Which services deliver this priority?
- Strategic Housing provide housing advice, ensure services are available to support homeless people, provide grants to help adapt houses for disabled people and reduce fuel poverty.
- Planning and Building Control Services work to create a proper planning framework so that housing can be built in the right places.
What action are we taking?
The Corporate Plan 2008-2011 identifies the Council's key goals. Areas for action focus on:
- Meeting the need for affordable housing
- Delivering better homes
- Ensuring fair access to housing
- Modernising the District's spatial strategy by progressing with the Local Development Framework (LDF)
- Improving planning performance
The Council is determined to implement imaginative and innovative strategic initiatives to address the housing needs of the District, especially the acute shortage of affordable homes, and we have established positive and productive partnerships with a wide range of external agencies which we intend to build upon.
Over the next three years we will focus on working in partnership to deliver the Craven District Housing Strategy. We will increase the housing supply and the availability of affordable decent housing throughout the District, recognising the significant impact that access to affordable, decent housing has upon the viability of the Craven economy and the creation of strong and prosperous communities.
In addition, we will focus on reducing and preventing homelessness across the District, reducing the use of hostel and bed and breakfast accommodation, and ensuring members of the community identified in homeless need have access to appropriate housing and support.
We will work to develop and adopt the Core Strategy and Allocations Development Plan (DPD), which will put into place planning policies that direct future creation and development of new housing units, and show the precise location and size of sites that are capable of being developed over a 15 - 20 year period.
We will continue our work to improve planning performance so that planning applications are processed more efficiently and we will work to ensure our planning enforcement is more proactive.