Accredited official statistics

SDR 2018 to 2019: Private registered provider social housing stock in England summary

Updated 16 October 2020

Applies to England

Contents

Introduction

• Coverage
• National Statistics status

Key facts

• Stock key facts
• Rent key facts
• Sector characteristics and stock movement key facts

Notes

• Background
• Governance of data and statistics at RSH
• Accounting for missing data
• More information and full report

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 (OSR) - 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 2019:

3m units owned by PRPs

• PRPs reported owning 2,995,569 units/ bedspaces (including social and non-social tenures).

85% of units are low cost rental stock

• The majority of stock owned by PRPs was low cost rental stock (85% or 2,567,063 units/ bedspaces).

1% increase in low cost rental stock since 2018

• There were 20,900 more low cost rental (including Affordable Rent) units/ bedspaces than on 31 March 2018. This overall increase was driven by an 11% increase in Affordable Rent units.

6% increase in low cost home ownership units

• An additional 11,299 units/ bedspaces of low cost home ownership were reported as owned by PRPs compared to 2018. The rate of increase in LCHO has been speeding up since 2017.

Rent key facts

The average general needs net rent was £95.12 per week

• The average 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/ bedspaces was £95.12 per week in 2019.

General needs net rents reduced by 1.3% since 2018

• The average 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/ bedspaces reduced by 1.3% from the previous year.

Supported housing net rents reduced by 0.3% since 2018

• The key driver behind the lower than expected decrease appears to be units that have an absolute exception from the 1% per annum rent reduction. After controlling for these units a 1.3% reduction can be seen.

Affordable Rent rents increased by 0.2% since 2018 [R] [^1]

• The average gross rent for Affordable Rent general needs units was £128.05 per week in 2019, an increase of 0.2% [R] on the previous year.

Sector characteristics and stock movement key facts

96% of stock in the sector is owned by large PRPs

• The 272 large PRPs (those owning 1,000 or more units of social housing) represented 18.5% of the total PRP population in 2019. The majority of PRPs (81.5%) are small (owning fewer than 1,000 units of social housing).

29% of PRPs are in a group structure

• Just over 400 (29%) PRPs reported being in some type of group structure on 31 March 2019, with 85.3% of large PRPs reporting being in a group structure compared to 15.3% of small PRPs.

Large PRPs gained 33,757 units

• A small reduction (7.1%) from the number of social rented units that large PRPs reported gaining in 2018. This does not include units transferred to PRPs or gained by subsidiaries.

Inter-group transfer activity remains high

• Transfer activity reduced from 2018 levels but remains high with 121,376 transfers of social rented stock in 2019. PRPs modifying their group structures through mergers or restructuring is the main driver.

Notes

Background

The statistics published by the RSH are based on data gathered in the Statistical Data Return survey. This survey collects data that RSH believes is included in the PRPs’ administrative or management systems. RSH consults with PRPs to ascertain which data items are present in systems and works with PRPs to minimise the overall burden placed on data providers by requesting data already collected and held by PRPs.

RSH uses the SDR data extensively as a source of administrative data and requires to plan our operational approach to economic regulation - see data quality and methodology note for more details. Public bodies are encouraged to exploit administrative data for statistical purposes by the OSR and, as such, RSH has published this data annually since 2012.

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 RSH staff as part of operational work).

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

Data submitted by PRPs is redacted within the public release to remove all contact information submitted within the Entity Level Information section. This contact information is not publicly available. There are no other administrative data held by RSH which can be made available for use in statistics. However, RSH publishes a range of summary data from other information collected. These are available from the RSH website.

Data errors

In 2019 the SDR question on Affordable Rent rents changed to capture gross rent rather than net rent and service charges. Following the publication of the 2019 statistics, during the course of our regulatory activity, the RSH became aware that a number of providers had inadvertently omitted service charges from their Affordable Rent gross rent figures.

This omission meant that the gross rents figures reported for Affordable Rent general needs and Affordable Rent supported housing units for 2019 were artificially lower than those reported in 2018 (where service charges and net rent had been combined to create this gross rent figure).

The RSH contacted all providers who reported Affordable Rent units and requested that rent data be checked. This resulted in changes being made to data relating to 20% of Affordable Rent general needs units and 42% of Affordable Rent supported housing units. Revisions are marked [R].

Accounting for missing data

In 2014, following consideration of alternative methods and discussions with the National Statistician’s Office and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (then DCLG), weighting was selected to account for the small proportion of missing data. This method was chosen given the incomplete prior year data for some of the non-submitting PRPs and the relative simplicity of the dataset.

The impact of weighting on data for the 2019 SDR is shown in supplementary tables. The overall effect of weighting on the final totals is relatively minor, which is as expected, given that small PRPs own a minority of stock and that the response rate for small PRPs was 95% in 2019.

More information and full report

The data is published in three pdf briefing notes:

• Stock profile
• Rents profile
• All data including sector characteristics and stock movement.

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.

The RSH is working to make as much of its content accessible as possible but if you are unable to access any of the information on our website, please contact our Referrals and Regulatory Enquiries team – email enquiries@rsh.gov.uk or call 0300 124 5225.

© RSH copyright 2020

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

Any enquiries regarding this publication should be sent via enquiries@rsh.gov.uk or call 0300 124 5225 or write to:

Regulator of Social Housing
Level 2
7-8 Wellington Place
Leeds LS1 4AP

RSH regulates private registered providers of social housing to promote a viable, efficient and well-governed social housing sector able to deliver homes that meet a range of needs.