Accredited official statistics

Local authority housing statistics: technical notes 2022-23

Published 8 February 2024

Applies to England

1. National Statistics Status

National Statistics^{[footnote 1][footnote 2]} status means that our statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value as set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. It is the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ statisticians’ responsibility to maintain compliance with these standards.

The accreditation of these official statistics as National Statistics was first confirmed in December 2011 following an assessment by the UK Statistics Authority.

2. Introduction

This document provides technical details on the Local Authority Housing Statistics (LAHS) return, including its data collection, processing and publication.

LAHS began as the Housing Investment Programme (HIP) return in the late 1970s, collecting housing related data at a local authority level. Since then, LAHS has gone through multiple iterations, with some of its current questions having been introduced by merging with other historical data collections (e.g., Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix - HSSA,  Business Plan Statistical Appendix – BPSA, Planning Application form P1B). The current version of LAHS has existed since 2011-12, with changes and updates made since then to maintain relevance and meet user needs for housing data.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (DLUHC) uses the data collected in LAHS in several other statistical releases:

• Affordable Housing Supply statistics

• Social Housing Lettings statistics, and

• Social Housing Sales and Demolitions statistics

3. Data collection

The data collected in LAHS are a combination of information taken as a snapshot at 31 March and for the whole of the financial year. For example, in the 2022-23 data collection, the snapshot information refers to 31 March 2023. For the remaining information the reporting period is 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023.

The overall response rate for 2022-23 was as follows.

• 308 of the 309 local authorities provided some data for the LAHS return.

• Of these 308, there were four local authorities who provided “unfinalised” returns. Local authorities are required to sign off their return to confirm it passes a range of quality checks and these local authorities have not signed off the return.

• Telford & Wrekin Council did not return any information.

4. Data quality

In 2015, the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) published a regulatory standard for the quality assurance of administrative data. The standard is supported with a Quality Assurance of Administrative Data Toolkit which contains guidance for producers of official statistics on practices they can adopt to assure the quality of the data they utilise.

To assess the quality of the data provided for this release, the department has followed this standard.

The responsible statistician’s assessment of the level of risk associated with these statistics is as follows:

Statistical Series	Administrative Source	Data Quality Concern	Public Interest	Matrix Classification
Local Authority Housing Statistics	Local authorities’ individual data systems	Medium	Medium	Low Risk [A2]

The publication of LAHS can be considered as medium profile, as there has been mainstream media interest, with moderate economic or political sensitivity.

The data quality concern is considered low given that the data are checked by providers and is subject to data quality checks prior to publication.

Overall, LAHS has been assessed as A2: Low Risk as it is a source to other publications such as Affordable Housing Supply, Social Housing Sales and Social Housing Lettings.

A full outline of the statistical production process and quality assurance carried out is provided below. Further details are also provided against each of the four areas outlined in the Quality Assurance of Administrative Data Toolkit.

4.1 Statistical production process

LAHS data is collected annually through a form submitted by local authorities and is part of the Single Data List of all the datasets that local government must submit to central government. As such, any changes to the form are subject to consultation via the Central Local Information Partnership Housing (CLIP-H) group. Changes that are not immediately approved are either adapted or dropped. All changes will  undergo a New Burdens Assessment, unless agreed the change does not require one by CLIP-H.

The LAHS form opens for collection on the DELTA platform in April, with the form usually published a few weeks in advance. Alongside the form, we publish LAHS guidance on the GOV.UK website. While the form is live, we respond to queries from data providers, monitor response rates, and contact data providers to ensure response.

The data set is quality assured in line with the principles set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. Validation checks exist within the DELTA system at the point the data is collected, but further validation checks are performed by statisticians in DLUHC once the data are submitted. Where queries arise, DLUHC statisticians contact the data providers to seek clarity. If no response is provided, the data is either kept, suppressed, or an imputation is made according to the existing rules and when supressed, this will be appropriately noted. Where these rules do not apply, we make a judgement as to from the available information to either keep or suppress the data.

The final data set is used to build live tables, with quality assurance comparisons made against previously published data. These live tables are published alongside other official statistics publications: Social Housing Sales and Demolitions, Affordable Housing Supply, English Housing Survey (EHS), Social Housing Lettings.

DLUHC re-opens the DELTA form for revisions between February and March for a three-week period. Data providers are contacted with any remaining queries, and on any new queries arising from re-submitted data. LAHS data are revised following additional quality assurance.

