Social renting is the tenure where English local authorities differ most sharply from one another, and the gap has almost nothing to do with distance from London.
Census 2021 asked households who their landlord was. Aggregate the answers by local authority and the national picture is 18.0% renting from a council or housing association. The spread underneath that average is nearly sevenfold.
The top of the table is inner London, and it is inner London by a distance. Islington, Hackney, Southwark, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets and Camden all sit at double the national rate or more. These are the boroughs that built most heavily in the post-war decades and, in many cases, sold least of it afterwards.
The bottom is a different country. Castle Point, Fylde, Wyre, Ribble Valley: smaller authorities, mostly suburban or coastal, where owner-occupation runs the table and council building was never at that scale to begin with.
The tempting read is a London story, and it falls apart quickly. Barking and Dagenham sits at 32.3%, closer to Camden than to Castle Point, and both of those are Thames Estuary places within an hour of each other. What separates them is not geography but what each was doing in the 1950s and 60s, and how much of that stock stayed in public hands. Tenure is one of the few things in this dataset that records a policy decision rather than a physical fact.
It is also the one number here that will not move for years. Tenure comes from the census, and the census comes round in 2031.