ONS is set to replace its Index of Private Housing Rental Prices (IPHRP) with a Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) in March 2024, to produce a single monthly publication that provides more detailed insight into the UK rental market.
According to ONS, the new PIPR is more responsive to market changes than the current IPHRP because of the differences in methodology used.
On average, UK annual percentage change reported by the PIPR is 0.7 percentage points higher than the IPHRP between January 2016 and October 2023.
PIPR makes use of all available data collected in the latest month, while the IPHRP splits the data between a sample (used to calculate the indices) and a substitution pool.
Furthermore, PIPR stratifies at a lower geographical level than IPHRP, so the aggregated data for PIPR are more representative of the UK rental market — which means that the ONS can better represent geographical areas that are under-collected compared with other geographical areas, which tend to be large cities with larger rental price growth.
