National statistics

Social housing lettings in England, technical notes: April 2021 to March 2022

Updated 19 February 2024

Applies to England

1. Introduction

The “Social Housing Lettings in England” statistical series has been badged as National Statistics, the quality mark of government statistics, following assessment by the UK Statistics Authority in 2014. We abide by the Code of Practice for Statistics from data collection through to publication.

More detailed information can be found in the accompanying quality report, available from the same landing page as these technical notes.

2. Data collection

Information for the 2021/22 release reflects data given by providers for the financial year ending 31 March 2022. CORE is a requirement on the Single Data List for local authorities and is a regulatory requirement of the social housing regulator for private registered providers.

Statistics presented in this release are based on the data submitted through the online Continuous Recording system (CORE) by private registered providers and local authorities. CORE was first set up in 1989 for PRPs and its remit expanded to local authorities in 2004.

Data providers complete a range of information set out in a form about tenants that are accessing social housing and the property they are letting. Practice varies in terms of how local authorities and housing associations collect and compile the data that is submitted on the CORE form. Some questions are answered with information recorded at the point of registration, other elements about the type of tenancy and stock are drawn from the providers’ own housing management information system, with the remaining CORE-specific questions are asked of tenants by housing officers at sign-up. Guidance notes are available on CORE’s Guides and Manuals page.

Once complete, the CORE logs are input online, either manually or directly from their internal systems via a bulk upload. The data are initially validated at the point of entry as they are submitted by data providers, and then undergo further validation and quality assurance processes. These processes are described in the “Data Quality” section.

3. Data quality

3.1 Coverage

The data collected through CORE differs from the social housing data in the Local Authority Housing Survey (LAHS) in that CORE is a ‘flow’ measure of all new social housing lettings which records data at record level, whereas data in LAHS is a ‘stock’ measure of all social housing stock in local authorities. Some LAHS information is presented in this release to provide context to the information from CORE on new lettings.

The English Housing Survey (EHS) also provides social housing lettings data but the statistics are based on a survey and are again a ‘stock’ measure of social housing stock. CORE data focuses on the tenancy details at the point of letting, and besides property characteristics also collects information on the socio-demographic profile of the household, their housing circumstances and some financial information. CORE does not record any information of social housing lettings that are continuing – only new lettings.

Lettings and sales data are reported by all registered providers, and voluntarily by those who are not registered with the  Regulator of Social Housing. Information is only collected on new lettings or sales, in General Needs or Supported Housing, by financial year.

CORE does not currently collect information on sales from local authorities, with more detail available in the Social Housing Sales publication.

Some types of lettings are excluded from CORE, (see Guides and Manuals), including:

• Mutual exchanges (where tenants have exchanged homes)

• Conversions of starter or introductory tenancies to assured or secure tenancies (because the introductory tenancy will have previously been reported to CORE)

• Successions by assignment (where the tenancy has transferred to another person at the request of the sole tenancy)

• Temporary General Needs housing (lettings made with a fixed period of less than two years)

3.2 Completeness of CORE data

CORE is designed to be a complete census of new social housing lettings provided by local authorities and private registered providers that own social housing stock.

Whilst data providers should submit data for all new social housing tenancies, this does not always happen in practice. In addition, not all questions are compulsory so information may be incomplete for some tenancy records. This introduces bias into statistics using the data which we minimise by applying weighting and imputation processes.

Weighting is applied to adjust for record level non-response by local authorities. Imputation is applied to compensate for item non-response for both local authorities and private registered providers.

Local authority weighting

Local authority weights are calculated by reference to the total number of lettings reported to the Local Authority Housing Statistics (LAHS) return and calculated for groups of similar local authorities, where these groups are defined by the ONS UK area classifications. For each of the groups, the weight is calculated for all responding local authorities as the ratio of the number of lettings judged to be the most reliable (either reported to LAHS or reported to CORE), relative to those reported to CORE.

Currently weights are not calculated for private rented providers as response is high and there is no alternative data source robust enough to be used for CORE weighting purposes.

Weights are only suitable for use when conducting analysis at the national level. When conducting analysis on sub-national geographies such as local authority areas the weights should not be used.

Imputation of missing items

Some of the questions on the CORE questionnaire are not compulsory. In particular, data on household characteristics may not be available to the housing officer or the tenant may prefer not to answer. In these cases, we impute responses.

Our imputation methods are based on the recommendations of the ONS Methodology Advisory review in 2013. We follow a ‘nearest neighbour’ or ‘donor imputation’ approach, a standard statistical technique. This involves identifying records that are similar to the records with missing data, based on variables that have been determined to be of most importance (e.g. other demographic characteristics, geography etc.). The algorithm randomly chooses a record (the ‘donor record’) from the set of records with the closest data for the non-missing variables and copies the data for the missing variables from the donor record into the record with missing data.

As with the weighting process, the imputation process uses ONS UK area classifications to group local authorities into clusters – one of the variables used to judge records’ similarity. The imputation is carried out separately for General Needs and for Supported Housing, to reflect the different demographic profiles of their tenants.

