More than one in ten homes in Peterborough don't meet minimum standards for safety and comfort

More than one in ten homes in Peterborough don’t meet minimum standards for safety and comfort, new Government data suggests.

Overall, 13 per cent of properties in the city can’t be considered ‘decent’ under the Government’s Decent Homes Standard measure which says they must be reasonably warm, in a reasonable state of repair, have reasonably modern facilities and meet legal health and safety standards.

Rentals are marginally worse than owner-occupied homes (14% non-decent versus 13%), on the whole, while in the rental sector, privately-rented homes are much more likely not to meet the standard than social housing provided by the council or a housing association.

More than 3,500 private rentals in Peterborough aren’t considered decent (22%), while the same is true of around fewer than 1,000 homes in the social housing sector (6%).

But while the data points towards problems with housing provision, particularly in the private rental sector, Peterborough doesn’t fare particularly badly in the national context.

Overall, it's 91st out of the 312 local authority areas included in the data and has a lower proportion of non-decent homes than anywhere in Cambridgeshire.

This puts it in a better position than Huntingdonshire (122nd), Fenland (141st) and Cambridge (153rd).

But the data isn’t entirely up-to-date – it comes from 2019 English Housing Survey (EHS) housing stock statistics – and may not tell the full story.

Released this week, it’s part of the Government’s Experimental Official Statistics series, meaning it’s still undergoing evaluation.

The statistics are also produced by data modelling which, in this case, involved analysing existing EHS statistics, rather than every property being surveyed.

They don’t, at least, contradict Local Government Authority (LGA) figures on Peterborough City Council's housing stock.

Zero local authority-owned homes in Peterborough are deemed non-decent, nor have they been in the past several years.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) says it “welcomes feedback on the data”, especially where it doesn’t align with “local authority level data and/or intelligence on housing quality”.

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