The main purpose of The Highlands Small Communities Housing Trust is to take direct and practical steps of intervention on behalf of disadvantaged smaller communities in the Highlands (the Highland Council area), which will help them realise good, long-term solutions to their local, housing-related problems.
To achieve this purpose, the Trust has the following 5 operational objectives:
1. Resources
Objective: to ensure that the Trust has financial and human resources at its disposal to enable it to fulfil its purpose, year on year, by:
- securing enough capital funding and assets to support its rolling programme of land and property purchases and related activities.
- securing enough revenue funding to employ a sufficient number and calibre of staff and support services to manage and deliver the Trust's work programme effectively.
- securing the input required of the Board's Directors and Advisers upon whom the Trust depends for the proper direction and supervision of its work programme in line with its objectives.
2. Landbanking
Objective: to ensure that the Trust regularly buys and sells on key sites, on behalf of needy communities, and that they are used only for the subsequent provision of appropriate and locally approved housing development, by:
- buying good sites for, and selling them on to, Registered local Housing Associations for the provision of the kind of rented housing required to meet local needs.
- buying good sites and then sub-dividing, servicing and selling them at affordable prices, plots to approved Rural Home Ownership Grant (Rural Home Ownership Grant) applicants.
- and/or, where locally approved, selling parts of sites to other purchasers (who may not be eligible for Rural Home Ownership Grant assistance) for the provision of housing or other buildings which are required to meet other community development needs.
3. Property purchase, rennovation and let
Objective: to be able to respond timeously to special case community development needs and particular market opportunities arising, by buying, renovating and letting appropriate a small number of suitable houses, which will thereafter be maintained and managed, on an agency basis, by local Housing Associations, to:
- help house key incoming community workers like nurses, teachers etc and/or
- local households identified by their local community as requiring urgent re-housing
4. Partnership working, information sharing, accountability and governance
Objective: to work closely, co-operatively and openly with all the key interest groups in the Highlands, and beyond, to secure their confidence in and support for the Trust's operations, by ensuring that:
- it liaises and confers constantly with communities and the key housing enablers and supplies all parties with a regular flow of reliably high quality bottom-up and/or top-down information and advice
- it has both effective internal reporting and external auditing systems in place, which give the required level of assurance that the Trust's financial and business affairs are being properly managed to demonstrably high standards.
5. Additionality and innovation
Objective: to add to the overall capacity and effectiveness of the housing system in the Highlands by:
- accessing new and/or additional resources to help the key housing players and enablers to fulfil their strategic commitments to the Highlands small communities
- developing and delivering innovative solutions to otherwise difficult-to-resolve local housing problems.