Wigan Borough Housing Strategy 2020
The Wigan Borough Housing Strategy 2020 outlines our overall plans and ambitions to ensure our borough is providing high quality, affordable and accessible homes for all.
It shapes how the Council, working together with our partners and communities, will ensure that our borough has the right homes, new and existing, for the right people in the right places.
It acknowledges the multiple areas of lives which housing touches upon, and sets out how our housing plans will help ensure that housing meets the various support needs of our residents, and provides healthy and secure accommodation for people in vibrant communities that care for one another.
Our proposals go way beyond the projected numbers of new homes required. In this strategy, we focus on:
- Dynamics between people at different stages of their lives
- Types of homes they can afford and what they would ideally want
- Suitability of homes that are available
- Community influence over what is built where
- Improving the homes we have
- Helping people to solve their housing related problems
- How people can be helped to access a home they want
- How all this impacts on our local economy, strengthening the Wigan £, and helping to achieve our carbon neutral ambitions.
For more information you can:
Wigan Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) 2020
The Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) 2020 provides an up-to-date evidence base to support the Council’s Local Plan and Housing Strategy. It gives detailed, robust, and defensible evidence to help determine local housing priorities, and inform the Council’s forward plans and development.
This research encompasses an up-to-date analysis of the social, economics, housing and demographic characteristics of areas across the borough, and identifies the type and size of housing needs by tenure and household type, and considers the need for affordable housing and the size, type and tenure housing needs for specific groups within the borough.
The HNA has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the February 2019 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and associated Planning Practice Guidance (PPG).
Homes For All Report 2020/21
The Homes For All Report 2020/21 details our progress to achieving one of the key ambitions of The Deal 2030; to ensure “high quality, affordable homes in happy communities”. The report provides a detailed overview of housing delivery in the borough over the last year, demonstrating how we are delivering on our latest Housing Strategy and using the Wigan Housing Needs Assessment to support the delivery of new homes that meet the needs of residents.
The report shows the housing need figure for Wigan, which is set by the government, is 872 additional homes per annum and in 2020/21, a total of 1,439 additional new homes were completed, which is a 5% increase on the previous year. The report also documents affordable housing delivery in the borough and in 2020/21, an additional 334 affordable homes were delivered in the borough. These annual delivery figures include specialist homes for both older residents and those with additional housing needs, meeting the aims of the Housing Strategy to provide affordable, accessible homes that meet the needs of all residents. In addition, new homes delivered in the last year were broadly evenly split between greenfield (51%) and brownfield (49%) land, with the use of brownfield land increasing by 34% since the previous year as we focus on redeveloping brownfield sites and protecting and prioritising our green spaces.
The report also discusses how this success is set to continue over the next year and beyond, highlighting the future pipeline of housing delivery by the Council Developers and Registered Providers in the borough. There are also further details around the wider local housing market context and challenges, updating on what steps are being taken to reduce the impact of some of these challenges, such as town centre regeneration plans and new infrastructure plans to unlock larger housing sites.
Supported and Specialist Housing Prospectus
Wigan Council’s Supported and Specialist Housing Prospectus sets out the nature and scale of need for supported and specialist housing in Wigan, identifying the gaps in provision and the type of accommodation required, which will need to be addressed through new development.
It sets out our plans and aspirations to expand the availability and range of good quality housing for particular groups of people in Wigan, and provides guidance and information to those who provide accommodation and services.
Our vision is for people in Wigan to be able to live as independently as possible in their own homes, in the place where they want to be with their families and networks around them. We want to ensure people live in the right type of home for their needs, in the right place and with the right support and believe that people with even the most intensive and complex health and social care needs should still have a range of choices open to them and be supported in the right accommodation.
We are committed to work in partnership with private developers, local communities, social enterprises and Registered Providers in order to meet the housing needs and aspirations of our residents. We are looking for partners, big and small, who share our ambition for improving and diversifying the Council’s offer for people requiring supported and specialist accommodation.
The Prospectus is intended to encourage and facilitate new developments which are financially viable and sustainable and should be used as a tool to focus discussions about future supply with the local authority. The Prospectus forms a key part of our broader Housing Strategy.