North Lanarkshire Council has approved a new five-year housing plan, that sees the council commit to their ambitions to transform and regenerate communities, reduce inequality and disadvantage and create opportunities for people across North Lanarkshire to achieve their full potential.

The Local Housing Strategy (LHS) for 2021-26, sets out the council's future plans for the service in key areas, including; housing delivery, homelessness, property condition, energy efficiency, fuel poverty, health and wellbeing and older people's and specialist housing.

To produce a meaningful plan, the council carried out a range of consultation which focussed on early engagement to help ensure local people, communities and wider stakeholders could share their views. As this was progressed, views were sought on the emerging key housing issues and challenges identified across strategic areas, ensuring priorities, actions and outcomes contained within our LHS reflected local need.

The key actions in the plan link to the council's overall vision to 'make North Lanarkshire the place to live through the provision of high-quality housing and support in sustainable communities, that enables people to thrive and prosper'. The council's targets are ambitious and include:

• delivering 5,000 new council homes by 2035, and £170.608m Affordable Housing Supply Programme investment over the next 5 years for council and registered social landlord new affordable homes;

• contributing to reshaping and populating our town centres to achieve our Town Visions;

• continuing to transform our communities by delivering the tower re-provisioning programme (1,760 demolitions planned in phase 1);

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• delivering the Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan to prevent and tackle homelessness, and

• tackling climate change and fuel poverty by delivering key energy efficiency measures and contributing to our Net Zero targets.

Commenting on the plan, Convener of Housing and Regeneration, Councillor Heather Brannan-McVey, said: "I'm proud of the real progress we've made in delivering key actions to date and committed to building on this and bringing real change and improvements to people's lives and our communities.

"Our five-year plan shows how we will do this. For example, we're determined to reduce inequality and improve living conditions for our tenants by tackling fuel poverty and are rolling out a range of energy efficiency measures to our existing stock. We're also incorporating the latest eco-friendly technology in our new build homes to help reach our Net Zero targets and reduce tenants' bills.

"We aim to continue to prevent and reduce homelessness by providing support to help tenants remain in their homes. Millions of pounds of investment is being made as we build more new, affordable council homes, progress our tower reprovisioning plans and work with our partners to increase available housing supply.

"However, it's been a year like no other and, if anything, has highlighted the importance of our homes and places in improving the health and wellbeing of our residents. We also face some challenges including demographic change, welfare reform, tackling homelessness and climate change, amongst others while we recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. This strategy recognises the vital role that housing has in North Lanarkshire's social and economic recovery and sets out how the council and its partners will meet the key housing challenges over the next five years.

"Our LHS for North Lanarkshire is already delivering benefits and changing the face of towns and communities and is playing a key part in the council's vision to make North Lanarkshire the place to live, learn, work, invest and visit."

Some of the key highlights from our last LHS (2016-21) include:

• 1,292 new, affordable homes built, with 202 of these for older or people with a disability;

• A reduction of 13.8% in homeless applications;

• 448 homes brought back into council ownership through the Empty Homes and Open Market Purchase Scheme;

• Implementing our tower re-provisioning programme with phase 1 well underway (3 towers demolished in Airdrie) and the new housing replacing these will be our first net zero homes;

• Developing and implementing 'Homes fit for the Future' an asset management plan for our homes that will help co-ordinate investment to improve and maintain our homes, and

• Completing a number of residential transformation projects in town centres – Muiryhall St (Former Tax Office) and Coatbridge, Carnegie Library.

Councillor Brannan-McVey added: "We are extremely grateful to our Housing Co-production group for its continued involvement and commitment to developing and influencing housing strategy to benefit people and communities and to North Lanarkshire Federation, all our tenants, residents and stakeholders involved in this journey."