Look-ups from Local Authority and postcode sectors to Broad Rental Market Areas (BRMAs)
Alex Fenton
Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics
Summary
The accompanying files contain look-ups from two common British geographic systems, local authorities and postcode sectors, to the Broad Rental Market Areas (BRMA) that are defined for the administration of Housing Benefit for private tenants. They allow data that is coded by local authority or postcode sector to be linked to data that is coded by BRMA, such as the current or historic maximum rates of Housing Benefit payable. They are suitable for use in policy analysis and simulations where the maximum amounts of benefit a claimant in a specific place is entitled to needs to be known.
Background
In Great Britain, Housing Benefit for private tenants has, since 2008, been administered under a system known as Local Housing Allowance (LHA). As part of the LHA system, the maximum benefit amounts payable for a given property size in a given place are set by reference to Broad Rental Market Areas. These are areas ‘within which a person could reasonably be expected to live having regard to facilities and services for the purposes of health, education, recreation, personal banking and shopping, taking account of the distance of travel by public and private transport, to and from facilities and services of the same type and similar standard.' A BRMA must contain a variety of residential property types held by a variety of tenancies and 'distinct areas of residential accommodation'.
Around 100 BRMAs were defined in Britain according to this definition; however, they were set without regard to existing administrative geographies such as local authority districts or wards. Furthermore, although outline maps were published, no formal definitions or geographic data have been made available for BRMAs. For the purposes of policy analysis, therefore, the accompanying data were extracted from the VOA website in September 2010 and compiled as tables.
Contents
Aside from this file, the package contains two comma-separated files with the lookups for local authorities and postcode sectors. Each is a table containing the source geographies (those likely to appear in datasets being analysed, such as of individual claimant households) and the corresponding BRMA codes.
ladistrict_2_brma.csv gives look-ups from local authority districts / council areas and contains the following fields:
Field name	Description	
BRMALA	The VOA’s internal code for this local authority	
LA	The ONS (2001 Census) code for this local authority	
LANAME	The descriptive name of the local authority	
BRMA	The VOA internal code for the Broad Rental Market Area	
BRMANAME	The VOA descriptive name for the Broad Rental Market Area	

Note that since BRMA boundaries do not follow administrative boundaries, local authorities can have two or more corresponding BRMAs.
postcodesector_2_brma.csv gives look-ups from postcode sectors (eg AB1 1**) and contains the following fields:
Field name	Description	
PCSECTOR	The postcode sector code	
BRMA	The VOA internal code for the Broad Rental Market Area	
BRMANAME	The VOA descriptive name for the Broad Rental Market Area