FOI Reference: FOI/2021/3391
You asked
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am writing to request that the ONS makes publicly available in electronic format the following information regarding the ONS House Price Index ("HPI") methodology.
The ONS HPI fits a hedonic regression to property sale transactions monthly. As such, each of those monthly regressions will have a set of regression coefficients associated with them after the fitting process, one coefficient per each discrete attribute value and one coefficient for the continuous floor area variable. These coefficients are then used to impute the prices of properties in the fixed basket each month.
We request that the ONS makes publicly available these regression coefficients from your hedonic regression model for each month of 2021 to date. If you must omit the most recent month(s) of coefficients to fulfil this FOI, please do so.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The HPI regression coefficients requested will need to be extracted and worked on before release which is a service we would charge for as part of our bespoke analysis route.
Therefore, we would advise consulting with the Housing Market Indices Team, who will be able to discuss your request further. Such services are subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, the availability of resources and an agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact HPI@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there would charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy. It is also important to note that this request will have to be prioritised against other work, alongside a busy production round and ambitious transformation programme.
As this information is reasonably accessible via our bespoke services route, Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. To note that information is exempt from disclosure under s.21 of FOIA if it is reasonably accessible to the applicant via another route, even if that information is only accessible at a charge.