Accredited official statistics

Private registered providers (PRP) social housing stock in England summary

Published 26 October 2021

Applies to England

Introduction

Private registered provider social housing stock in England - outlines the stock and rents units owned and managed by PRPs. The data is published in three briefing notes:

• Stock profile
• Rents profile
• Sector characteristics and stock movement.

These documents are 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 at both a PRP and geographical level.

Coverage

These statistics provide information on social housing owned and managed by PRPs 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 manner in which data was collected.

National Statistics status

These statistics are considered by the United Kingdom Statistics Authority regulatory arm - the Office for Statistics Regulation - to have met the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value, and are considered a national statistic. For more information see the data quality and methodology note.

Key facts

Stock key facts

On 31 March 2021:

3.1 million units owned by private registered providers

• Private registered providers of social housing (PRPs) reported owning 3,092,831 units on 31 March 2021 (including social and non-social tenures).

6% increase in low cost home ownership units

• An additional 13,015 units of low cost home ownership (LCHO) were reported as owned by PRPs on 31 March 2021 compared to 2020. This increased the proportion of all owned stock reported as LCHO to 7% (from 6% in 2020).

1% increase in low cost rental stock

• PRPs reported an increase of 15,616 low cost rental units between 2020 and 2021. This overall increase was driven by an 8% increase in Affordable Rent units.

Smallest increase in low cost rental stock since 2014

• The overall change in low cost rental units (+0.6%) is the lowest year-on-year percentage increase since 2014. This is likely to be due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on construction activity.

Rent key facts

Average general needs net rent £96.60 per week

• The average weekly net rent for general needs low cost rental stock (excluding Affordable Rent and intermediate rent) owned by PRPs in England with 1,000 or more units/ bed spaces was £96.60 per week in 2021.

General needs net up by 2.5%

• The average weekly net rent for general needs low cost rental stock (excluding Affordable Rent and intermediate rent) owned by PRPs in England with 1,000 or more units/ bed spaces increased by 2.5% from the previous year.

Supported housing net up by 3.2%

• Within the overall increase of 3.2% are regional differences. The West Midlands saw the greatest increase (3.8%), although this is likely to reflect the relatively large change in unit numbers (-7%).

Affordable Rent rents increase by 3.6%

• The average gross rent for Affordable Rent general needs units was £133.31 per week in 2021, an increase of 3.6% on the previous year.

Sector characteristics and stock movement key facts

95% of stock owned by large PRPs

• The 247 large PRPs (those owning 1,000 or more units of social housing) represented 18% of the total PRP population in 2021. The majority of PRPs (82%) are small (owning fewer than 1,000 units of social housing).

For-profit providers increase owned social stock by nearly 50%

• The 51 for-profit providers reported 13,671 units of social stock in 2021, nearly 50% more than in 2020 (9,313). The growth has been predominantly in low cost home ownership (from 5,144 in 2020 to 8,419 in 2021).

Losses and gains lower than in previous years

• There were 15% fewer units gained in 2021 compared to 2020 and 20% fewer losses. This is likely due, at least in part, to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on providers’ overall operational activity and the construction industry as a whole.

Fewer than 800 evictions

• The impact of coronavirus and the measures in place to protect tenants led to a dramatic fall in evictions (from over 10,000 per year to just 798). Unlike in previous years, most evictions in 2021 were due to anti-social behaviour rather than arrears.

Notes

Background

These statistics are based on data gathered in the SDR survey. This survey collects data that we believe is included in the PRPs administrative or management systems. We consult with PRPs to ascertain which data items are present in systems and work to minimise the overall burden placed on data providers requesting data already collected.

We use the SDR data extensively as a source of administrative data to inform our operational approach to regulating the economic standards (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 publish these data annually.

Governance of data and statistics at RSH

The statistician responsible for the publication of these statistics is also responsible for the SDR data collection and the cleansing of incoming SDR data; working with PRPs 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 SDR data is stored and analysed within password-protected government secure networks and access to the sector level analysis work undertaken on the data is restricted until after publication (PRP level data is accessed by our staff as part of operational work).

Further information on the data quality assurance processes employed by RSH is provided in data quality and methodology note.

Contact information submitted by PRPs 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.

Accounting for missing data

In 2014, following consideration of alternative methods and discussions with the National Statistician’s Office and the, now, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we selected weighting to account for the small proportion of missing data.

The impact of weighting on data for the 2021 SDR is shown in our additional tables. The overall effect of weighting on the final totals is relatively minor, which is as expected, given that small PRPs own a small proportion of stock and had a response rate of 94.2% in 2021.

More information and full report

The data is published in three pdf briefing notes:

• Stock profile
• Rents profile
• Sector characteristics and stock movement profile

These are accompanied by pdf data quality and technical notes, excel based tools to enable the viewing of data on a PRP, group and geographic basis, additional tables and raw data sets.