Methodology

Shelter Housing Insights for Communities draws on many sources to help you understand the views and motivations of local people and families. It is brought together using the ACORN classification system, used by most local authorities.

Information on housing aspirations, support for house building, responses to planning applications, and the main concerns people have about housing development are largely based on new analysis by Shelter, using ACORN. Other information contained in this resource, including statistics on housing tenure and preferred communication channels, is drawn from ACORN Knowledge, which itself incorporates a large number of government surveys, marketing data and other sources to produce a geo-demographic profile of the UK. A short guide on the use of ACORN in this project is also included here and you can contact them at the website below.

ACORN Knowledge can be accessed free of charge by registering for ACORN’s ward level data at caci.co.uk/acorn-classification

A range of surveys were imported into ACORN by Shelter and profiled. A complete list of sources is available at the back of this book.

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Use of ACORN data

Shelter Housing Insights for Communities also uses data collated by ACORN on topics that are potentially relevant to views on house building and the motivations behind them. Figures and commentary on aspects such as housing tenure, age, access to and use of public transport and marketing preferences, in conjunction with Shelter’s new analysis and your own local knowledge, can help you to decide on the best methods and content to use when communicating with local people about housing.

ACORN profiles UK households and segments them into:

  • 5 categories
  • 17 groups
  • 56 types

Shelter Housing Insights for Communities is designed to be used at the group level – 17 segments. Classification systems like ACORN work by best-fitting households into segments. This is not an exact science, and some figures can seem anomalous, such as over 65s being present in a group tagged as aspiring singles. Any classification system will contain such anomalies, when more than 20 million households are categorised into just 17 groups, and users should bear this in mind when using the resources here and in ACORN.

ACORN primarily produces output as indexes – that is the relative likelihood of a group answering in a particular way, in comparison to the national average. We have taken care in this resource not to over-emphasise high indexes when the actual proportions of the population answering in such a way is small. We recommend similar care is taken when using ACORN and the results here.

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