Issue - meetings

Report of the Cabinet Member Housing

RESOLVED THAT:

1.    The Housing, Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Strategy Action Plan Update for 2022 be approved.

The Cabinet Member Housing introduced the report, thanking officers for their hard work in putting it together. The strategy set out their vision and priorities in order to achieve four key outcomes, namely increasing the provision of affordable housing; making best use of existing housing and improving our neighbourhoods, tackling homelessness and rough sleeping; and improving the health and wellbeing of our communities. The strategy was originally approved by Cabinet in July 2018, and was a living document that was updated annually to reflect changing challenges and opportunities. This report sought to review the most notable achievements and look forward to the future.

71 new affordable homes had been provided during 2021/22, 69% of which were delivered over and above what would have been delivered through market forces alone. They were continuing to identify new sites for more CBC-owned affordable housing and had a strong pipeline of 366 affordable homes. That figure would continue to improve, and she was confident they would reach their pipeline target of 500 affordable homes by the end of the year. They were expecting to allocate approximately £17m from the Housing Revenue Account on new affordable homes for the period 2022/23, and were projecting further investment of c.£50m over the following 2 years to March 2025. This was in addition to the Golden Valley Development in West Cheltenham, which would see the provision of over 3,000 new homes, 35% of which would be affordable.

This increase in the delivery of affordable housing in Cheltenham was part of a wider £180m housing investment plan. As part of this plan, CBH had acquired, refurbished and let 13 high quality homes in the private rented sector at St George’s Place in the town centre. They were also investing in new net zero carbon homes, with planning permission now granted at 320 Swindon Road for 24 highly energy efficient new homes.

In addition to this, they had improved the safety of more than 847 households in the private sector in Cheltenham, while three long term empty homes had also been brought back into use. Due to recent organisational improvements, the council was in a better position to explore options for the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders, with the aim of bringing the most difficult properties back into use. Through the Warm & Well scheme, which provided provides free, impartial home energy efficiency advice to fight fuel poverty, they had undertaken 88 energy efficiency measures across 70 properties in Cheltenham, leading to estimated lifetime savings of 1,871 tonnes of carbon, and reductions in energy bills.

Despite the significant impact of the pandemic on the sector, CBH had also ensured that their replacement doors and window programme would be completed by March 2023. Improvement so far had contributed to a further uplift in the SAP rating of their homes to 73.02, compared with 72.02 in 2019, and exceeding the average SAP rating of 69 for local authority housing stock. CBC (via CBH) also secured approximately £780k grant following a successful bid earlier  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6