National statistics

Private registered providers stock and rents in England - Summary (key facts)

Updated 28 November 2023

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 2023:
3.18 million units owned by private registered providers
- Private registered providers of social housing (PRPs) reported owning 3,182,458 units on 31 March 2023 (including social and non-social tenures).
1.3% increase in overall owned stock (social and non-social)
- PRPs reported owning 1.3% or 41,537 more units in 2023 than in 2022. The majority of the increase is due to increases in general needs units (+27,140) and low cost home ownership units (+14,278).
Largest increase in general needs units since 2017
- General needs units increased from 2,219,586 units to 2,246,726 units, an increase of 27,140 units (1.2%). This is the largest increase in overall units and the first increase in general needs social rent units (+5,809) since 2017.
68% of units have an EPC rating of EPC-C or above
- Nearly 1.7m units of social housing owned by large PRPs have an EPC rating of EPC-C or above (68% of the units requiring an EPC).

Rent key facts

Average general needs net rent £102.15 per week
- The average weekly net rent for general needs social rental stock (excluding Affordable Rent and intermediate rent) owned by PRPs in England with 1,000 or more units/ bedspaces was £102.15 per week in 2023.
Average general needs net rent up by 4.2%
- General needs average weekly net rent increased by 4.2% from the previous year. The greatest increase was seen in London (4.4%) and the smallest increase was in the East of England (3.8%).
Average supported housing net rent up by 5.1%
- Some regional variation was seen in supported housing rents. The North East, the region with the largest increase in 2022, saw the smallest increase this year (3.5%). In England, the average weekly rent was £100.43.
Average Affordable Rent rents increase by 5.2%
- The average gross rent for Affordable Rent general needs units was £143.80 per week in 2023, an increase of 5.2% on the previous year. Excluding London, the difference between the lowest and highest regional increase in gross rents was less than 1%.

Sector characteristics and stock movement key facts

96% of stock owned by large PRPs
- The 230 large PRPs (those owning 1,000 or more units of social housing) represented 17% of the total PRP population in 2023 but owned 96% of all stock.
For-profit providers increase owned social stock by over 40%
- The 69 for-profit providers reported 29,272 units of social stock in 2023, over 40% more than in 2022 (20,831). The growth has been predominantly driven by a 53% increase in general needs stock and 35% increase in LCHO.
Losses and gains returning to normal levels
- There were just 0.2% more units gained in 2023 compared to 2022 but 8% fewer losses. This represents, at least in part, the sector returning to more normal levels of sales activity following a surge in right to buy sales after the pandemic.
Evictions still below pre-pandemic levels
- Total evictions are still lower than the levels seen in 2020 (4,861 in 2023 versus 10,311 in 2020), but have risen since 2022 as more normal activity returns following the lifting of the restrictions introduced during the pandemic.

Notes

Background

These statistics are based on data gathered in the Statistical Data Return 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 the Regulator of Social Housing

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 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 2023 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 96% in 2023.

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.