Are 2,194 of our Council Homes missing?

Every year Bristol City Council publish a "Report for Tenants and Leaseholders". There is a lot of interesting information in these reports, but it is clear that they do not appear to be widely read as the report for last year was only downloaded 1,272 times. As a comparison the "Ideal Logic Combi Boiler" manual has been downloaded 98,745 times from the council website.

So I decided to read all of the reports and compare some data points from each of the reports to learn about trends over time. Here are the results of my analysis.

Please note that the number of "Tenants" and "Leaseholders" is not the same as the number of people living in the properties.

2024 Key Figures

But the figures are much more interesting when you look at the same measures across the years.

Homes

The number of homes has increased by 0.84% (227) over this period.

But the population of Bristol has increased by 8.16% (40,000) over the same period. Estimated population figures used are 450,000 for mid 2016 and 490,000 for mid 2024.

This suggests that the number of council homes has failed to keep pace with the increase in population.

The number of Empty Properties for 2024 (358) is higher than an any time.

The average number of days to re-let a property (79 Days) has increased dramatically. It was 52 days the year before.

The number of Properties Let has dropped below 1,000 for the first time.

People

The number of Tenants and Leaseholders has decreased from approximately 33,000 to 29,000 (12% decrease).

Some of the reports do give estimates of the number of people housed:

As at 1st April 2016
We house around 62,000 people - about 14% of Bristol’s population

As at 1st April 2022
In total, we estimate around 64,000 people live in the homes we manage. This is about 14% of Bristol’s population.

This means the number of people housed went up by 2,000 (3.2%) between 2016 and 2022. The figures for 2023 and 2024 were not published in the annual reports.

Tenants Ethnicity

The main changes are that "White British" reduced from 75% to 66% (-9% difference), and "BAME" increased from 17% to 22% (+5% difference).

Tenants 65 Plus and Disability

The percentage of Tenants aged 65+ has not changed much.

The percentage of "Disabled" Tenants has increased from 20% to 32% (+12% difference.)

Expenditure

The first column shows the total expenditure for council housing and the other columns show some of the categories of expenditure.

The management costs have steadily increased from £27.8M to £45.4M, which is an increase of 39% (£17.6M) between 2016 and 2024.

The biggest jump in expenditure was for "New Builds And Acquisitions" which increased from £20.3M in 2023 to £42.1M in 2024.

Possible Data Errors

I have checked and double checked my data analysis, but there is a small possibility that I may have mis-typed some numbers (I am number dyslexic!)

But I did find some inconsistencies and inaccuracies in some of the numbers provided by BCC, and I have corrected those where I could work out what the correct number should be.

One major "error" I found was in the report for 2024 which contained the following table on page 10:

The second column of figures does appear to contain the "Expenditure 2023-24" figures. But the first column does not contain the "Income 2023-24" figures. These are actually the figures for Expenditure from 2022-23. And the categories of income cannot be the same as the categories for expenditure. This suggests that this report was not checked properly before it was published. If BCC are making errors of this kind in this published report then there is a risk that other published data might be incorrect.

The screenshots below show that the "Total income 2023-24" figures actually come from the "Expenditure 2022-23" figures.

Tenants and Leaseholders

Here is a table that shows the key differences between Tenants and Leaseholders:

You can view the New Tenant's Handbook and the Leaseholder's Handbook for more information about the differences.