the proposal contains provisions empowering the Commission to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 290 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.