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Written by rosalind renshaw

Government housing policy is decided with the help of figures taken off website FindaProperty.

The revelation came in a statement to Parliament by work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith in which he admitted that he had misquoted figures used in a debate on housing benefit.

Duncan Smith originally said the figures, which he used to suggest landlords were taking advantage of Local Housing Allowance to drive up rents, were from the Office for National Statistics.

But in his statement, he admitted the figures came from FindaProperty.

He first said: “We now know that, according to the Office for National Statistics, the private marketplace in housing – Labour Members are completely wrong about this – fell by around 5% last year. At the same time, LHA rates, which the previous Government had set and left to us, had risen by 3%.”

Now he says: “The correct answer should have been:

“We now know that, according to national statistics, the private marketplace in housing – Labour Members are completely wrong about this – fell by around 5% between November 2008 and February 2010. At the same time, national LHA rates, the system the previous Government left us, had risen by 3%.”

“The source of this statistic, as published in DWP’s analytical supplement to the Work and Pensions Select Committee inquiry of 3 November, is the Find a Property private rental index.

“This source for rental data has been used by the Department and wider Government since 2008 when the Department for Communities and Local Government stopped producing their own private rental index. The Find a Property Index is the biggest national private rental property website with an extensive amount of nationwide data.”

However, FindaProperty does not appear to claim that it carries the largest rental listings.
Instead, it says that its quarterly index draws on FindaProperty’s sample of 450,000 sales and rental properties combined. Rightmove currently quotes a rental listing of 250,000, which is 23% down on last year, plus 900,000 homes for sale.

Independent fact-checking body Fullfact, which challenged this and other statements put out by the Department of Work and Pensions, said the latest statement refers to the FindaProperty figures as ‘national data’, which is an official term used by the Office of National Statistics.

It also said the figures quoted are based on asking rents, and although there is no reason to doubt their validity, they are not necessarily an accurate guide to actual rents.

Andrew Smith, research director at the Digital Property Group, the parent company of FindaProperty, said: “The Government recently revealed it had been using figures from our quarterly rental index to help form policy.

“While this caused surprise in some quarters, many don’t realise that our rental index is the only index produced by any property company to look at the private rental sector regularly, comprehensively and robustly on a national level.
 
“This index, which is publicly available to download as a PDF from our site at FindaProperty.com, is a rich source of data examining asking rental price fluctuations, the number of properties available to rent nationally and levels of yields – all broken down nationally, regionally, by key cities and by London boroughs.

“It is based on our own large sample of approximately 450,000 rental and sales properties, as well as data from Calnea Analytics, who work very closely with the Land Registry, and uniquely provides data on the private rental market rather than the social housing one, which is gathered nationally by the Office of National Statistics.

“Our data is of interest to a wide range and large number of people in the UK including those seeking to rent a home, landlords interested in buy-to-let yield performance, lettings agents researching their market, as well as the media and policy makers.
 
“We expect our index to become increasingly relevant, not just because more people are renting than ever before, but because of the impact of the Comprehensive Spending Review. The CSR focused attention on rental asking prices as it introduced a new ‘80%’ formula that looks likely to push social housing tenants into the rental sector.”

Comments

  • icon

    Very interesting as our Honourable Friend Duncan Smith was part of the Conservative Government that brought out the Estate Agents misrepresentation Act!

    Pity he did not include statements by MP's!

    • 01 December 2010 10:55 AM
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