Classification of housing association grant for public accounting purposes

You asked

I would like to request the following information under the Freedom of Information Act:

• All correspondence between the Office for National Statistics and government departments, officials or ministers, regarding the classification of housing association grant for public accounting purposes sent between 14th October 2015 and 14th April 2016

We said

This assessment of the classification of grants paid to social housing providers in England was requested (verbally) by the area within ONS responsible for Public Corporation statistics. As you will appreciate, their interest arises from our reclassification of registered providers of social housing in England as Public Non-Financial Corporations - which leads them to look at the transactions those organisations engage in. They asked for this assessment in order to be sure of compiling the statistics correctly.

I therefore attach the correspondence we have had with government departments, officials, or ministers on this matter as requested. The first email was sent to colleagues at the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) by the ONS Public Corporations statistics team in gathering relevant contextual information to provide to the ONS classifications team ahead of possible inclusion of a review of the classification of these grants on the March 2016 Classifications Forward Work-Plan. The HCA responded to this by phone and a summary of that conversation is contained in the second email which was sent to HM Treasury in response to their verbal request for clarification on what the 'grants paid to Private Registered Providers of social housing in England' item included in our March 2016 Forward Work-Plan would be looking at. The Forward Work-Plan can be found on the ONS website.

However, I would like to add that the HCA have since come back to us (outside the period covered by your request) with clarifications to the record of the phone conversation which took place, namely that:

• from the HCA perspective possible repayments of grant are a contingent asset, they would theoretically be a contingent liability of the relevant social housing providers
• that any grants from/potentially repayable to the Greater London Authority (GLA) is already recorded in the figures rather than elsewhere
• the "other capital grants" line in Global accounts also covers grants from non-government sources