National Register of Social Housing (NROSH) Christine Whitehead, Daniel Banks and Fiona Lyall Grant.

Background The National Register of Social Housing (NROSH) will be a property database containing a record of each individual unit of social housing in England. It will provide neighbourhood level information for the whole country which will be accessible by central, regional and local government and other interested parties, and reduce the burden of reporting on housing providers. ODPM September 2004 NROSH will replace the stock elements of the Regulatory and Statistical Return (RSR) for housing associations and the Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix (HSSA) for local authorities. Currently it is a regulatory requirement for HAs and LAs to supply this information on a annual basis.

The process In order for NROSH to provide detailed social housing property information at a local level a unique property reference number (UPRN) must be allocated for each individual social housing property in England. To date no UPRNs have been allocated. However, data are being collected from both HAs and LAs. DCLG along with the HC have established data standards by which the data will be collected. Schema have been developed by toolkit providers, which uploads existing property data from management information systems. These data are then sent to DCLG for validation. Once validated the data are sent to consultants for the HC who aggregate the data to RSR level. Dataspring receive both the migrated data and raw NROSH data to analyse and compare with the individual HAs RSR. The analyses are then sent on to the HAs and where necessary follow up calls are made to clarify inconsistencies between datasets.

What is asked for? Ten critical fields from the data standards, out of 107, must be complete in order to compare NROSH data with RSR data: 1. Confirmation of ownership 2. Confirmation of manager 3. Provision category (general needs, supported etc) 4. Exclusivity (self-contained or not self-contained) 5. Tenure type 6. Vacancy status 7. Rent payments per year 8. Rent payment 9. Eligibility for housing benefit 10. Amount of service charge

Dataspring involvement Dataspring have been involved with the development of NROSH since its inception with the overall aim of ensuring that it will constitute an acceptable replacement for stock based RSR data This process has been in collaboration with staff at the Housing Corporation The data standards (Field definitions document) has been reviewed and revised in order to capture data requested in the RSR Validation and aggregation documentation have been produced to ensure data are correct and can be aggregated to RSR level Tolerance levels have been set with which to measure the acceptability of NROSH data in comparison with the RSR for regulatory purposes

Methodology Creation of housing association level templates comparing their RSR data to the NROSH data downloads at two levels: Comparison to Raw NROSH data (different format to RSR data) Comparison to Migrated NROSH data (matching the RSR format)

What does this look like? We create Excel template files to send to each participating HA, these contain at least 4 worksheets: 1.Summary Sheet 2.Migrated Comparison at national level 3.Migrated Comparison at LA level (e.g. Part I of the RSR) 4.Raw Comparison (covering 10 critical fields) 5.Also, some worksheets from previous downloads if available

Raw Template NROSH variable definition RSR variable definition NROSH and RSR data Differences

Technical Aspects There are two broad options when dealing with repetitive complicated cross dataset reporting: 1.Manual completion, aided by some assisting elements 2.Automation wherever practicable The approach depends on the nature of the project – for example, the complexity, the amount of repetition involved and the likelihood of alterations

Raw Template Automation Diagram Automatic link Raw NROSH Database (Access) Latest RSR Database (Access) Excel Raw Templates NROSH Dev. Database (Access) RSR Dev. Database (Access) NROSH Variable Defn. RSR Variable Defn. Cross dataset variable matching SQL Queries Cross Application Dynamic link Raw Database (Access) Master Database (selects Housing Assoc.) Auto-format using VBA and condit. formatting and calculation fields auto-populated Automated testing For each download Once per year

Benefits of this approach Efficiency - templates take a fraction of the time to produce Accuracy - content produced by tested programming that centralises the complexities Flexibility - database and programming structures can be converted to produce new outputs

Current activity Seventy-eight Housing Associations have submitted data since the first upload was taken in September 2005, accounting for 5% of total HAs. The total stock recorded in NROSH for these HAs is 88% of that recorded in the RSR 2007.

NROSH data compared with the RSR The number of HAs participating in NROSH and the amount of stock reported are increasing steadily. HAs are generally improving accuracy with each download – the majority make changes in response to feedback. Looking at individual housing association data five HAs had 100% of their RSR stock reported in NROSH. 58 HAs had NROSH total stock within 25% of their RSR reported stock. There is substantial variation between fields with the highest completion rate for Mandatory Fields and the lowest for Vacancies.

Number of HAs and total stock in NROSH

Summary Seventy eight HAs have submitted data via NROSH since October This amounts to over 180 downloads by September 2007; Overall follow up calls to NROSH data providers (those who have not submitted recently and those who have) see NROSH as a positive way of collecting social housing data, particularly if it is seen as successful and it removes the annual burden of completing the RSR; The quality of NROSH data is steadily improving as HAs receive more feedback in the form of comparison templates. However, a large proportion of participating HAs have only made one download; The data quality should improve further once the new data standards are in place.

Conclusion Providing the toolkits are user friendly and the schema collects all required data there is no reason why NROSH should not prove a successful replacement of stock based data collection from the RSR However, in order for NROSH to work effectively UPRNs must be allocated to each individual property Changing the schema on the toolkit must be kept to an absolute minimum. At present it takes roughly 6 months for the toolkit providers to implement changes or additions to the data standards. NROSH will not be as flexible as the RSR for this reason. The RSR and NROSH should run parallel for a year in order to make sure what the regulator is asking for the regulator is getting. This will place an extra burden on housing associations during this time.