National statistics

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

Published 23 February 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 2020:

3 million units owned by private registered providers

• Private registered providers of social housing reported owning 3,045,849 units on 31 March 2020 (including social and non-social tenures). This is the first year the total stock has exceeded 3 million units.

85% of units are low cost rental stock

• The majority of stock owned by PRPs on 31 March 2020 was low cost rental stock (85% or 2,589,725 units).

1% increase in low cost rental stock

• There were 22,662 more low cost rental units on 31 March 2020 than on 31 March 2019. This overall increase was driven by an 10% increase in Affordable Rent units.

8% increase in low cost home ownership units

• An additional 14,500 units of low cost home ownership were reported as owned by PRPs on 31 March 2020 compared to 2019. The rate of increase in LCHO has been speeding up since 2017.

Rent key facts

Average general needs net rent £94.25 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 £94.25 per week in 2020.

General needs net rents down by 0.9%

• 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/ bedspaces reduced by 0.9% from the previous year.

Supported housing net rents down by 2.1%

• Within the overall decrease of 2.1% are regional differences, with the greatest reduction seen in the West Midlands (a 6.2% year-on-year decrease).

Affordable Rent rents increase by 0.4%

• The average gross rent for Affordable Rent general needs units was £125.62 per week in 2020, a slight increase of 0.4% on the previous year.

Sector characteristics and stock movement key facts

96% of stock owned by large PRPs

• The 256 large PRPs (those owning 1,000 or more units of social housing) represented 18% of the total PRP population in 2020. The majority of PRPs (82%) are small (owning fewer than 1,000 units of social housing).

For-profit providers nearly double their stock

• The 49 for-profit providers reported 9,313 units of social stock in 2020, nearly double that in 2019 (5,342). The growth has been predominantly in low cost home ownership (from 2,425 in 2019 to 5,144 in 2020).

Right to buy activity higher than in recent years

• There were 5,908 sales under the various right to buy/acquire schemes. This is a 20% increase from the 4,929 sales reported in 2019 and a result of a large increase in voluntary right to buy sales.

Inter-group transfer activity remains high

• Transfer activity has remained relatively stable since 2019, with 121,178 transfers of social rented stock in 2020. PRPs modifying their group structures through mergers or restructuring is the main driver.

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 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (then DCLG), we selected weighting to account for the small proportion of missing data.

The impact of weighting on data for the 2020 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 small proportion of stock and had a response rate of 94.5% in 2020.

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.