Annually, a large amount of data (about 3000 items) covering a wide range of housing areas are collected from each of the 354 district local authorities through a set of 2 or 3 regular returns which are traditionally known as the Housing Investment Programme (HIP) returns.
The HSSA is collected from all local authorities, as they are all required to publish a housing strategy.
Purpose and usage
-
As an appendix, the HSSA is a statistical document to support the LA's annual Housing Strategy;
-
The majority of the data are used for monitoring and developing housing policies, tracking Communities and Local Government’s Public Service Level Agreement or PSA targets eg Low Demand Indicator 1 is based on vacant dwellings, and performance assessments including Comprehensive Performance Assessment or CPA for the Audit Commission;
-
Some of the data are used for funding allocation among the 9 Regions and the LAs within each region (needs indices or allocation formula). These include the housing capital investment funding (normally averaging over £2b per year, currently known as the Regional Housing Pot but previously it was known as the Single Capital Pot or HIP allocation) and the Disabled Facilities Grants (about £100m); and
-
Other uses, including answering Parliamentary Questions, future planning as well for assessing trends and research purposes.
Data contents
Briefly speaking, the data collected can be summarised as follows:
Mainly basic and policy orientated data on all tenures within each local authority's own geographical area and covers a wide range of information such as:
-
Dwelling Stock and Vacants
-
Housing register, Lettings and Homelessness
-
Houses in Multiple Occupation
-
Capital Expenditure and Receipts, and Cash Incentive Schemes
-
Private Sector Housing Renewal Assistance including Disabled Facilities Grants, and Private Sector Clearance.
-
Provision of Affordable Housing