Castle Point Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Consultation

Our Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Strategy 2019-2024 sets out the key housing and related issues affecting the borough and the Council’s plan to meet the housing needs identified.  
We have drafted our Strategy and identified priorities and actions to meet identified needs.  We are interested in hearing your views on whether these are the correct priorities for us to focus on.


1.    Key Priorities

The key priorities in the draft Strategy are:

  • Maximise Homelessness Prevention
  • Ensure the availability of good quality and affordable temporary housing
  • Maximise the capacity of the service to fulfil all our obligations and continuously improve our performance.

2.    Maximise Homelessness Prevention

To support the maximisation of homelessness prevention we propose to:

  • Fully implement the requirements of the Homeless Reduction Act and monitor compliance.
  • Work with private sector landlords and caravan parks to reduce the number of evictions.
  • Work closely with partner agencies to co-ordinate and ensure the right advice and guidance is provided to clients.
  • Work intensively with families to provide mediation and clear pathways into independent living to reduce young people becoming homeless.  
  • Work with victims of domestic abuse, to ensure that all needs are met by collaborative work with the South Essex Domestic Abuse Hub.
  • Work with landlords of all tenures to provide tenancy sustainment; particularly with households who are affected by welfare reforms     
  • Look to develop our own in-house social lettings agency working with the private sector to identify suitable private sector accommodation, developing agreements and schemes with landlords to provide an assured rent and to manage the accommodation on their behalf.    

3.    Ensure the availability of good quality and affordable temporary housing.

To ensure the availability of good quality and affordable temporary housing we propose to:

  • Construct good quality short term accommodation ourselves
  • Deliver an additional 16 units by March 2021
  • Plan to deliver the first Council owned house in multiple occupation by March 2020.

4.    To maximise the capacity of the service to fulfil all our obligations and continuously improve our performance we propose to:

  • Review the Homelessness Service to ensure there is sufficient staffing capacity in place to meet all our obligations under the Homeless Reduction Act and to ensure we can meet our performance targets.
  • Work with partners to ensure a full and complete advisory service is maintained for all clients seeking advice to prevent homelessness.
  • Work with partners to ensure clients are well advised and able to manage the impact of Universal Credit and other welfare reforms to minimise homelessness.
  • Look for opportunities to work with other partners including Landlords to ensure robust and reliable information and advice is provided as much as possible at the first point of contact.  
Priorities

Note: Questions marked by * are mandatory