London Borough of Southwark

The provision of affordable homes in Southwark is secured by the use of S106 legal agreements with developers. We want to ensure that affordable housing in the Borough is being accessed and used by those who need it.

Monitoring of the ongoing provision of affordable housing units requires improvement, with a data driven process to ensure that evidence-based decisions are made around the allocation and continuing use of affordable homes.

Affordable homes provision is checked at the start of the planning and development process but there is no ongoing monitoring to ensure continuity of supply.
There isn’t a current means of monitoring whether legitimate tenants are subletting a property or are no longer eligible for the band of rent they are paying.
When homes are not being occupied by eligible person(s) this increases the need to build more affordable homes to meet the shortfall.

We want to understand whether we can create a digital service for the ongoing monitoring of affordable homes in the borough, using data from multiple external sources to build evidence based intelligence about property usage.