Swindon Borough Council is seeking to develop directly and with partners a greater range of housing options suited to people in late life. The council has developed and enabled specialist housing options, such as extra care housing, to meet the housing and care needs of older people.
Introduction
Swindon’s over 65 population is projected to double by 2031. The number of people who might need social care services in the future is expected to rise significantly.
Swindon Borough Council is seeking to develop directly and with partners a greater range of housing options suited to people in late life. The council has developed and enabled specialist housing options, such as extra care housing, to meet the housing and care needs of older people.
The council also wishes to support development types of housing suited to older people, such as ‘care ready’ housing as part of inter-generational housing developments.
The council has worked with Nationwide Building Society and its partner Igloo to create a new community, in the east of the town at Oakfield of over 230 intergenerational homes.
The council has also set a priority to improve infrastructure and housing to support a growing, low-carbon economy. One of the ways the council is doing that is by working with Nationwide Building Society and its partners to rejuvenate the former Oakfield campus, a brownfield site that has been empty for a number of years.
The approach taken by the council and its partners
The development is Nationwide’s first housing scheme and provides 239 intergenerational homes with a mixture of tenures, for people at every stage of their life, from first time buyers, to families, to over 55s, wanting to live in flats, houses, or cottages.
The design was developed with the local community to help identify local heritage, desired routes and uses desperately needed in the area. Over a dozen events were held and the community organiser knocked on 600+ doors, recording 300+ conversations.
Nationwide Building Society employed a community organiser to identify the types of housing and amenities that were important to local people for the five acre site. They engaged widely and in great depth prior to submitting a planning application. The feedback received shaped the mix of housing, the scheme layout and the enhancements to local facilities that will be delivered alongside the development. Unusually for a scheme of this scale, and on a site that is close to established residential communities, no formal objections from local residents were received at the planning application stage. This is unprecedented in Swindon and reflects the level of community engagement that took place.
The arrangement of home types, forming terraces around communal courts is designed to foster community spirit, and enable a higher proportion of the site to be devoted to soft landscape.
The scheme has been developed with the ‘15-minute neighbourhood’ concept in mind, to try and provide the basic amenities that residents would need close by, without dependency on car usage.
The development is contributing towards meeting the council’s affordable homes target; thirty percent, that’s 71 of the homes will be affordable rent or shared ownership.
The intention is to create a community where young people can put down roots and where homes are designed to be easily adapted for older people to remain in their community throughout later life.
This is an example of the development of a neighbourhood and community that has housing that is designed to enable people to ‘age in place’ as well as some age-designated housing but blended into a housing development that is multi-generational.
Outcomes
The housing typology includes a range of housing types suited to older people alongside housing for all ages:
- three bed age in place flexible homes
- one bed apartments for over 55s
- one bed maisonettes for over 55s.