A five-year strategy to improve accommodation and address homelessness has been approved for Cherwell.
Published: Friday, 7th February 2025
On Monday, 3 February, a meeting of Cherwell District Council’s executive endorsed the Housing Strategy 2025-2030.
Its priorities are: delivering affordable homes; improving conditions in existing housing; and promoting health and wellbeing through housing and tackling homelessness.
Councillor Nick Cotter, Portfolio Holder for Housing, said: “A good-quality, secure home is crucial to residents’ quality of life, wellbeing and opportunities. With the cost of living crisis hitting our communities, updating our housing strategy is a positive and very important step.
“It sets out how we will address some of the big overarching issues facing the housing sector in the coming years, such as affordability, supply of housing and the need to move to net zero.
“We can’t solve these issues on our own, but the strategy underscores our commitment to positively collaborating with partners and using our connections in other policy areas such as health, economy and planning to deliver better housing outcomes.”
The council will continue to work to improve standards in the private rented sector, through activities such as its landlords forum and its backing of the Better Housing Better Health service.
Additional efforts will focus on bringing empty properties back into use, providing more new affordable housing for social rent, improving the provision of temporary accommodation, and working in partnership to improve housing outcomes for vulnerable groups.
A new action plan has been developed to help realise the ambitions outlined in the strategy for people living in the district. Progress in delivering the action plan will be reported every year to the overview and scrutiny committee.