Creating harmonised and scalable methods and tools for constructing households in large diverse administrative and health research datasets

The COVID pandemic has shown how important household circumstances such as over-crowding are for physical and mental health and education. It has also highlighted the benefits of using information collected routinely by public services for research.

At present it is difficult to use this routine information for research into household circumstances such as over-crowding because we can't easily identify households and join information on housing to information on health and education. We need better tools and routine datasets to carry out research on households, especially on households with the most pressing health, social and housing problems.

One way to do this is by using 'Unique Property Reference Numbers' - UPRNs. Every property in the UK has a UPRN - a string of 12 numbers - which, unlike postcodes, are unique to an individual property whether it is a care home, flat, house, shop, or school. We can add UPRNs to the addresses patients provide when they register with a general practitioner. The UPRNs can then be coded or 'encrypted' to protect privacy and allow research to be safely carried out.

UPRNs are a key that help us to link information about people who share the same household. They can also be used to link households and the health data of their members to housing information - for example number of rooms or floor space recorded routinely for council tax assessments - so that we can identify overcrowded households.

We are a group of researchers from Scotland, Wales and London who have worked on UPRNs together. We now plan to create a new dataset and tools - currently unavailable - to identify households and their social, economic, environmental, educational, and health circumstances for researchers to use. Our project sets out to help researchers use UPRNs safely and answer some important questions about households.

We will develop some examples to show how useful this by looking at how living in households with more health, social and housing problems affects children's physical and mental health, their school attendance and achievements, and their need for social care. We will also use it to understand where the most vulnerable households are in our communities and how this might affect their access to and use of the public services they need.

We will work with our local communities to explain UPRNs and their benefits more clearly and understand how they want us to use UPRNs for public benefit and to hear about and address any concerns they may have about their safe use, including those relevant to privacy.