Our One Hounslow approach to tackling current and projected housing need, over the next six years.
Incorporating Homelessness and Rough Sleeping.
This succeeds our previous Housing Strategy, which ran between 2019 and 2024 and set out our plans to deliver affordable homes and sustainable communities across Hounslow. Over the past five years we have faced many challenges: from the unexpected Pandemic that hit Hounslow very hard economically, increasing the number of households on benefits and homeless approaches to the council; to the anticipated growth in the borough’s population; build-cost inflation making maintenance and construction more expensive; and the escalating unaffordability of housing. Together these have added pressure to Hounslow’s already challenging housing market, making it more difficult for residents to rent or buy their own homes. Despite this, over the course of the last strategy we successfully secured an additional 2,300 affordable homes, to help house families in need in the borough.
New laws – to improve the safety of peoples’ homes and regulate the services received by tenants from their landlords – have now been passed or are progressing through Parliament and are expected to come into force this year, specifically: the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023, Building Safety Act 2022, and Renters Rights Bill 2025. These reinforce that resident safety is paramount across all tenures of housing. We are refocussing our efforts to ensure that we meet the requirements of these new laws, but this necessarily draws on our pool of limited funding, which has not increased in proportion to these new burdens.
We will continue to demand high standards of landlords in Hounslow, setting ourselves as the manager of 16,000 council homes as an example, putting tenants first and ensuring that all homes are safe, decent and economical to live in. We will continue to demand a fair quota of affordable housing from new developments across the borough, in line with the Mayor of London’s Housing Strategy and our Local Plan. We will continue to build and invest in our housing stock, noting that due to the constraints of available funding, our capacity to do so is now more limited than in previous years.
The One Hounslow Principles of our Corporate Plan inform our approach: Place-based, Data-driven, Co-created and Green by design, Building Community Wealth and Tackling Inequalities. The Housing Strategy 2025-2030 adopts a flexible plan to tackle housing need in Hounslow, based on engagement with residents and cooperation with partners, to deliver a robust programme of actions that will mitigate housing pressures and ensure all our residents have access to a good-quality housing, suited to their needs.
