The Rent Registration Service is part of the Scottish Government. Its work centres around the private rented housing sector in Scotland, and has three main functions:
- Gathering market evidence on rents to set Local Housing Allowances (LHA)
- To provide valuations for tenants and landlords for Fair Rent registrations - that is, a rent level set by rent officers based on a range of information about the property
- To calculate the level of housing benefit subsidy that local authorities receive from central government
Setting Local Housing Allowance
Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is set from market evidence of rents in Scotland and comes in a variety of formats. The best evidence available is provided by those actually paying rents.