Barking and Dagenham to establish partnerships delivery forum for RPs in new housing action plan

Barking and Dagenham’s council will establish a forum to drive partnership delivery, pilot a taskforce to help large families find suitable homes and implement a programme to bring empty homes into use.

These are among a range of measures set out in an action plan, which was approved by the council’s cabinet on Monday alongside its housing strategy for 2026-2031.

The strategy aims to deliver more affordable homes, raise standards across the borough’s housing stock, tackle rough sleeping and homelessness.

As of 2025, the borough had 6,300 households on its housing register, more than 1,000 in temporary accommodations and one-in-five facing affected by overcrowding. It was also the third fastest growing local authority by population between 2011 and 2021.

The action plan, published alongside the strategy, set out a number of measures and targets.

Barking and Dagenham plans to establish a formal register provider forum to strengthen partnership delivery by identifying sites, addressing delivery barriers and supporting coordinated delivery approaches.

The forum aims to be operational by the end of the year, and to have completed a pipeline and capacity assessment and delivery forecast by the second quarter of 2027.

The council also plans to pilot a large families taskforce to engage households waiting homes with four or more bedrooms.

It intends to launch the pilot with at least 50 households engaged by end of the year and aims to reduce 20 families’ bedroom requirements and rehouse 20 families by 2030.

An empty homes programme would identify long-term vacant private properties and bring them back into use “through incentives and, where necessary, enforcement”. It plans to implement this at the start of 2027, bringing a minimum of 20 new properties into use each year until 2031.

Barking and Dagenham also plans to identify and allocate six council-owned sites for community-led housing projects and 10 viable infill sites by 2031.

It also plans to review and update its housing allocations policy and tackle unlawful subletting and tenancy fraud, with five properties recovered annually to 2031.

The council will launch a ‘housing first’ programme to tackle homelessness by Q1 2027 and rehouse a minimum of 10 rough sleepers per year from this point through to 2031.

It suggested a range of other measures, including fresh assessments of the borough’s housing market, measures to improve the standard of council homes and the establishment of an accessible housing register.