Before and after photos of infill sites for housing in Eastboune
Last Friday my councillor colleague Glenn Haffenden, organised a research trip to Eastbourne for the cross party Hastings Housing Taskforce to visit some exciting examples of modern energy efficient council housing using awkward sites like car parks, old light industrial units and old garages. We met some of the senior officers involved in delivery of these projects and it was an inspiring and thought-provoking day, sadly missed by the Labour cabinet members who cancelled at the last minute despite the trip being planned since August.
Many of these were locally constructed modular houses mostly built off-site which makes the build process much quicker and helps with difficult to access plots. I was really impressed by the level of expertise built up by the in-house officer team shared by Eastbourne and Lewes council and their willingness to share the learning. With councils strapped for cash and officers stretched we really need to be doing more skill sharing between councils so Hastings can build out its council owned sites for much needed social rent housing. We have similar sites available in Hastings. Sadly, one of the prime ones, the car park in Cornwallis Place is destined to become a Premier Inn hotel. We saw a four storey block of nineteen light and spacious flats built on a much smaller car park footprint than the Cornwallis St one, just think how many much needed homes could have been provided on our car park site?
Another innovation was that the ground floor flat had been custom built to accommodate a family with complex accessibility needs in consultation with the family and adult social care. It’s much cheaper to build in accessibility requirements like this into a new build than retrofit older properties and takes a difficult to house family off the housing waiting list.
I was impressed with the effort that had gone into making these houses and flats cheap to run with solar panels on the roofs and very high levels of insulation. Energy bills are around only £20 a month. On one build they had reduced the amount of concrete used by 90% by using a new form of eco piling instead of concrete foundations. Modular building also reduces the amount of building waste as materials can be recycled within the factory.
We learnt how the council teams are building supply chain certainty for low carbon technologies like air source and ground source heat pumps by getting together with other councils to create a pipe line of building and retrofit projects so companies have certainty of supply to invest in new technologies and train up workers in the skills required.
I really hope we can bring this learning and innovation along the coast to Hastings to help address the housing crisis and see local families benefitting from similar energy efficient and low cost housing.