Handy facts on housing

Thanks to @joehalewood for digging these facts out - they are relevant to ongoing debates over housing and housing costs and I make no apology for lifting his blog post wholesale:

The COntinuous REcording (CORE) statistics for 2011/12 have just been released on the CLG website and make interesting reading

Did you know?

• Average social rent is £76 per week or £329 per calendar month?
• Average HA rent is £81 per week and £351 per month
• Average ‘affordable rent’ is £110 per week and £477 per month
• Average market rent is £163 per week and £706 per month
• 20.88% of social housing tenants are unemployed
• 29.48% of social housing tenants are EMPLOYED! – So there are 3 employed social housing tenants to every 2 unemployed!!
• 94% of social housing tenants are UK Nationals (Less than 1% of all the housing in the UK is social housing given to foreigners)
• Only 35% of ‘affordable rent’ tenancies are new build – 65% are not!
• Shapps ‘affordable rent’ panacea has seen just 1592 of his planned 170,000 units built (0.93% of his target and so 99.07% to go!!)

The cost figures above make startling reading as they reveal :

• Market rent is 114% higher than social rent;
• Market rent is 101% higher than housing association rent;
• Affordable (sic) rent’ is an increase of 45% to social rent level