4.2 Operational context and administrative data collection

The LAHS data collection is an annual return and is collected from all lower tier local authorities (including unitary authorities) in England that were in existence during the 2022-23 financial year (309 local authorities). It covers information on social housing owned by local authorities, including stock, waiting lists and evictions.

The LAHS return contains both mandatory and voluntary questions. Mandatory questions should be completed by all local authorities that submit a return. Some authorities may not report data for all voluntary parts of the return.

From 2017-18 onwards, the return has been completed by local authorities via DLUHC’s DELTA system. This system includes several data validation rules, including those to ensure mandatory questions are filled. These rules are continuously reviewed.

Every effort is made to collect data from every local authority, but statisticians may use imputed estimates where no response has been provided (see imputation section).

Where possible, local authorities should make revisions to their data directly in the DELTA system. However, for earlier periods this may not always be possible. This may result in minor discrepancies between data held on the DELTA system and the figures we publish.

User should remember when using data at a local authority level that the of data points are low or unrelated from year-on-year and therefore can be (or appear to be) volatile.

There are a number of other sources which contain data related to or that complements that the data in LAHS. These include:

• the EHS;

• the COntinuous REcording of Lettings and Sales (CORE) return;

• the Regulator for Social Housing (RSH)’s Statistical Data Return (SDR) and Local Authority Data Return (LADR);

• the Annual Right to Buy sales and replacements and;

• the Mortgage and Landlord Possession statistics.

Further information is available in the definitions section covering themes on stock, rents, waiting lists, decency and evictions.

The LAHS form is regularly assessed against current and future policy requirements. Where changes are proposed, they are presented to the CLIP-H sub-group for discussion.

4.3 Communication with data supply partners

Statisticians are in regular contact with the data suppliers for this release to ensure they have a common understanding of the information supplied. This communication happens through a range of channels, including:

• Direct contact with data providers via email and phone during the data collection and validation periods

• The LAHS webpage on the GOV.UK website

• The GOV.UK Notify system

• The CLIP-H sub-group

The government maintains the Single Data List, which is a catalogue of all datasets that local government is required to submit to central government. LAHS is on this list.

4.4 Quality Assurance principles, standards and checks by data suppliers

LAHS data are provided by local authorities and therefore DLUHC does not have full oversight of their systems and quality procedures. The department provides local authorities with detailed guidance on the information collected through LAHS, which we make available on both the GOV.UK website and the DELTA platform where the data is collected.

Data received by the department goes through an extensive validation and imputation process.

4.5 Producers’ Quality Assurance investigation and documentation

While providers are expected to carry out their own checks before the data are submitted for this publication, further quality assurance is carried by the responsible statistician at DLUHC once the data is received. This includes:

• Sense checks on the latest data against previous years to identify significant and unexpected changes

• Identification of extreme values

• Cross-validation of related fields, for example to ensure that constituent fields sum to a total provided

• Where identified issues are not otherwise explained in comments left by data providers, directly contacting the data provider for clarification or confirmation of figures

The data, report and tables are independently quality assured by another statistician in the production team. These checks use a clear checklist approach to ensure the figures are consistent across the release and live tables, with each check being systematically signed off when it has been completed.

4.6 Imputation

All returns undergo validation and cross-checking, and late returns are chased to ensure the overall response is as complete and accurate as possible. Outliers or inconsistent data are highlighted and verified by contacting the local authority. Where the local authority has not responded to the query, an assessment has been made as to the likelihood of the data being correct. Where the figures are deemed highly likely to be incorrect, an imputation has been included for the purposes of producing the regional and national totals, where possible.

Imputations attempt to take into account missing or incorrect data in order to provide national aggregates. This method has been used in the LAHS (and previously HSSA and BPSA) collection process for many years. Some national totals include imputed data for missing returns, including variables on stock (a1a), waiting lists (cc1a) and vacants (e1a).

In general terms, one of five approaches to imputation are taken:

• Where figures are not expected to change greatly year on year, direct carry-over of the value reported from the previous year is used.

• Where there are sub-components of other reported items, imputations are calculated from data provided.

• Where we can be confident that financial figures have been filled in using the wrong units from comparison with other authorities, i.e. in pounds rather than thousands of pounds, values are converted to the correct units

• Removal of highly anomalous figures, which are inconsistent with other data (either from that year or previous years). Communication with local authorities to confirm the correct figure is pursued first, but in the absence of a response, some figures may be suppressed or presented as ‘don’t know’. This only done in exceptional cases or at the request of the data provider.

