West London Housing Partnership

The West London Housing Partnership

The West London Housing Partnership consists of the 7 West London boroughs: Brent; Ealing; Hammersmith & Fulham; Harrow; Hillingdon; Hounslow, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

The purpose of the Housing Partnership is to work together to meet the housing strategy objectives of the member boroughs. In order to achieve this we will:

• Lobby for the interests of the sub-region on housing issues;
• Develop collaborative working across the sub region, and between
boroughs;
• Improve provision of housing services in West London through
sharing knowledge, expertise and resources, undertaking joint ventures
where this is beneficial, and maximizing additional resources wherever
possible.
• Develop an excellent understanding of housing demand, needs and
conditions across West London, and an understanding of how this relates
to wider housing markets.

West London Projects

The 7 boroughs have been working in partnership for around 5 years and now have a number of joint projects operating across the West London sub region. These include:

• West London Locata: the choice based lettings system for people seeking council and housing association accommodation in West London.
• West London Letstart: a new project to help qualifying tenant’s access accommodation in the private rented sector.
• West London Thermal Comfort Programme: The West London boroughs working in partnership with London Warm Zones to install energy efficiency measures in homes across the sub region.
• West London HELP: a new scheme to help homeless households into employment
• West London Better Homes: a small grants scheme available to landlords who let property through borough lettings schemes.
• West London Empty Homes scheme: offering limited grants to owners of empty properties to bring them back into use to let through borough lettings schemes
• West London Fair Money: a scheme to help vulnerable home owners find suitable finance to carry out essential works to ensure their homes meet the decent homes standard
• West London Supporting People Accreditation Scheme: a joint scheme to accredit providers of supported housing and floating support for vulnerable people across West London.

Future projects

• Your Move: a new scheme to help under-occupiers move to smaller, high quality homes, thus releasing larger homes (which are in very short supply) for use by overcrowded households.
• West London Temporary to Settled Accommodation scheme: a joint scheme to purchase homes for use as temporary accommodation in the short term and social housing in the longer term.
• West London Housing Market Assessment: a future project to look at housing needs and demand across the various housing markets and sub markets both locally and more widely, which will inform borough strategies and Local Development Frameworks.

New Housing & Housing Investment

A biennial investment guide is produced setting out the sub regional requirements for new build housing in West London. The current West London Housing Investment Guide 2008-11sets out 5 key West London requirements for housing developers wishing to build in the sub region:

• To create innovative options for home ownership
• To build larger homes across all tenures
• To deliver excellent quality and design across all tenures
• To create strong, cohesive and sustainable communities
• To deliver best practice on environmental sustainability

Access to new homes

A further issue for the Housing Partnership concerning new homes is to reach agreement on the apportionment of lettings to new homes built with Housing Corporation grant in the West London sub region, and across the London region in general. Having reached an agreement on the apportionment of lettings, a nominations protocol is now being drafted, the aims of which are:

• To incentivise delivery of affordable housing in West London and to ensure that funding continues to be available for West London
• To ensure that all boroughs meet their own housing need as far as possible within borough
• To ensure that those boroughs that have limited capacity to build in borough have access to an appropriate share of units developed in the sub region.

Sub Regional Working Groups
Each of the seven boroughs hosts a working group to take forward specific areas from the West London Housing Strategy Action Plan. Sub groups of these groups are also set up from time to time to deliver specific pieces of work. Click on a box on the left hand side of the screen to go to the area of work you are intersted in.