17/04/2025
A property company has been appointed to deliver a £1.7million refurbishment to John West House in Maidenhead for temporary housing.
A property company has been appointed deliver a £1.7million refurbishment to John West House in Maidenhead for temporary housing.
John West House is a council-owned unit which has been used in the recent past as an emergency night shelter for rough sleepers.
In 2023 a cabinet decision was made to allocate £1.996million of capital funding for the site to be developed into a dedicated hostel facility for this cohort of service users.
The building in Howarth Road will provide rooms for people experiencing homelessness as part of the council’s Rough Sleeper Pathway, which currently supports 41 residents.
Work has been going on to finalise the design and planning, and John West House is now set to be transformed into a dedicated hub to provide 19 beds and support to vulnerable residents.
The project is partially funded through developer contributions.
Now, property services company The Momentum Group has been appointed by the Royal Borough to undertake this refurbishment.
The site, vacant since June 2022, will undergo ‘significant upgrades’, says Momentum Group, including the construction of a mezzanine floor and a new glazed roof for the courtyard area, ensuring the building meets the needs of its future residents.
The Royal Borough’s cabinet made a decision to award this contract to Momentum Group in February.
A report set to come to the full council next week outlines this decision and asks fellow councillors across the chamber to note it – and the ‘urgency’ with which it was done.
The report highlights the ‘pressure on wider council finances due to the costs of other forms of temporary accommodation provision.’
The number of people needing temporary accommodation has ‘increased significantly’ in recent years, creating a pressure on the Royal Borough, and councils across the country.
This is mainly due to the high cost of out-of-borough placements and lack of affordable social housing.
Additionally, work has been going on to transform St Edmund’s House in Ray Mill Road West (which also belongs to the council) into temporary accommodation.
The first residents and families moved into some of the 14 flats there in February.
The Royal Borough has also been making changes to social housing priority to try to deal with the challenges of costly temporary accommodation.
Meanwhile, there have been some delays in the plans to transform John West House.
The design of the facility went through several iterations, with a redesign of the scheme agreed in 2024. The procurement of the contract to refurbish the unit was done by RBWM Property Company.
But staffing changes within the organisation and the housing team led to ‘an oversight’.
The result was that the contract award was not placed on the cabinet’s forward plan – ie its list of key decisions to make over the next few months.
As such, a decision was made to take the contract award to the February 26 cabinet as an ‘urgency item’. This was so the Borough could make a start on site ‘as soon as possible’ to save money.
John West House is considered more cost-effective than current forms of temporary accommodation.
The urgency decision enables refurbishment works to be completed by September 2025, with the site being commissioned an early as December 2025.
A non-urgency decision would have moved the commissioning of the site into 2026.