Up-date on the development of the new Greater Haven Gateway (GHG) sub-regional Housing Strategy

Context

Government budgets are likely to be severely constrained over coming years and difficult decisions will need to be made about priorities and the funding streams that follow them. Whilst we have little influence over macro economic events that will shape the future housing market we believe that the existing GHG partnership will help and provide support to tackle the challenges that we all face in maintaining and improving the housing options that can be provided for our local communities. 

This will include continued efforts to respond to the imbalance in supply and demand by increasing the supply of new housing, improving and making the best use of existing stock, maintaining equitable access to housing and support to ensure that that the effects of limited supply do not fall disproportionately on vulnerable households.

The new strategy will be the main document that outlines our key ideas and plans for housing in the sub region. It will provide a formal statement about our goals, the reasons why we believe they are attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. We believe this approach provides a more ‘future proof’ style of working as it clearly sets out thematic areas of work that move us, as individual Local Authorities, and collectively, as a partnership, towards achieving shared outcomes. In this way GHG will provide ‘added value’ to achieving shared local agendas, within the context of Local Investment Plans, whilst simultaneously situating our work within a broader locale to create the biggest impact.

Engaging with stakeholders

In March we held an event at Weston Community Stadium to engage with housing and non-housing stakeholders to develop the new GHG sub-regional housing strategy.

The event was well attended and well received with over 60 people attending to contribute their views and expertise on sub regional housing issues. A wide range of organisations were represented including: Registered Social Landlords,, developers, private sector agencies, health, probation, county planners, LAA representatives, drug and alcohol services, Supporting People, Haven Gateway, rural housing enablers, elected Local Authority (LA) Members and officers from the eight sub regional LAs.

The day was structured around four thematic areas and all the participants were asked to join a group and focus on one theme throughout the day. The Workshop agenda for each group was as follows:

Workshop 1. The Issues

• What is working well?

• What is working less well?

• What is getting in the way?

Workshop 2. The solutions

What could we do more of, what could we change to improve the way we are working to produce better outcomes and what would that look like?

Workshop 3. Prioritisation

The solutions were then prioritised using an impact and do-ability matrix e.g. the activities that have a big impact and are relatively easy to do have a higher priority than something with a lesser impact that was hard to do. Finally within the time available a small selection of activities was expanded using an action planning template.

Next steps

The wealth of information from this consultation event is being used to develop the new GHG sub-regional housing strategy. Other sources of information, such as needs data, and knowledge accrued from delivering the previous strategy are being combined to produce a robust, focused strategy that will helps us achieve better outcomes with fewer resources.

It is anticipated that the draft strategy will be completed by the end of July and we will be in a position to go back to stakeholders to seek their comments, approval and commitment to work together to help us deliver the objectives through the detailed activities in the Implementation Plan.

On completion the strategy will come back to each local authority to take it through their democratic processes to approve, sign off and adopt.

Click here to view the achievements of the Greater Haven Gateway sub region from 2006-10.