Draft Housing, Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy 2025-2030 - Consultation

To address this priority, we will:

• Improve our homeless prevention outcomes, through better outreach and more targeted advice and support for the groups that are most susceptible to homelessness.
• Reinforce the emphasis on assisting the most vulnerable homeless households, making clearer the help available for those who are lower priority, by updating our Allocations Policy and housing advice to residents.
• Optimise the use of Temporary Accommodation, minimising the numbers while optimising the safety, quality and cost, by incentivising move-on for residents and strategic procurement of properties from landlords.
• Develop our pathway to help rough sleepers get and stay off the streets, addressing their mental health and substance misuse needs, to help sustain them in appropriate accommodation.

To address this priority, we will:

• Ensure the highest standards of health and safety compliance, continuing and building on our existing successes with a new, dedicated ICT system and closer cooperation between safety specialists and housing officers.
• Maintain and make good use of our council homes, formally adopting a new Council Housing Asset Management Plan and using it to review options for disused properties.
• Manage tenancies effectively, fairly and transparently, implementing new policies aligned to the Regulator of Social Housing’s Consumer Standards, evaluating their impact to ensure they are beneficial for all tenants.
• Listen and respond to our tenants’ concerns, engaging with more residents to develop, harness and learn from their feedback and complaints.
• Deliver an efficient, value for money repairs service, by optimising our commissioning arrangements and streamlining processes.

To address this priority, we will:

• Link across Council services to raise awareness of the new standards, educating Private Rented Sector tenants and landlords on their rights and responsibilities.
• Support landlords with licensing and best practice, ensuring that there is a formal framework setting out clear and robust expectations for PRS landlords to follow.
• Enforce against landlords not meeting the standard, taking action against those that break the law or place residents at risk through breaches of Health and Safety.

To address this priority, we will:

• Work with partners to learn from each other and build on good practice, pooling resources where appropriate to achieve shared goals.
• Safeguard vulnerable residents, ensuring that we have procedures in place to mitigate the risks specific to groups that are disproportionately disadvantaged or affected by poor housing.
• Sustain independence through suitable accommodation, whether this is an offer of appropriate housing or adaptations made to an existing property.
• Encourage safer, greener healthier neighbourhoods, seeking opportunities to tackle crime, the climate emergency and improve health through advancing the design of services and localities.
• Tackle inequalities to create resilient, flourishing communities

To address this priority, we will:

• Take a flexible, partnership approach to the development of new affordable homes.
• Call for new affordable homes to match Hounslow’s existing housing needs, including more homes for large families, genuinely disabled-adapted properties, and adequate provision for equalities groups including Gypsies and Travellers.
• Promote high quality, sustainable development that is aligned to Hounslow’s Local Plan, and the Mayor of London’s London Plan and London Housing Strategy.

When developing this new strategy, the options open to the Council were:

• Draft a new Housing, Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy
• Review and update the previous Housing Strategy document
• Do nothing (not feasible, given statutory obligations)

The Council’s view is that the last strategy does not meet current housing needs in the borough and that a Housing, Homelessness and Rough Sleeping strategy is important and needed.