Agenda item

1.         Pursuant to Paragraph 11 of the Council Procedure Rules the following oral question was put by Councillor J. Barnes and answered by Councillor Byrne.

Oral Question:  Can the lead Member for Housing and Homes confirm what progress we have made with the idea of extending our housing stock by the purchase of pre-fabricated units for erection on Council owned land?

Answer:   Pre-fabricated or system built housing really has two applications in our housing strategy.  The first is quite straight forward, wherever we are building new houses and when we have our new Local Housing Company, certainly they will be looking to use system built houses; they will also be looking for housing design that minimises environmental impact and maximises the use of alternative energy and degradable materials.  That is the easy one.    The more obvious but slightly more complicated area is that of building homes or acquiring homes for the homeless or potentially homeless or to expand our accommodation available for those people who would otherwise be in bed and breakfast.  Pretty much like the pre-fabs schemes after the second world war.  Now this looks very easy, however, if you carry on with the tenant finder scheme and if we carry on acquiring buildings to rent they will already have some kind of maintenance in place, either by the landlord or by the housing association or similar organisation.  If we start building / using pre-fabricated buildings we will have to put in place similar maintenance arrangements to wrap around that housing.  So it looks like it is a very quick win, it will probably be a quick-ish win but it is not quite as simple as it seems but yes we are definitely looking at it but be aware those implication have to be looked at as well.  

Supplementary Oral Question: I trust that we will have report in the autumn on this, in addition to other aspects of the housing strategy, but my question is would it not be possible if we do the building for us to make arrangements with Optivo or some other housing provider to do the management or are we not going to use the management of our other existing properties – are they going to be handed over or are they going to be a management organisation which we could use?

Answer:  Thank you Councillor Barnes, yes, of course we are looking at how we fit system-built housing into our current strategy and all the elements you mentioned are obviously going to be considered.   It is a bit new, I do not know the traditional firms that do traditional house maintenance are necessarily immediately equipped to look after pre-fabricated or system built housing but again, provided that we look at all those options and do not drag our feet be assured that we will get something in place as quick as we can but we do have to look at the whole picture, it not as simple as putting a few pre-fabs up and hope, we do have to have proper maintenance arrangements in place.