Regional Housing Strategy 2009

The North West Regional Housing Strategy, 2009

The North West Regional Housing Strategy was launched on 27^th March 2009 at the NWHF Annual Housing Conference by the Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

The Strategy has been produced against a backdrop of significant structural change that has called for new approaches to advance and develop the 2005 Strategy. The following are the key issues that have arisen throughout the consultation period that the revised Strategy needs to address:

The impact of the credit crunch on housing markets that were already extraordinarily dynamic;
A changing demography;
Identifying routes to establish or strengthen links between housing and economic agendas;
Ways of improving access to affordable homes whilst continuing to restructure vulnerable markets;
Spatially prioritising market intervention to ensure that limited public resources are used in the most effective way;
Ensuring greater spatial prioritisation of market intervention; and
Optimising the role of housing in tackling climate change and addressing fuel poverty.

The overarching driver behind the Strategy is to ensure the Region's housing offer supports sustained long term economic growth, inclusion and regeneration, while playing a central role in delivering the benefits of this to all communities. By strengthening and focussing interventions to ensure that housing markets operate effectively we will be able to address the tension that can exist between creating a long term housing offer that looks to people's aspirations and reacting to short term pressures to meet immediate housing needs.

In striving to meet this ambition, the overall vision of the Regional Housing Strategy is:

"to create balanced housing markets across the North West that support economic growth, strengthen economic and social inclusion and ensure that everyone has access to appropriate, well-designed high quality, affordable housing in sustainable, mixed and vibrant communities."

To achieve this there are three equally important and connected objectives for the Strategy:

Achieving the right quantity of housing
Continuing to raise the quality of the existing housing stock
Connecting people to the improved housing offer

The Strategy provides a framework for local authorities to shape their housing strategies and work with their districts in establishing market interventions that will create balance across their housing markets. Using intelligence gathered from Strategic Housing Market Assessments these interventions will address the core three objectives through locally determined solutions and tie housing into a wider policy environment.

Please access the following link for a full copy of the 2009 Regional Housing Strategy

For Practical good practice examples related to the aims of the strategy vist: http://www.housingnorthwest.co.uk/Rhsgp/?page=2

Supporting Documents:

Executive Summary

Technical annex:

Summary of responses on the Draft Consultation Document

Sustainability Appraisal and Equality Impact Assessment (including rural proofing and health impact assessment) of the 2009 RHS:

Appendix A; Appendix B; Appendix C and Appendix D.