An update to be provided by the Vice Chairman, Lisa Hughes.

Lisa Hughes reported to the Forum that in October she had been invited to give a short presentation about Accessible Homes to the developers, officers and councillors who comprised the Maidenhead Developers’ Forum. Lisa Hughes sought to convey a message that building more Accessible & Affordable homes was a commercial opportunity for developers. A recent study by RIBA had indicated that “future-proofing” was a key criterion for the over 55s looking to move house. It was received politely but some weren’t sure their investors would agree.

Lisa Hughes commented that it was good to see that almost all the dwellings in the planning application for St Cloud Way were proposed to be Accessible & Affordable.  

Lisa Hughes reported on the Borough Local Plan, the planning inspector had carried out an examination of the BLP between October and December. Two of the points that Lisa had submitted in last year’s consultation were included in her examination. As a result, Lisa participated in two sessions of her hearings.

The positive outcome from the first session was that RBWM had agreed to monitor the number of Accessible & Affordable homes built over the plan period as well as the number of specialist accommodation places made available.

The second session examined housing policies in the BLP and Lisa had described the numbers of current and future borough residents who had different disabilities and housing needs – the data Lisa had used was from the government, NHS or other reputable and publicly available sources. The following three things had been highlighted:

1         RBWM could not provide supporting data or explain why the percentage of Accessible & Affordable homes to be built decreased from 100% to 5% in the BLP in 2017.

2         RBWM could have very easily (and so should have) compiled this data. Also, they held relevant borough data which was not publicly available and would have improved estimates of housing needs still further.

3         There were thousands of borough residents who had or would have housing needs that weren’t met by the mandatory baseline accessibility. This was a stark contrast to Policy HO2 and the few Accessible & Affordable homes that would be built as a result.

After the second session Lisa had a Zoom call with Ian Gillespie, a consultant engaged by RBWM to help get the BLP through the planning inspection. It was a good call and it was agreed that an aim of 25-30% homes to be built as Accessible & Affordable was reasonable. Ian had thought that some additional work on viability testing could be done to check the aim would still deliver a reasonable level of profit for the developer.

It was not yet clear whether RBWM would change Policy HO2.

Lisa Hughes continued to report that at a council meeting late last year, both Angela and Lisa had had a very brief conversation with Councillor McWilliams about the council updating its Housing Strategy. Councillor McWilliams said that the strategy would be progressed in 2020, after the homeless strategy had been finalised. They remained in contact with Councillor McWilliams and presented to him, the deputy MD and heads of Planning & Housing over the summer.

As preparation for this Forum meeting Lisa had emailed Cllr McWilliams for an update and had received a last-minute invitation to a stakeholder consultation meeting on November 24th. Tracey Hedren chaired the consultation event which had considered the draft strategy’s objectives and outcomes. Lisa had re-iterated the housing needs of People with Disabilities / OP in mainstream homes and specialist accommodation.

The next steps were for the draft Housing Strategy to go to Cabinet in December 2020 with a subsequent public consultation. Feedback from this would be analysed and a final version of the Strategy would be considered for adoption by Cabinet in 2021.

Lisa Hughes reported that Councillor McWilliams had said that there would be “lots of opportunities for feeding into the strategy. Ensuring high levels of accessibility was set to be one of the key commitments in the Strategy.”