What Do YOU Think Housing Associations Are For?

Yesterday I was at a Risk Management conference. No, don't stop reading yet, because actually, this was a really interesting day with luminaries like Piers Williamson from THFC and soon-to-be one of our new Regulators, Hannah Fearn from the Guardian housing Network and Andrew Cunningham from private sector landlord - Grainger PLC all giving really interesting insights into their worlds. I'd been asked to talk about what a housing association might look like and do if it set out its stall to be an active social enterprise. Not to be a housing association that supported social enterprises, but to turn itself, in its entirety, into one. My conclusions were that it was possible, some organisations were trying to do it (and Trafford Housing Trust is certainly one of them), but it's a hard road to go down, with many barriers in the way.

Path A or Path B? You decide...

What was more interesting, I thought, was a straw poll I took at the start of the session. I was following Hannah Fearn from the Guardian Housing Network, who in her talk had contrasted some of the assumptions we might make about the world of housing and its interface with politicians, with what was actually going on. So I decided to try a bit of assumption testing of my own. I took a bit of a risk and asked everyone to stand up. Fortunately, they did (thank goodness we're such a compliant nation) and I explained what was going to happen. I was going to give everyone four sets of paired statements; if the audience believed statement A to be true in each case, they could sit down, but if they believed statement B they could remain standing.

The first pair of statements were about the real, underlying purpose of housing associations. Do we A) exist to protect the most vulnerable, or B) to promote personal responsibility. There was an uncomfortable moment of uncertainty - no-one wanting to be the first to sit, but eventually, after a momentary pause, about 15% of the room sat, with another 10% looking pretty uncomfortable in a "hovering" position, before gravity - or perhaps historical thinking - pulled them chairwards.

The second pair of statements got a more clear-cut response from the 75% still standing. Were we A) there to build houses, or B) there to build communities. Pretty much everyone thought that community building was our raison d'etre, and so only one or two more people sat down. The third pair were more contentious. As a sector was our job to A) "have and hold" our homes - or was it B) to "churn" them - selling where we could release value to re-invest in new.

I have to say I was surprised that another 20% sat down - as I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of Boards in our sector are like mine; poring over any property sales with the utmost care and adopting an "if you can let it, keep it" approach. Finally, I asked people if they supported our sector providing A) homes for life or B) homes only for when people needed them. This was the one I'd expected most people to sit down over, in fact, hardly anyone else moved and so I was left with about 40% of the audience still standing.

This was of course only a straw poll and was far from representative. But the room contained people from forward-thinking housing associations and the proportion still standing at the end was a real surprise to me - in constructing the exercise I'd actually thought there might only be a handful left standing at the end. If it is the case that around half the sector believes we should churn property, house people only when they need our subsidised product, build communities and have a focus on promoting personal responsibility, an awful lot of business models and business practices within housing associations are going to need to be turned on their head - because sure as eggs are eggs - that's not how we operate now.

Is it what's needed? Will we do it? In the infamous Geordie words of the Big Brother narrator: "You decide..."

Can You Be Innovative In Housing?

Octavia Hill by John Singer Sargent (source)

Housing is a very simple business. I realise that’s a pretty dangerous statement for the CEO of a Housing Association to make and I would issue a few caveats, but in general my point is that the fundamental business of the housing world hasn’t changed much since the days of Octavia Hill. For anyone new to the business of housing (or anyone who wants a refresher) housing works like this: you build property, you offer those properties to people, you collect rent from those people, you keep the housing stock in good condition, you use the rent to build more houses and do other good things in your community.What could be simpler?

One issue with this is that when your main business is relatively straight-forward there’s the danger that you think you know how its done and miss the opportunities and progress that arises from innovation. I’ve been thinking on this issue more than usual lately as we’re hosting Progress 2011 on May 10th (its already fully booked, but watch the blog for posts afterwards). The theme of the day is “Necessity is the mother of invention” and we’ll be looking at how the current environment with all the associated flux and change is making our “simple” business of housing more complex than its been for years.

There's a mix of viewpoints on this but my feeling is that we have to be positive and identify the benefits and opportunities that arise from any given situation. After all, it’s all too easy to bemoan the difficulties that are created by powers out of our control, but why should we invest energy into complaining about things we can’t change when we can put that energy into making the best of the opportunities that this change is bringing. After all, as the wise t-shirt slogan goes – “When life gives you lemons, keep them because, hey, free lemons!”.

One of the biggest positives you can take out of the current situation is that we can feel the dead hand of regulation being lifted from our shoulders. There is currently a philosophy at the top that believes we should be less restrained by rules and more in touch with our customers. So for the first time in my 30+ years in the sector, there’s a real chance we will be left to get on with running the business that we know, in the way that meets our customers’ needs – that’s got to be a positive. In my experience extra regulation simply increases the need to comply. You end up with a culture that is obsessed with compliance: league tables and pointless trophies that exist just to show that you can follow regulation. Sweep that away and there’s an excitingly blank canvas. Onto that we can project new thoughts, express new ideas, in short we are being encouraged to innovate.

And what happens if we all start being creative and innovative? I was wondering this same thing about housing whilst listening to an excellent recent BBC documentary on pencil manufacturers in Germany who are still, after 200 years, competing to see who can innovate to produce the sharpest lead (honestly, it’s more interesting than that initially sounds! Listen Again on the iPlayer). Well, hopefully we start doing new things, things that are exciting, things that are a bit adventurous, things that are useful, things that are wanted by our customers, things we didn't know were possible. It’s inevitable that we’ll make mistakes, but as long as we acknowledge that they are mistakes, learn from them and move on, that’s ok too.

Then we begin to see a real differentiation between the services we offer to communities, some challenging ideas, some technological leaps forward, perhaps into a culture that really embraces the possibilities of social media. There is ultimately the creation of an industry that Octavia Hill might not recognise if she were alive today. We forget sometimes that as a woman who helped to create the National Trust, protect public land at the expense of private development and provide shelter for the country’s poor, Hill was invested in some fairly dangerous new thinking herself and that’s an attitude towards change, campaigning and innovation we should seek to emulate.

Let me end on a question – what do you do that’s innovative? When was the last time you or your business tried something different? How did it work out?