Hillingdon: bright ideas

Like many London boroughs, Hillingdon is a district of contrasts. The north is leafy suburbs, villages and farmland; the built-up south takes in pockets of deprivation, industrial estates, Heathrow Airport and a large minority ethnic population – one in five of the borough's 243,000 residents has a BME background.

Soaring house prices make homeownership out of bounds to many and affordable housing is in high demand, but the number of council homes has dwindled from 25,000 to just over 11,000 since the introduction of right to buy in the 1980s.

But where the borough differs, says director of housing services Pam Lockley, is it is doing all it can to build more affordable housing, despite being a Conservative administration. "The whole drive of the housing department is to create more affordable housing and for it to be sustainable," she says. It is using some pretty innovative methods to do this.

It is using money from its general capital programme to create new affordable homes, including 33 new bungalows for the elderly – nearly a third of Hillingdon's residents are over 65. This £2.9m is intended to replace the defunct local authority social housing grant. It also has an £11m development fund, funded from the housing revenue account, for 80 new dwellings that will be developed on council-owned land.

"We've been able to do this," says Lockley, "because the HRA is very healthy. That's the legacy of having top-end rents." The other side of this coin, though, is that Hillingdon is being hit hard by rent restructuring, the policy intended to bring social housing rents broadly into line.

A 2003 survey found that 2800 extra affordable homes are needed each year. To ease this, the council has a void transfer scheme in which it transfers empty homes to Paradigm Housing Association for free, in return for the right to nominate more tenants. For the 100-plus homes transferred this way each year, the council gets the right to nominate 170 people.

Hillingdon's arm's-length management organisation, Hillingdon Homes, was set up in March 2003. Headed by Tim Price, former assistant director of the housing department, it has 300 staff and a two-star rating that has paved the way for £16.5m to invest in homes by May 2005 and a further £35m up to 2007/8.

It manages 11,330 council-owned homes and 2522 leaseholds.

Two-thirds of its properties are semis with gardens, built before the Second World War; the rest were mostly built between 1945 and 1964.

The stock is well-maintained on the whole – another legacy of relatively high rents – but a modernisation programme is under way for the 3400 that do not meet the decent homes standard.

The highly affluent nature of some parts of the borough means that not everyone wants to see more affordable housing. For Lockley, the key to overcoming prejudice is to ensure the social housing is well-managed and does not get a reputation for antisocial behaviour. The ALMO has been charged with coming up with a common approach that can be used to tackle the problem across all tenures. Otherwise, says Lockley: "Neighbours can be treated differently, depending on whether they own the property."

The council is particularly proud of meeting the government's target of getting families out of B&Bs a year early: it now has all 2000 of its homeless families in temporary accommodation.

This achievement is partly down to a long-term contract with a London estate agent, Orchard & Shipman, to procure 1000 units over five years, which helped it to bring rent levels down.