We impute the following demographic variables for the lead tenant:

• Age

• Gender

• Economic status

• Ethnicity

• Nationality

Quality assurance procedure

1. START: new lettings form published on the CORE website in April

2. Supporting documentation published (guidance on form changes etc)

3. Information collected from tenants and individual CORE logs completed and uploaded to website

• Logs automatically validated on submission
• Data quality issues (errors) raised during process queried to data providers
• CORE helpdesk resolves queries

4. Monitoring of response rates based on number of logs submitted last year

5. End of reporting year 31 March 2022

6. Imputation and weighting carried out

7. END: publication April 2023

4. Users and uses

CORE is a unique source of information in providing detailed information about individual tenancies. This record level data enables multi-variable breakdowns, distributional analysis, and construction of small area estimates. For example, it collects information on household characteristics, primary reason for housing, and the source of referral and previous tenure of all recorded lettings.

Policy makers and practitioners regard CORE as an essential tool for monitoring housing costs, assessing affordability and developing policy. CORE data are used:

• For policy monitoring and development, e.g. through detailed local analysis of allocations;

• As a component of the Retail Price Index (RPI) by the Office for National Statistics;

• By other government departments, e.g. forming part of how the Armed Forces Covenant monitors access to social housing for veterans;

• To respond to Freedom of Information requests (FOI) and Parliamentary Questions (PQs).

Non-government bodies also use CORE data. For example:

• Housing providers use analysis of their own data to inform their housing management strategies and to benchmark their own performance;

• Academics, researchers, charities and the public access record level data through the UK Data Archive to better understand social housing issues.

5. Confidentiality

Since the introduction of the General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) on 25 May 2018 updates have been made to how data are submitted into the CORE system:

• Data sharing agreement – all CORE data providers must sign a formal data sharing agreement with DLUHC;

• CORE data protection officer – all CORE data providers must set up a CORE data protection officer on the CORE system to electronically sign the data sharing agreement on behalf of their organisation;

• Privacy notice – a new CORE privacy notice must be made available to all new social housing tenants when their data are collected.

All of these steps must be taken for an organisation to submit data into CORE. This ensures that tenants are informed of how their data will be used and that it is being processed securely.

Our disclosure policy is applied to all internal and external uses of the data, including this statistical release and accompanying products. Record level datasets are available through the UK Data Archive via 1 of 3 types of licence agreement with different levels of data protection to meet different user needs whilst maintaining tenant confidentiality in line with legislation.

6. Revisions policy

This policy has been developed in accordance with the UK Statistics Authority Code of Practice for Official Statistics and the Department‘s Revisions Policy:

1. Non-scheduled revisions: These are where a substantial error has occurred as a result of the compilation, imputation or dissemination process. Revised products are released as soon as is practicable, alongside an explanatory note on both the cause and impact of the error. Data are clearly indicated in tables as ‘provisional’ (P) or ‘revised’ (R).

2. Scheduled revisions: Providers cannot retrospectively submit or revise data after the close down deadline date for the re-porting year. The only scheduled revision is to the weights, currently based on provisional LAHS data, once the final LAHS data are published. Revised weights and estimates are made in the subsequent release in the historic tables.

For example, 2020/21 weights were revised after the publication of final LAHS 2020/21 data in summer 2020. The summary tables published as part of the 2021/22 Social Housing Lettings release use the revised weights for the 2020/21 figures in the time series tables.

7. Related statistics

7.1 Social housing sales data

The Department’s Social Housing Sales in England utilising data collected through CORE for sales of self-contained dwellings and re-sales of any part-owned dwellings (shared ownership) from private registered providers.

7.2 Housing stock in England

The Department publishes annual live tables on housing stock and vacancies by tenure.

7.3 Private registered provider social housing

The Regulator for Social Housing in England, the separate statutory regulatory body, publishes its annual Statistical Data Return (SDR) including the total number of social and affordable lettings and stock, is based on data collected from private registered providers.

7.4 Local authority housing social housing

The Department’s annual Local Authority Housing Statistics (LAHS) data return reports on a wide range of housing related data including total dwellings, lettings and vacant, waiting lists, rents, and condition of stock^{[footnote 1]}.

7.5 English Housing Survey (EHS)

The Department’s annual English Housing Survey (EHS) providing information on the quality and quantity of both social and non-social stock in England based upon a sample of households.

7.6 Homelessness

The Department’s statistics relating to homelessness include quarterly Statutory Homelessness and the annual Rough Sleeping in England.

7.7 Devolved administrations

The devolved administrations of the UK produce and publish their own social housing lettings and sales statistics. These data are not published alongside the England statistics in this release because there are not directly comparable figures across the country due to differences in data collection methodologies and policies.

Wales

• Social housing stock and rent statistics

• Social housing lettings statistics

Scotland

• Local authority social lettings

• Social sector summary tables

• Private registered provider social lettings

• Social Tenants in Scotland, 2015

Northern Ireland

• Social housing statistics including data on tenancies, household, allocations and sales.

Footnotes

1. Prior to 2011/12 much of this information was collected through the department’s Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix (HSSA). ↩