In-work housing benefit numbers

Here’s a report by the Building and Social Housing Federation on the growth of in-work recipients of housing benefit.  It shows, among other things, that 92.8% of the increase in HB claimants last year were from claimants that were in work (p12).

The Growth of In-Work Housing Benefit Claimants: Evidence and policy implications

And here’s a graph showing variations in housing benefit claimant numbers since 1991 (p4):

There’s also a good summary of the findings at Inside Housing here.  I’ve reproduced their ‘key findings’ bit below:

Key findings

4.95 million
number of housing benefit claimants in Great Britain, excluding Northern Ireland

300,000
extra claimants since January 2010, of which 279,000 were employed

93 per cent
proportion of the increase in housing benefit claims from in-work households

• In 2010 and 2011 sizeable numbers of in-work households started to claim housing benefit
• There has been a considerable change in the financial situation of households, this could be due to rent freezes, more part-time workers and inflation
• The Department for Work and Pensions will not achieve planned £2.25 billion savings on housing benefit if the number of in-work claimants continues to increase

Council House Sales by Local Authority from 1979

This page from the DCLG website has some useful stats on Council house sales since 1979, broken down by local authority and by region.

Table 648: Social housing sales: Local authority stock sold through right-to-buy and other council house sales by district and region has what I think are the best local authority figures.  This shows, for example, that there were 6886 council homes in Southampton sold off between 1979 and 1998; and that there were around 200 Council homes in Southampton being sold off per annum in the early years of the Labour government; and that this figure dropped to just 29 homes being sold off in 2009-10.

Shelter Housing Databank

The Shelter Housing Databank allows you to pull out local stats on housing need, affordability, supply and other measures.  You can pull information off at a regional level or at the level of a local authority.

You can get stats for:

• Housing Need (including stats for homelessness and council waiting lists)
• Affordability (including stats for house prices, rents and income-house price ratios)
• Supply (including new homes built and vacant properties)
• Social and Welfare (including housing benefit claimants and unemployment stats)

In most cases you can get stats going back until 1997, although for some reason most of the welfare stats only go back until 2009.  It also doesn’t include any stats on Houses in Multiple Occupation.

It’s a really helpful website that in most cases allows you to customise the data you need and pull it off in a variety of formats.

Here, for example, is a quick report I pulled off for all ‘housing need’ indicators in Southampton.

Check out the full site here: Shelter Housing Databank

UPDATE: You can also get a number of useful policy papers from the Shelter Policy Library.

HMO Density in Southampton

Southampton City Council is consulting on new planning guidance for regulating the spread of Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in Southampton.  As part of the consultation, they’ve published a table showing the current “density” of HMOs in different parts of the city (page 9):

Link to the full consultation pdf is here: Southampton draft HMO SPD

Background to the consultation: Southampton HMO Consultation