How to use Housing Counts
About Housing Counts
Housing Counts is a new tool from the National Housing Federation, bringing together relevant housing data into one place for members to explore.
There are two aspects to Housing Counts:
Stories: Our pick of topical or influential trends emerging in recent housing data which have particular relevance to housing associations’ work or support the sector’s media, policy and campaigning.
This part of the tool is accessible to everyone.
Data: The full range of data with an easy to use interface allowing more detailed queries. Users can select up to 10 geographical areas and areas of interest to compare and download charts and tables for use in reports, presentations or online. The raw data behind these graphs can also be downloaded for further exploration.
This part of the tool is available for members as part of their membership, and commercial and other organisations can gain access through an annual subscription package.
Housing Counts is regularly updated to provide you with the most accurate data available.
How to access
Access to Housing Counts is easy – just login with the same email and password you use on the National Housing Federation website.
- Need to register? It’s easy to do.
- If you can’t remember your password, you can reset it.
Once you have logged in, you will be able to access the data part of Housing Counts.
Federation members have free access as part of their membership benefit. If you are not a member, you have the opportunity to purchase an annual subscription of the tool. For more information please email Tristan Carlyon or call 020 7067 1128.
If you are experiencing any login problems, please contact us.
Glossary of terms
While we have aimed to make the terms used across Housing Counts easy to understand, in some cases we do need to use specific terminology. Where this is the case, we will describe here what we mean by that term.
Additional affordable housing: the gross supply of additional affordable housing in England, initiated and/or funded by the DCLG and local authorities. Includes both new build and acquisitions.
Data represent the Affordable Homes Programme (including re-cycled capital grant), Affordable Homes Guarantees Programme, homes funded directly by local authorities, Private Finance Initiative, Traveller Pitches, Homelessness Change, Mortgage Rescue, and purchase schemes such as Tenants Incentive Scheme and Right to Acquire, plus ‘other’ DCLG categories.
Affordable housing: social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing provided to specified eligible households whose needs are not met by the market.
Affordable rent: Rent set at 80% or below market rent.
Empty home: any home that has been empty for six months or more.
Fuel poverty: Fuel poverty in England is measured using the Low Income High Costs (LIHC) indicator. Under the LIHC indicator, a household is considered to be fuel poor if:
- they have required fuel costs that are above average (the national median level)
- were they to spend that amount, they would be left with a residual income below the official poverty line.
Intermediate housing: the total of intermediate rent and affordable home ownership.
Other public homes: publically owned homes which are not owned by a housing association or district or borough council. This may include homes owned by the National Health Service or upper tier county councils.
Social rent: Rent set below market rent.
Passported: Passported benefits are benefits or schemes which some groups of people are entitled to because of their entitlement to certain other benefits or tax credits.
Private rent: These data are from the Valuation Office Agency. They state that the data used to generate these statistics are based on a sample of rental information which is collected by Rent Officers from landlords and letting agents. Because the composition of this sample changes over time, it is not possible to compare median rents provided in this publication with statistics in previous publications to infer trends in the rental market over time. Any differences in median rent may be due to differences in the sample rather than true changes in the rental market.
The data
The data used in Housing Counts is open source data, and while we endeavour to keep the information up to date and correct, any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk.
We have clearly referenced and linked to the data sources used when you run a data query. If you have any questions about the data used, please contact the original data source. Most of the original data sources will have methodological notes and disclaimers, and users of Housing Counts should note these.