Overview of housing renewal (including Disabled Facilities Grants)

Renewal grants and loans are assistance given by Local Authorities (LA) to private households, are limited to repairs, improvements and adaptation to their dwellings and are covered by the Regulatory Reform (Housing Assistance England and Wales) Order 2002 which became law on 18 July 2002.

The Order gives local authorities greater discretionary powers to provide assistance such as low cost loans and equity release as well as grants to private homeowners and others to help them to renovate, repair or adapt their home. The Order also enables authorities to provide other sorts of assistance, for example helping someone move to more suitable accommodation where this is a better option than repairing or adapting their existing home.

Mandatory Disabled Facilities Grants (DFG) is outside the scope of the new reforms

The expenditure for housing renewal including discretionary DFG is funded by a combination of central government and local authorities' own resources. The central government resource includes: the housing capital investment allocation; grants from Housing Market Renewal, Neighbourhood Renewal, New Deal for Community, and the Single Regeneration Budget. For mandatory DFG, central government contributes up to 60% of the total LAs' expenditure in a form of a specific grant.

Live tables 313 and 314 provide the main data (i.e. the number and amount) for housing renewal grants and DFG respectively. The main source for this is the Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix return (HSSA). To see the full range of data collected for this form, please visit the topic section on Local authority housing strategy and business plan data . For information on DFG policy and the amount of DFG allocations given to LAs, please see the section on Housing adaptations for disabled people below.

There are other detailed private sector data related to unfit dwellings, Houses in Multiple Occupancy (HMO), and data on dwellings closed or demolished through Clearance Orders. All of this historic data was collected from the P4 return but since this return was replaced by the HSSA return from 2003/04, this information is no longer collected. Hence the live tables containing old data cannot be updated.