Successes 2024-25

In the last financial year, council staff have been working hard on the council’s top priorities of balancing the budget and improving housing for our residents. 

Since May 2024, housing staff have advised and supported more than 1,100 households that were threatened with homelessness and permanently prevented the homelessness of 269 without them needing to move into temporary accommodation. 

170 affordable homes have been created through our acquisitions programme and new developments with Housing Association partners. We’ve acquired 66 homes, including rooms in two houses of multiple occupation and 33 of these homes are now tenanted. 

We also spent the disabled facilities grant for 2024-25 and the underspend that was left from previous years. This was a total of almost £3.3m helping people stay in their homes for longer. 

Our street cleaning team cleaned 9,414 miles of road – the equivalent of the UK to Australia. We collected more than 3.6m residential bins, or one bin every ten seconds, and 223,725 litter bins, one every three minutes. We also removed 3,489 fly-tips and did 3,354 bulky waste collections. 

Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, our tennis courts at Alexandra Park and our beaches were all award winning in the last year. 

We were successful in receiving additional government funding to support regeneration projects across the town, and appointed Troika Projects to deliver the West Hill Cafe and Castle Project as part of the Town Deal programme. 

There were 410,893 attendances at Summerfields Leisure Centre and Falaise Gym, with 49% of participants living in the top 20% most deprived wards, and 1,826 residents took part in one or more of the 1,345 sessions delivered as part of the Active Hastings programme, with 12,925 individual visits logged. 

We have also seen continued growth of the film office and our sports and events income.  

We’ve created a land stability team to help tackle issues of land stability across the town, the council has received White Ribbon accreditation again, appointed a healthy aging officer and our HR team have started a partnership with Little Gate Farm, and committed to helping Hastings become a plastic free town. 

Cllr Glenn Haffenden, leader of the council, said: “I’m really pleased to hear about all the successes we have had as a council this year. All our staff are working hard in challenging circumstances to deliver the best services possible to our residents. We’re committed to continuing to do this, and to building a stable base that we can move into the next few years with devolution and local government reorganisation around the corner. I’m excited to see what we can do in the next year working with the priorities set out in our new corporate plan.”