West London Housing Partnership
Tackling Overcrowding
Living in overcrowded conditions can have a huge impact on the quality of people’s lives. It can cause enormous tensions within a household, effect the educational attainment of children and have a negative impact on people’s health.
Increasing demands for social housing and in particular for larger family units means that households who are overcrowded have a long wait for a suitable sized property to become available.
The West London Partners are committed to tackling overcrowding and in January 2007 appointed David Clayton as sub-regional co-ordinator to work with the boroughs and RSLs (Registered Social Landlords) to focus on and develop initiatives at a borough and sub-regional level around overcrowding.
In December 2007, the CLG produced its ‘Tackling overcrowding in England – An Action Plan’, which gave a new focus to the problem of Overcrowding and called for a substantial reduction in the number of households who are living in overcrowded conditions. The CLG gave each London Borough a ‘Pathfinder’ status and funding to develop further housing options and advice services targeted at overcrowded households.
David has been working closely with both the CLG and boroughs in collecting data on the levels of and severity of overcrowding in the sub-region. He is also working with boroughs individually in developing their action plans and initiatives for the coming year and looking at ways we can work more effectively as a sub-region.
In West London a Project Group meets on a regular basis and consists of representatives from each borough and key RSL partners. The project board has been looking at the issues around overcrowding, sharing best practice, developing initiatives and getting sub-regional projects up and running.
Currently we have a number of sub-regional projects that are being developed. Firstly looking at how we can make better use of our stock. A key area will be to develop a number of schemes that will encourage and assist those households who are currently under-occupying larger properties to move to smaller homes and thus freeing up larger family properties.
We are also looking at ways of how we can work directly with overcrowded households. This maybe as simple as making small alterations to their current property to increase its ‘liveability’ or looking at the household and assisting some of the adult members of the household to move on and access employment and training.
Data Collection
All boroughs are currently preparing returns for the CLG on levels of overcrowding. The six LOCATA boroughs have agreed to use this system to record and monitor overcrowding. Funding for this will come from the Tackling Overcrowding Pathfinder funding. We will be publishing this data shortly.
Last updated: 09 June 2008