Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) 2020/21 - 2024/25

The council has a housing strategy that focuses on ensuring that people who live, or would like to live in Gateshead can access, sustain and remain in a home that meets their needs and is safe, secure and affordable, in a thriving neighbourhood, at whatever stage of life they are. This provides a framework for the Council's housing-related strategic functions and activity and includes its homelessness and rough sleeping strategy.

The strategy is structured around three linked objectives:

• Supply - to ensure use of existing stock and supply of new housing best meets current and future needs and aspirations to create thriving, mixed communities. We want to encourage the building of sufficient new homes using land sustainably and prioritising the use of brownfield land. We also want to increase the number of empty homes brought back into use.
• Standards - to improve the quality, condition and management of housing so that all residents benefit from safe, healthy, energy efficient and well-managed homes and neighbourhoods.
• Support - to help residents' access and sustain a home which promotes their wellbeing and supports them to thrive. Tackling homelessness and its root causes is a key objective.

It also sets out the key priorities relating to these objectives and how the council and partners will work together to address them within current and future available resources.

To facilitate decision making and strategically plan for social housing in the future the Council continually updates its 30-year Housing Revenue Account Business plan considering the long-term future of the housing stock alongside the short-term plans. The plan includes all known income and expenditure information alongside several key assumptions in relation to the anticipated levels of voids, right to buy sales and inflation. It also includes plans for borrowing and repaying debt in the future.