LAST week a new Government method for calculating housing need revealed fewer homes will be needed that originally thought. Following the news, Oxford City Council leader Bob Price writes about the authority's new strategy to address housing needs in the city.

THERE is a national housing and homelessness crisis and we’re seeing it every day on the streets of Oxford.

Shortage of housing and street homelessness have been major challenges for the city for a long time and tackling these twin social problems are a top priority for the city council.

There aren’t enough homes to meet Oxford’s growing population, and in particular, there aren’t enough homes that are affordable for local people struggling to buy or rent on low or middle incomes.

While we are close to meeting our annual house building target of 400 dwellings a year, with 3,843 homes built over the past decade, we are acutely aware that this doesn’t meet the needs of our residents and the local economy, and house prices and rents keep going up more rapidly than wages.

The Government last week published a consultation document on how housing needs should be calculated, to help councils to plan for the right number of homes in the right places to meet local needs.

The consultation includes baseline figures on housing need based on a national methodology, but that baseline does not take account of backlog needs, or the additional needs for housing that come from expected economic and employment growth.

The document also makes it clear that areas like Oxford and the wider county area around the city, where housing affordability is a big issue, will be expected by the government to deliver more homes.

The consultation document is a first stage and does not reflect the realities of local economic and employment growth, or the demand for affordable housing, that we know local people, our businesses and Oxfordshire’s stretched public services desperately need.

Together with the other councils in Oxfordshire and the local enterprise partnership, we will be reviewing the consultation document and the technical detail behind the formula, and considering what response we shall be making to it. It will be some considerable time before the government implements the new approach, and in the meantime, it is essential that we do not lose focus on delivering the homes that Oxford and Oxfordshire needs.

Street homelessness is a major problem in Oxford and has been especially visible during the recent summer months.

As the winter approaches the health impact of rough sleeping gets increasingly serious.

It is a scandal that rough sleeping and single homelessness has reached such a scale throughout one of the world’s largest economies.

In the face of our local challenges, the city council has decided that it will make more funding available to tackle rough sleeping following the regrettable withdrawal of Oxfordshire County Council funding.

The city council has made a steadfast and long-term commitment to retaining, improving and developing council housing.

We invested heavily in meeting the national ‘decent homes standard’, and then went further to meet our higher ‘Oxford standard’, and set up our great estates programme to improve the environment in the areas where our homes are located.

People who rent homes from private landlords in the city haven’t always had a good deal.

While most private landlords manage their properties responsibly and well, a small proportion of them do not maintain them safely, tidily and sustainably.

The city council supports private tenants who suffer from these problems; we inspect properties and deal with poor landlords through enforcing the legal requirements for rented properties.

In the city council, we’ve long recognised the scale of these various aspects of the housing challenge, and have invested heavily over the years to improve things in close partnership with the NHS, voluntary organisations and charities, and the county council.

There has been a lot of improvement but we’ve not cracked the problem.

That’s why we’re announcing today a new strategy to meet housing needs, and a new city-wide partnership approach.

Oxford’s housing problems are not easy to solve and our strategy acknowledges that we need to do more and that we need to work even more closely with our partners to do this.

We plan to do more on affordable housing – ensuring that the city’s urban extensions include affordable homes for Oxford people; more on street homelessness – bringing empty buildings into use to provide shelter; more to support private tenants – with greater enforcement of standards across the private rented sector; and more on our council houses and flats, with an expansion to the capital investment programme.

This won’t be quick or easy, and we do need everyone to do their part – not just the city council and public agencies, but also Oxford’s businesses, developers, voluntary and community groups, universities, students, and Oxford’s residents.

We know that up to 30,000 new homes will be needed over the next 20 years to meet the expected rate of employment growth, but that only 8,000 of these can be built in our already tightly packed city area.

The remainder will be situated outside the city but linked closely with good transport facilities.

Together, I am confident that we can make real and significant progress in tackling Oxford’s housing challenges.

It is too important not to give this top priority; I hope everyone will join us in this mission, and play their full part.