Tracking affordable housing is crucial to deliver on a basic human need
Southwark Council are committed to delivering significant numbers of affordable homes. To do that, they had to find a way of monitoring how many affordable homes they have and tracking them from agreement to occupation throughout their lifespan
Tracking affordable housing is an ongoing challenge and is crucial to helping local authorities deliver a home for everyone who needs one.
At the time of the project, the Office Of National Statistics was 95% sure there were somewhere between 42,500 and 55,500 homes rented from a local authority or housing association in Southwark. That’s a margin of 13,000 homes. The same issue is faced by councils across the UK.
Outcome
We worked with the Council to build a new service which means affordable housing supply can be effectively monitored for the first time. The service doesn’t need to integrate with other systems, making it easy for other councils to use. So there is huge potential to share and scale the service.
The service allows councils to know with confidence that they are meeting their commitment to provide genuinely affordable housing for their communities.
What we did
The combination of Southwark’s knowledge of the local area and housing system, and dxw’s experience in building user-centred services, meant a working prototype was operating in 10 weeks. The planning department and a multidisciplinary team from dxw worked together to build the prototype based on research with different users.
Traditionally there’s been a disjoint between planning and the management of housing. Planning is a legal process which specifies an area of land but without addresses for new homes. To manage homes that have been built, you need to know their address.
In S106 agreements councils and developers agree a number of affordable housing units. The developer (hopefully) builds them and then the new affordable housing units are included in official statistics. But at no point in the process do councils know specific addresses. We can’t know if an affordable housing unit is being used by the people that need it if we don’t know where it is.
The new service means that when an agreement is made between a council and developer for an affordable home, a planning officer will enter the details, taking just a few minutes. This creates an individual record for each property, as a single identifiable affordable home which can be tracked. When the building is finished the developer will log on and say it’s completed, and when they apply for addresses, they and the local authority will add them.
Because the service doesn’t need to be integrated with other data or technology systems, it avoids compatibility issues and legacy technology problems. This means it can be easily adopted by any local authority. Throughout development, testing was carried out weekly with planning and policy teams enabling them to co-design the system. It has the potential to transform how council staff and others associated with the housing system work.
The service provides accurate live data about affordable homes that can be shared with the public.
The wider impact
The new service means it’s less likely that affordable housing will be misused. Homes turn up on Airbnb, get sublet, and get sold to people that aren’t eligible. Enforcement officers can now proactively spot potential problems and intervene. The service also makes it easier for conveyancing solicitors to find out if a property shouldn’t be sold on because it’s an affordable home.
It enables councils to know how many affordable homes are available, so they can plan how many more to build based on accurate data. The end result should be reduced waiting lists for housing and local residents with better access to an affordable council maintained property.
If this service is adopted more widely it would enable the accurate and consistent collation and reporting of data on affordable housing stock at local, regional and national level in a way that just hasn’t been possible before.
