Quality Housing in Hounslow
Hounslow’s population is growing (14% between 2011 and 2021) and as elsewhere in London, access to decent affordable housing is a challenge for many people. The Council is tackling this through house-building programmes and significant investment in Council and Social Rent homes.
As part of a previous corporate pledge, the Council has secured 3,617 affordable homes through the planning process between 2018 and 2022. Over the same period, 1,143 new Council homes have either been completed, commenced on site, or the contract awarded
Our 2022-2026 Corporate Plan commits to ‘A Liveable Hounslow where people can live in homes that work for them and in neighbourhoods where they can belong’. This will be achieved partially through our commitment to building a further 1000 Council homes and buying another 1000 social rent homes for local people and those in need.
These are significant numbers of new homes, and we are working to ensure that the homes we are delivering are suitable, comfortable, safe and enjoyable to live in and to ensure that they are meeting the specific needs of our communities and can adapt as their lives change.
In an effort to address these challenges, we have produced Quality Housing in Hounslow: A Vision. A Hounslow-specific housing design quality Vision document which sets the bar high for what we expect of homes built by Hounslow or by partner organisations on our land.
The Vision document was produced as part of Hounslow Council’s ongoing efforts to improve the quality of the homes we deliver. It sets out at a corporate and strategic level what our qualitative vision is for Hounslow Homes. It was developed through extensive engagement with key stakeholders including residents, officers and councillors, ensuring that the document is rooted in the needs of our communities.
Quality Housing in Hounslow: a Vision isn’t just a vision piece, it is also practical tool. The document contains prompts designed to guide users towards a high-quality built outcome and can be picked up at any point during a housing project’s lifecycle and used to evaluate whether the scheme is meeting Hounslow’s definition of quality homes.
The document goes beyond existing policy and urges teams involved in the delivery of housing to assess their projects against a broad set of criteria covering everything from local identity to passive environmental design.
Quality Housing in Hounslow: a Vision is the result of the council's participation in the Delivering Quality Homes Pilot, (part of the Mayor of London’s Good Growth by Design programme), a GLA initiative that aims to support housing providers in reviewing and improving their internal processes and practices that lead to good quality housing. Hounslow were 1 of 4 partner organisations participating in the pilot and the only local authority to do so.
