Homes for everyone - what we’ve delivered 2023 to 2025

Improving housing quality

Last year we invested £89.735 million in our council homes. This included £14.7 million to ensure building, health and fire safety compliance alongside planned maintenance, repairs and major projects including delivering new council homes. We have worked hard to address the backlog of routine repairs, with over 3,000 repairs carried out each month and a new materials supply chain introduced. Our repairs and maintenance service offered apprenticeships to 25 individuals in 2024/25.

Over a third of the city's residents rent privately. To drive up standards, we introduced a city-wide Additional Licensing Scheme for houses in multiple-occupation and a Selective Licensing Scheme in 4 wards. Over 8,000 properties in the city are covered by the licensing schemes.

In 2024/25 we invested £2.28m to provide adaptations to help disabled council tenants stay in their homes with 232 adaptations completed. We also allocated £2.03 million in Disabled Facilities Grant funding to help private renters and homeowners, with 171 adaptations delivered.

We agreed to a £30.8 million investment in sustainability measures for council homes over the next five years, including improved insulation and other energy efficiency measures. As part of this programme, over 400 solar panels have already been installed on council homes with a further 170 to be fitted by the end of March 2025. We also contacted over 647 landlords between April and December 2024 to enforce energy efficiency standards in the private sector.

Increasing housing supply

Homes for everyone, a new housing strategy for 2024 to 2029, was approved in October 2024. This sets out five priorities for tackling the city’s housing crisis and delivering accessible, affordable and high-quality homes for everyone in Brighton & Hove. In 2023/24, 1,075 homes were delivered across the city, the highest number since 2013. 318 (24%) of these were affordable homes, including 127 new council homes at Denman Place in Coldean. A further 62 former council homes were bought back by the council.

226 affordable homes were delivered in 2024/25. This includes 95 additional council homes including 21 homes purchased at the St Aubyn's development in Rottingdean. Construction has also begun on 294 affordable homes with a further 137 in the design phase. In 2024/25, 145 privately owned homes that had been empty for over a year were brought back into use.

Improving housing support for residents

We have established a new housing advice and triage service leading to increased homelessness preventions and early interventions. We have also improved progress against our key customer service measures, including almost doubling the number of applications processed per month on the Housing Register. We recommissioned our rough sleeping and single homeless support services to reduce levels of rough sleeping and improve move-on from temporary into settled accommodation.

We agreed a new housing allocation policy to increase opportunities to prevent homelessness, simplify the process for applicants and increase the transparency of our decision-making. The new policy gives greater priority to people fleeing domestic abuse and to serving and former members of the armed forces.

Working with our partners, we completed a pilot of a new integrated service model for people who are homeless with multiple and compound health and social needs. The evaluation of this pilot will help inform the development of our new homeless and rough sleeping strategy

We developed a new joint protocol to improve our response to homeless 16 and 17 year-olds. A care leavers' housing protocol was also agreed, ensuring that every one of our looked after children has a firm offer of accommodation which meets their needs on leaving council care. As a City of Sanctuary, we met our goal of resettling at least 44 Afghan households (207 individuals) by July2025.

We supported tenants to access the benefits they are entitled to, reducing rent arrears and improving rent collection. We worked with the Community Safety Project to establish four pilot projects to reduce anti-social behaviour. We have undertaken targeted work to reduce fly-tipping and tackle litter on our estates.