Accredited official statistics

Local authority registered provider social housing stock in England - Summary (key facts)

Published 29 October 2024

Applies to England

Introduction

Local authority registered provider social housing stock in England – outlines the stock and rents units owned and managed by LARPs.

These statistics are based on data we collect through the local authority data return.

The data is published in a single briefing note and is supplemented by technical notes and definitions and data quality and methodology notes. These notes provide additional information on our data collection and cleansing processes, key limitations with the data and provide additional context for the statistics presented.

Additional tables and data are also available with tools allowing for the interrogation of the data.

Coverage

These statistics provide information on social housing owned by all LARPs as at 31 March each year. Unless otherwise stated, all figures in this document refer to stock located in England. The definitions used within the release are consistent with the way data was collected each year.

Accredited Official Statistics status

These statistics are considered by the United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA) regulatory arm (the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)) to have met the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value, and are considered an accredited official statistic (this designation replaces the former National Statistic designation). For more information see the data quality and methodology note.

Key facts

On 31 March 2024:

1.56m units of social stock owned by LARPs

• Local authority registered providers (LARPs) reported owning 1,564,288 units of social stock on 31 March 2024 (including low cost rental and low cost home ownership units).

93% of social stock is general needs

• The majority of stock owned by LARPs is general needs low cost rental stock(1,448,040 units), and the majority of this (1,412,224 or 98%) is general needs social rent stock (the remaining 2% being Affordable Rent).

0.1% reduction in low cost rental stock

• Since 2023, the number of low cost rental units (including Affordable Rent) owned by LARPs has decreased by 855 units. A loss of 4,492 social rent units was offset by an increase of 3,637 Affordable Rent.

Social rents increase by 7.1% for general needs and 7.3% for supported housing

• Average general needs (social rent) weekly net rents increased by 7.1%, while supported housing (social rent) weekly net rents increased by 7.3% between 2023 and 2024.

Notes

Background

These statistics are based on data gathered in the Local Authority Data Return survey. We introduced this survey in 2020 to collect data that we believed was included in the LARPs administrative or management systems. We consult with LARPs to ascertain which data items were present in systems and worked to minimise the overall burden placed on data providers requesting data already collected.

We use the LADR data extensively as a source of administrative data to inform our operational approach to regulating the rents (see data quality and methodology note for more details). The United Kingdom Statistics Authority encourages public bodies to use administrative data for statistical purposes, as such, we have published these data since 2020.

Removing the collection of dwelling equivalents from LADR

When the LADR collection was created in 2019, it took questions from the existing Local Authority Housing Statistics and replicated these in order to maintain the timeseries for data publication. Since then we have sought to improve the quality of the data returned to us through the LADR and from 1 April 2022 we ceased the collection of dwelling equivalent counts for non-self-contained units. This was an area which had caused significant confusion, and which had been reported as having resulted in errors in previous years’ submissions. Before removal we sought feedback on the loss of this information but received no responses which indicated that the loss of this data would pose any issues for the users of these statistics. Please see the 2022 release for more information.

Governance of data and statistics at RSH

The statistician responsible for the publication of these statistics is also responsible for the LADR data collection and the cleansing of incoming LADR data, working with LAs to directly address anomalies within the data submissions and producing the final data set and statistics.

Responsible statistician: Amanda Hall

Queries and feedback: enquiries@rsh.gov.uk or 0300 124 5225.

All LADR data is stored and analysed within secure networks and access to the sector level analysis work undertaken on the data is restricted until after publication (LARP level data is accessed by our staff as part of operational work). Further information on the data quality assurance processes we employ is provided in the data quality and methodology note.

Contact information submitted by LARPs in the Entity Level Information section is redacted within the release. This contact information is not publicly available. We hold no other administrative data that can be made available for use in statistics. However, we publish a range of summary data from other information collected. These are available from our website (www.gov.uk/rsh).

More information and full report

The data is published in a single briefing note and is supplemented by technical notes and definitions and data quality and methodology notes. These notes provide additional information on our data collection and cleansing processes, key limitations with the data and provide additional context for the statistics presented.

Additional tables and data are also available with tools allowing for the interrogation of the data.