Lewes corporate plan

The home in which we live has a huge impact on our quality of life and our health. Access to safe and secure housing, that local people can afford, is fundamental to supporting wellbeing and enabling our communities to thrive.

Working with partners we will support, promote and enable the delivery of housing for local people to buy and rent, including through community land trusts and other relevant community groups. We will seek to rebalance our local housing markets with an ambition to ensure these align with our sustainability aims.

We will deliver and maintain affordable, high quality homes. We will do this in partnership with TOLD (Tenants of Lewes District). Alongside providing council housing, we will support people to access other social housing and private rented accommodation, particularly supporting those who are at risk of homelessness. Using our planning policies we will work to ensure provision of the right homes in the right places for local people.

Key areas

We will:

• Enable the delivery of an additional 300 new affordable homes, across the district, alongside 200 new council houses.
• Support the provision of social, affordable and sustainable homes for our tenants and residents.
• Ensure, where possible, that new homes are both energy and resource efficient, alongside being climate and flood resilient, and nature-friendly.
• Build more rented council homes in the district, including using innovative approaches such as modular housing.
• Provide the broadest possible range of accessible housing to meet the diverse needs of the community.
• Explore opportunities to work with public sector partners to identify land suitable for housing development, where social rents could be achieved.
• Use our planning system to support the provision of truly affordable housing, narrowing the inequality that exists whilst delivering for our tenants and residents even more effectively.
• Implement a system of revolving loans to enable Community Land Trusts to develop affordable housing in the area.
• Reduce the reliance on, and need for, temporary and emergency accommodation. Improve prevention measures for those experiencing homelessness and deliver more appropriate accommodation.
• Support independent living, including providing accessible housing for those with physical and additional support needs, and work with partners on health, housing and care strategies that enable supported living.
• Ensure residents have equal access to housing services across the district and have a strong voice in how their homes and communities are managed.
• Prioritise regulatory and legislative compliance to ensure the council owned homes remain at a high standard, including improving responsiveness on repairs and maintenance, retrofitting, making them cheaper to heat and improving shared and amenity space.
• Ensure that when new housing is being delivered, the developers minimise waste and avoid removing material from the development site where possible.
• Support and champion the need for, sufficient infrastructure provision and community facilities close to locations where new housing developments are taking place.

4 year goals:

• Enabling the delivery of 300 new affordable homes
• Delivering 200 additional council houses
• Directly deliver more council housing for rent
• More sustainable and energy efficient homes across the district
• Accessible housing for those with additional support needs