The role

Strategic Director: Housing and Communities

£94,331 to £99,887 (plus performance points, up to £105,683)

This is an exciting senior leadership opportunity, taking on responsibility for the Council’s ‘people’ services.

These include:

• the Housing Service including maintenance of the council’s housing stock, the delivery of the homeless service, community management, compliance and private sector housing;
• Environment and Regulation including commercial, licensing, emergency planning and enforcement.
• Community Safety and Anti-social Behaviour, CCTV and Careline
• Arts & Culture
• Community Development & Wellbeing
• Corporate Plan priorities around housing and communities, working with portfolio holders to ensure clear direction for services and delivery.

You’ll be a part of our Transformation vision – this is being developed to deliver a range of benefits, but will involve investing in our people and services to meet customer needs, protecting our finances and embedding sustainability to preserve our unique place by transforming tomorrow, together, Including meeting a savings target of £1.2m over the life of the Medium Term Financial Plan.

You will also be key to supporting overall delivery and lead the ‘People’ priorities in the new corporate plan which is currently being developed.

Some of the key projects you’ll be leading on will be:

• Social Housing Regulation Act – bringing about huge changes/improvements on how we engage with our tenants including our newly approved Tenant Engagement Strategy
• Overcoming pressures on Homelessness – both demand increasing and costs increasing (temporary accommodation) - cost of living Housing Strategy and Development – 600 new dwellings by 31 March 2026; currently have 285 completed
• Working on people based implications of meeting the Net Zero 2050 target

Housing 

The Council currently owns and manages  approximately 5,200 properties, which means we are the main supplier of social housing to our community. We recognise the importance of making good quality, affordable homes available in the district, and the positive impact this can have on other key indicators, including health, education and economic prosperity.

We're investing in our stock and our services to ensure that our customers benefit from a highly responsive repairs and maintenance programme, and that our homes meet new regulatory and compliance requirements. We're placing a real emphasis on energy efficiency to bring our properties up to EPC C for 2030.

Our HRA budget is approximately £32m and we are delivering around 60 new homes from this account a year. Work is also underway to refresh our Housing Strategy - the current version of which was produced in 2018.

Homelessness

This is an area of significant need. 2000 household approaches for homelessness assistance (Oct 22 to 23). Here are some of the ways we aim to address this below.

• We’re one of the very few Local Authorities in the country to operate a Mental Health and Homelessness Partnership with a qualified Mental Health Practitioner embedded in the Homeless Team to prevent MH crisis, hospital admission, breakdown of accommodation and reduce pressure on key services.
• We’ve invested several million pounds in delivering 60 new units of temporary accommodation. 
• Our team includes six Homesearch staff, two Ukraine Team, 10 in the Support Team inc. MH Practitioner, three accommodation based staff, Ex-Offender Worker, two street outreach and two floating support workers, and 11 Homelessness Officers.

Community Safety

Our partnership priorities are:

• Drug and alcohol related harm
• Domestic abuse
• Tackling crime and fear of crime through education, prevention and enforcement