The Housing Advisers Programme was launched in 2017 and funding has been awarded once a year every year since. The 2022/23 programme is the sixth and final round of funding for this programme.
Large or small, urban or rural, applications led by councils across England. The programme was open to councils at all levels, either individually or as a partnership. If forming a partnership of councils (and/or other organisations) a single council lead the project.
The grant funding was for English councils only. However, we would encourage all councils to check out the LGA Housing Advisers Programme webpages for case studies which share learning from the programme across the sector.
Our ask was that applications were for projects or approaches which were both innovative at a local or national level and:
- Tackled a local housing, homelessness or planning/place-making challenge.
- Led by a council and involve local people and/or partners.
- Had corporate endorsement from the relevant lead officer(s) and/or portfolio holder(s).
- Gave the officer capacity to enable the project to succeed.
- Were open to the prospect of external input and challenge from an adviser.
- Were willing to share learning and experience from the programme with other councils.
The programme funded ambitious projects seeking to improve outcomes. Previous projects have spanned the full range of work in the housing, homelessness, planning and place-making policy areas, including:
- strategy development
- service design or redesign
- improving or expanding delivery operations
- upskilling the internal or external workforce
- developing new partnerships.
Successful projects focused on enabling councils and partners to:
- Directly build homes of the right mix of products, tenures and techniques.
- Support the building or retrofitting of zero-carbon homes.
- Meet the housing and wider support needs of low-income families.
- Refresh homelessness services and partnerships to focus on long-term solutions.
- Sustainably provide temporary accommodation.
- Proactively enable the development of the right types of homes to meet local need.
- Meet the needs of groups at risk of homelessness to prevent them becoming homeless.
- Support improvements in the private rented sector.
- Improve the quality of existing social housing.
- Explore different options for housing delivery like self-build, community land trusts (CLTs) and modern methods of construction (MMC).
- Reform the end-to-end planning process and the relationship with developers.
- Achieve fair returns to communities from planning gain.
- Empower council housing tenants.
- Information about previous HAP projects is available on the HAP case study pages.
