This Case Study is the second blog covering the RLBA's work with MHCLG on delivering an innovative housing data solution for Local Authorities around the First Homes initiative.  This blog describes the successful implementation of the solution and highlights the work with Bristol City Council.

The challenge

There is a growing demand for Local Authorities to be able monitor and report on issues in privately owned housing in the UK. The NetZero revolution has increased the monitoring burden for Local Authorities around the energy efficiency of homes in their area, and the Government’s Help to Buy schemes, which need local distribution and management, have similarly brought new monitoring challenges. 

One such scheme is Home England’s ‘First Homes’ scheme, which enables qualified locals to buy units in new build developments overseen by Local Authorities at a significant discount. Developers working under the First Homes framework typically designate 20% of their units to be sold at an average of 30% discount to market rates.

While Local Authorities take no ownership in these properties, the units are intended to carry their First Home status into future sales. Local Authorities are required to keep lists of eligible locals, not just for the first sale, but for these future sales when owners are required to sell them back into the First Homes framework. Maintaining the integrity of the First Homes scheme through future purchases means being aware of when units are offered for sale. The units are also restricted in their ability to be let out in the private rental market. Owners are only allowed to rent them out in very limited and very specific circumstances.

This means that Local Authorities need to be able to monitor the status of these properties throughout their life, and to be aware if and when their occupancy or tenure might change. But Local Authorities don’t currently have the systems to maintain this level of connectivity and monitoring of homes outside of their own social housing stock. They also don’t have the systems to monitor the sales and rental markets for early warning signs of abuse of the First Homes properties.

The solution

The UK is slowly catching up with the roll-out of Digital Property Logbooks for residential property. This is a new digital product that has been increasingly adopted across Europe in the last few years. In countries like France and Belgium Logbooks are now mandatory for all new homes as well as for any homes that have had a significant refurbishment or energy efficiency upgrade. A small group of proptech companies have pioneered different forms of digital property logbook for the UK targeted at both the privately owned and social housing sectors. Represented by a trade body - the Residential Logbook Association (RLBA) - they have been making the case to national and local governments that logbooks can deliver against a range of policy objectives. These will eventually include digital planning, energy monitoring, NetZero improvements and even homeowner communications.  From the outset, the RLBA has driven the use of the UPRN within Logbooks and have included it as a mandatory field in the RLBA recommended Logbook Data Schema.

As RLBA Project Lead Simon Lumb said “a key function of Logbooks is to aggregate data from a wide selection of public and private sources. The UPRN is the only data point that can enable us to do that”.

A key issue in the roll-out of Logbooks has been the prevention of property fraud: making sure that only the verified owner of a property is able to create and access a Logbook.  To support this, the RLBA has built a National Register of Logbooks which maintains a list of Logbooks issued by trusted partners such as Conveyancers, Estate Agents and Local Authorities.  The UPRN is the key search term the Register relies on.  The Register also works to establish the tenure status of any given property, eg if it is being offered for rent or sale. 

Working with MHCLG and Homes England, it was suggested that, if all First Homes properties were given an RLBA endorsed Logbook, then the Logbook Register could provide a solution to Local Authorities’ data monitoring needs around the First Home’s scheme. To deliver this would also require development of a specific ‘First Homes Logbook’ optimised for the needs of Local Authorities. Details of this Logbook, and the way it would be used by Developers, Local Authorities and the National Logbook Register, were developed by the RLBA in conjunction with MHCLG through a series of workshops in 2023 and put into development in 2024. The role of Logbooks in the First Homes Scheme was then added to the Homes England guidance notes for the scheme, which were circulated to participating authorities in 2024.

Local Authorities participating in the First Homes scheme are now able to require developers to provide an RLBA registered ‘First Homes Logbook’ for each of their units sold within the First Homes scheme. The first Local Authority to provide logbooks and access the National Logbook Register is Bristol City Council, who came on board as a pioneer user in August 2024. Initially used to ‘back-fill’ logbooks on schemes already built, the Council is now incorporating them as a requirement in future First Homes backed developments.

Under the initiative, the Logbooks are created once the Section 106 Planning Consent has been delivered and are Registered on the National Logbook Register as ‘unbuilt units’.  At this point the UPRN is issue to the developer and lodged in the Logbook [check this with Simon].   The initiative has also entailed the creation of a Local Authorities specific interface and dashboard for the National Register of Logbooks.   The dashboard enables a Local Authority to monitor units as they progress through the key stages of the scheme through Construction, Marketing (when the Council need to provide candidate buyers), Conveyancing, Occupation and ultimately Resale (when the Council once gain needs to provide candidate buyers).  During Occupation, the system provides Local Authorities with alerts if a property is listed on any agents websites for lettings or sales or on any property boards such as Gumtree or AirBnB.

The benefits

Outside of the scheme the Logbook Register had already begun to be integrated into the software used by estate agents and Conveyancers. This enables an exchange of data based on schemas and APIs developed by the Conveyancing industry themselves, that the First Homes Logbooks are able to piggy back on.  This has facilitated the Local Authorities interaction with commercial systems in the property lettings and sales markets. The UPRN provides the key property identifier that sits at the heart of the data exchange as it cuts across different industry sectors. 

The Logbooks themselves contain digital versions of all the key handover information that a developer would normally give to a first time buyer and, with homeowner permission, can exchange data directly with Council systems as they become available.  For developers there is almost no incremental cost as they have to compile handover packs (containing user manuals, guarantees, warranties etc) currently in analogue form.  The Logbooks replace these handover packs and many developers are already swapping to using Logbooks for their developments.

The initiative has created a platform by which LAs are able to investigate how developers could be compelled to deliver including materials records and circularity statements. In time it is envisaged that Logbooks could provide regular updates to Local Authorities on issues of growing concern like carbon footprints and energy use of homes.

Implications

More broadly, the implications of the First Homes and other Help To Buy initiatives are that Local Authorities are having to interact with industries like conveyancing, lettings & rental and the mortgage industries in ways they previously never had to. Most importantly, these industries are themselves digitising and Local Authorities will increasingly have to exchange data with the new systems being built by those sectors.  Having the UPRN as the unifying identifier for property that cuts across a variety of industries has enabled data exchanges within the First Homes Logbook initiative.

The First Homes Logbooks initiative represents the first formal use of digital property logbooks by the public sector in the UK to interact with privately-owned homes and their owners. The home is that initially, its benefits could be rolled across to all the other forms of Help To Buy schemes in the UK as a statement of Government intent. Longer term it provides a basis for Local Councils to explore how they want to interact with private homes in the digital arena over the coming decades.