Housing Annual Report 2019-20

The Housing Annual Report for the 2019-20 financial year is an important report that explains how the council’s housing services are performing. By publishing and sharing this information, we aim to be as transparent as possible. The report highlights both the quality of the services provided as well as where we will focus our efforts to improve services further.

The report covers how we’ve managed and maintained our properties, how responsive our repairs service has been, how quickly we are letting any empty homes, how many new homes we are building, and how satisfied you are telling us you are with those figures.

Improving lives and places

At the end of the 2019-20 financial year we went into lockdown, and the impact of the coronavirus on our services will become more apparent in next year’s financial report. The information contained in this report reflects the last ‘normal’ operating period.

Local government continues to need to be prudent and so we continued to assess all expenditure carefully in 2019-20. As always, we shine a strong spotlight on the front line services that we know benefit our tenants. We continue to look for cost effective and efficient ways of working that make the money that we do have go further.

Building communities and Improving homes

This report follows the pattern of previous years where your feedback has told us that you want accessible information presented clearly, giving headline data on our most important services. We therefore hope that you agree that this report delivers in that respect. 

We continue to deliver quality homes ourselves, highlighted this year by a visit to our Danemore independent living scheme in Tenterden by HRH The Princess Royal. She was able to see first-hand how we are prioritising the needs of an ageing population and delivering quality homes for our residents. Our developments continue to set a high standard that support our residents to live independently.

We continue to push the boundaries to deliver excellent services, build and acquire homes and make the most of the funding available to increase our housing stock as cost-effectively as possible. This includes trying to reduce the impact of homelessness on those affected, the financial impact it has for the taxpayer and working in partnership with others to meet the housing need for those who want to call Ashford ‘home’.

From left to right, the exterior and interior communal area of the redeveloped Christchurch Lodge building on Beaver Road, which provides short stay accommodation for homeless families for up to 25 people.

Housing Annual Report 2019-20 in numbers:

• Number of void properties: 270
• Average void period: 19 days
• Number of evictions for rent arrears: 14
• Number on housing register at end of year: 1350
• Number of mutual exchanges: 56
• Number of tenancies granted: 328
• Number of housing applications received: 1752

Tenant interaction and welfare

Rent arrears and building new affordable homes