• Using proportions from previous years, e.g. on waiting lists by bedroom requirement, to predict the proportion for a later year

Imputations are listed within the published tables.

4.7 Data Suppression

On occasion, when there are very extreme values, these will be suppressed if the value is not plausible, has a disproportionate weight on England or regional figures and the local authority could not be contacted or did not reply in time for the publication.

For the 2022-23 data, we have suppressed the figures for Right to Buy discount for Enfield due to an error in their submission that could not be resolved before publication. Therefore Enfield’s data is excluded for variables b2ac, b2abc, b2fc, b2aac, and b2acc. We aim to resolve this for the next scheduled update.

4.8 Additional Quality Assurance

In 2022, statisticians carried out an additional one-off quality assurance exercise for data covering the period from 2004-05 onwards. This included trend analysis to identify potentially anomalous values, and consistency analysis where variables are related to each other. In this process, identified potential errors were flagged to data providers and their responses used to update data values.

Work is ongoing on the historical data from Section B (sales) to retrieve further detail across more years and depending on the results, the data in this section will be updated at a later date.

5. Revisions

This policy has been developed in accordance with the UKSA Code of Practice for Statistics and DLUHC’s revisions policy. There are two types of revisions that the policy covers.

5.1 Non-scheduled revisions

Where a substantial error has occurred as a result of the compilation, imputation or dissemination process, the statistical release, live tables and other accompanying releases will be updated with a correction notice as soon as is practical.

5.2 Scheduled revisions

Any revisions made by local authorities to their figures after the DELTA form is closed for editing, due to either errors found in their submission or failure to meet the deadline, will be recorded and will update the tables at next scheduled release or revision.

The Department runs a formal revisions period in February/March 2024 after the publication of full LAHS data in January 2024. The LAHS forms are reopened for editing for a few weeks. The Department inform all authorities when DELTA is open and will further target authorities where the Department knows revisions are due. Revisions will normally only be made to the most recent published year. The next scheduled revision for the LAHS returns will be published in June/July 2024, alongside the next update of Live Table 1012.

Where LAHS data are published in live tables, these tables will be updated annually at the same time as the publication of this statistical release. The exception to this is when a significant error has been identified as described previously. In this case, these tables will be updated as soon as the error is found, and a note will be placed on the table to notify users of the reason for the change.

Revisions to historical data are performed occasionally alongside scheduled updates to the data. This occurs if a local authority informs us that values should be revised, or if DLUHC carries out a more detailed quality assurance process, such as that occurred in 2022 and was reflected in the January 2023 update.

The LAHS open data always reflects the most up to date data.

5.3 Revisions in this release

Following a comprehensive checking process, DLUHC contacted local authority housing officers where values seemed unlikely given previous submitted values. Checks were performed to flag large year on year changes in variables such as those for stock count, number of right to buy sales, waiting list size, number of lettings, number of vacant stock, number of non-decent stock and rent arrears.

Further consistency checks between variables, such as related variables for non-decent stock and financial contributions from s106 agreements were also performed to ensure values added up.

Revised values resulting from these checks have been incorporated into the data.

6. Definitions and related statistics

A full list of housing statistics definitions can be found in the Housing Statistics and English Housing Survey glossary.

6.1 Housing stock data

DLUHC publishes notes and definitions for housing stock data which explains the different data sources used to calculate housing stock figures for England by tenure.

For total local authority stock figures, LAHS is the preferred data source. Live Table 116 provides the number of local authority dwellings in each local authority district by tenure for dwelling equivalent stock.

The Local Authority Data Return (LADR) also reports on all stock.

Social housing is made up of stock owned by local authorities and stock owned by Private Registered Providers. The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) took over responsibility for the regulation of social housing providers in England on 1 April 2012. In 2018 the HCA was split into the RHS and Homes England (HE). The SDR is the preferred data source for figures on dwellings owned by Private Registered Providers.

Further information about local authority Large Scale Voluntary Transfer (LSVT) to Private Registered Providers can be found in the National Archives.

Further information and data about Right to Buy and other sales of social stock can be found in the relevant Live Tables.

6.2 Waiting lists

The EHS surveys and records the number of households on housing waiting lists. The numbers reported by households on the EHS are much lower than those reported by local authorities on the LAHS return.

