Help us shape the blueprint for the future of our city

The consultation is open to everyone who lives or works in the city, and as a tenant or leaseholder your voice matters. We encourage you to read through the initial draft strategy and share your views. The consultation is open until 19 September 2025.

Why have we produced the strategy?

Southampton is a growing, diverse, and ambitious city – but like many councils across the country, we face serious housing challenges.

• The ongoing cost of maintaining council homes is rising and over 50% of our council homes require investment work to bring them up to Decent Homes standard.
• There is simply not enough affordable housing to meet demand, with over 8,000 households on the waiting list.
• Many residents, especially families, are having to rent privately, where too many of the properties are unfortunately poor quality.
• Demand far outpaces supply, particularly for family homes.

Our initial draft Housing Strategy has been developed to address these challenges. It sets out a clear roadmap for action, timelines, investment plans and how we will measure success.

We have laid out three strategic priorities:

1. Improve our landlord services to significantly enhance tenant satisfaction and foster better relationships.
2. Increase quality homes in the city by expanding housing supply to ensure more affordability, sustainability, healthier and high-quality homes.
3. Support strong and resilient communities by creating environments where everyone feels valued, respected and have equal opportunities to participate fully.

We plan to do this by:

• Rolling out a major investment programme to improve and modernise council homes
• Working with partners to deliver more new homes
• Introducing tougher standards and better enforcement in the private rented sector
• Developing a whole city approach to preventing homelessness

How we will track progress:

We will measure our success by looking at:

• the number of new affordable homes built,
• homelessness figures,
• the percentages of council homes meeting Decent Homes Standard and achieving a high energy efficiency rating, and
• the rate of tenant satisfaction levels.

You will be able to track our progress through future articles in Tenants’ Link, our website, and in our Annual Reports.

Have your say

We want to build a future where everyone in Southampton has access to affordable, sustainable, healthy, and high-quality homes. That everyone lives in a neighbourhood where they feel safe and happy. We cannot do this without you, and we need your input to ensure we are doing the right thing to deliver this.

You all play a role in helping us to realise this, and the first step is providing your input on the initial draft Housing Strategy. You can do so by taking part in the online consultation before 19 September 2025.