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Housing association rents fall by 1.3% in 2016/17
Housing association rents in England have dropped by 1.3% on average in the first year of rent cutting, statistics from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) have revealed.
The social housing regulator’s Statistical Data Return, published today, showed that the average housing association rent fell from £97.84 a week to £96.61.
There were fairly wide regional variations, with falls of 1.8% in Yorkshire and the Humber contrasting with falls of just 0.9% in both the East and West Midlands.
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The 2016/17 financial year was the first of four when the flat 1% rent cut applied, replacing the previous system of Consumer Price Index inflation plus 1% increases.
Robert Dryburgh, assistant director, analysis at the Homes and Communities Agency, said it was not surprising that the decrease in rents was not exactly 1%.
“You never end up with uniform rent increases or decreases, because once you take into account new build, demolition and sales you are not comparing exactly the same stock from one year to another,” he said.
He added that average rent decreases were also influenced by the reclassification of some elderly housing as general needs properties due to new definitions included in the Welfare Reform and Work Act, which came into force in 2016.
The Statistical Data Return, which comprises overall statistics from England’s registered housing associations, also revealed 2,781,305 units were owned by housing associations at the end of March, an increase of 0.7% on the total for 2016.
This is the slowest increase since 2014 – attributed to 2017 being the first year since then without a large-scale stock transfer into the sector.
Large associations built a total of 36,438 units in 2016/17, according to the figures, with 23,907 general needs rental units. This is a fall of 14.2% from 27,855 in 2015/16, due mainly to transition between HCA funding programmes.
The figures do not include non-social housing units built by unregistered entities within association groups, and contrasts with data from the National Housing Federation which shows 38,082 completions by associations for the period.
The figures also showed a rise in the number of for-profit housing associations, with five new registrations taking the total number to 31. These associations were shown to own a combined 873 homes.
This is understood to be mainly due to private developers registering housing associations in order to take ownership of affordable homes they build through Section 106 deals.