In LAHS, the number of households on the waiting list is not the same as the number of households waiting. Local authorities periodically review their lists to remove households who no longer require housing, so the total number of households on waiting lists may overstate the number of households who still require social housing at any one time. The frequency of reviews varies between local authorities. Waiting list size may also be affected by other factors. For example, there is the potential for some households to be on the waiting list of more than one local authority.

The introduction of choice-based approaches in 2003, where applicants have more choice about where they live, has contributed to a rise in the size of waiting lists. The Localism Act 2011, has contributed to a decrease in the size of waiting lists, as it allowed local authorities to set their own qualification criteria.

6.3 Social lettings data

Local authority lettings information is reported on the LAHS return, and most local authorities, as well as all Private Registered Providers, also report information on the CORE data collection system.

The latest statistical release provides information on lettings of social housing in England up to March 2023 by local authorities and Private Registered Providers.

LAHS figures on lettings often differ from those in the CORE data due to methodological differences in data collection and processing. For example, LAHS counts mutual exchanges in its total lettings (where existing tenants agree to swap homes) whereas social housing lettings recorded in CORE do not. In addition, since CORE is a case-level data collection, limited response rates mean it does not reflect every single letting within a local authority.

6.4 Decent homes

In 2001, government established the decent homes standard for all social housing. This was updated in 2006.

Local authorities report information on decent homes activity through the LAHS return. Private Registered Providers report similar information through the RSH’s SDR. In the LAHS return, non-decent local authority housing stock includes stock owned by local authorities in other areas.

Estimates on the numbers of non-decent homes are also available from the English Housing Survey.

Decent homes figures from different sources are summarised in live table 119.

Reported levels of decent homes have been consistently lower in LAHS than EHS. There are a number of reasons for this. For example, EHS figures are based on a physical inspection of surveyed properties, while in LAHS only properties that LAs have been made aware of are included. Furthermore, in LAHS, properties where the tenant refused work are excluded. LAHS data should be used when assessing the decent homes standard for social housing.

6.5 Evictions

The Ministry of Justice publishes quarterly National Statistics on possession actions issued in county courts by mortgage lenders and social and private landlords in England and Wales. Whilst the LAHS return collects information on the evictions from properties owned by local authority landlords, corresponding information is not collected from Private Registered Providers. Therefore, where a breakdown by type of social landlord is not required, the best source would be the Ministry of Justice’s statistics on possession actions (see table 3 of their statistical tables).

Please note that there are differences because:

• the Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of possession claims and number of possession claims leading to an order rather than the number of orders

• the information is taken from courts administrative data rather than local authority returns

• the Ministry of Justice’s published tables include both England and Wales.

7. Uses of the data

The data in this statistical release are important for a number of reasons. They support informed decision-making by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, other government departments, local authorities, other public services, business, researchers and the public. The data collected on the LAHS form provide an important part of the evidence base for the assessment of future housing requirements and are used to inform evidence-based policy decisions and as a basis for answering Parliamentary Questions and other requests for information by Ministers, local authorities and the general public.

LAHS data is used as a data source for other statistical releases by DLUHC and other government departments.

8. User engagement

Users are encouraged to provide feedback on how these statistics are used and how well they meet user needs. Comments on any issues relating to this statistical release are welcomed and encouraged. Responses should be addressed to the “Public enquiries” contact given in the “Enquiries” section below. DLUHC has published an engagement strategy to meet the needs of statistics users.

9. Devolved administration statistics

Statistics relating to social housing stock in the other UK countries are published by the devolved administrations. In all countries, data are collected from returns made by the stock owning authority (local authority, Private Registered Provider or equivalent).

Statistics on social housing for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are published on their respective websites.

There are a number of differences between the statistics that are collected and published for local authorities in England through the LAHS return and the other UK countries. These differences can arise for a number of reasons, but the majority are a result of different legislation, methodology or coverage.

10. Enquiries

Media enquiries: 0303 444 1209

Email: [email protected]

Public enquiries and Responsible Statistician: Stanley Rudkin

Email: [email protected]

Information on official statistics is available via the UKSA website.

Information about statistics at DLUHC is available via the department’s website.

1. National Statistics are accredited official statistics. Accredited official statistics are called National Statistics in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Please see the Office for Statistics Regulation website for further details. ↩

2. Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to. You are welcome to contact us directly with any comments about how we meet these standards. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing [email protected] or via the OSR website. ↩