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The five Rs of housing

Nick Atkin sets out his priorities for housing

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Halton Housing's @nickatkin_hh looks at the five Rs of housing in 2018 in today’s IH50 #ukhousing

Residents should be at the heart of housing’s priorities says @nickatkin_hh in today’s IH50 #ukhousing

The irony was never lost on me of the use of the so called three Rs in education, when they actually referred to reading, writing and arithmetic.

What did this say about our approach to spelling?!

My priorities for the year have a variation on this theme – the five Rs.

The first and most important of these is ‘residents’.

A recent HACT report highlights that we need to ensure we don’t return to an era when an over-reliance was placed on the views of a few willing, but unrepresentative, voices.

Instead of returning to a time of asking lots of questions and doing very little with what people told us, we need to develop a real-time customer insight framework that focuses on understanding what is driving our customers, rather than just analysing their transactional activity.

One of the key tests of satisfaction is whether customers would recommend their current landlord to friends or family.

The next four Rs are set out in no particular order.


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‘Repairs’, for the vast majority of customers this is the primary measure by which they assess the quality of the service they receive from their landlord. It’s also the areas where the fight for value for money can be won or lost.

This is not just about the immediate home environment – it’s also a reflection of how well the wider neighbourhood is managed and maintained.

Then there are ‘rents’.

The roll-out of Universal Credit and the associated challenges this brings, which I’ve covered in an earlier article, means that for a number of landlords up to 65% of their income could be at risk.

When considering that just 15% of those claimants who are due to move to Universal Credit have actually done so, there are still over three million households who will migrate across by 2021.

Halton Housing has responded to this seismic shift in our operating environment by transforming the way we deliver our services. This has enabled us to free up resources that are now being used to provide intensive tenancy support for those customers who lead complex lives and who would otherwise be at risk of losing their tenancy.

The penultimate R is ‘regulation’.

“The recent spate of regulatory downgrades has reinforced the importance of effectively managing all the ‘big six’ compliance areas.”

Post-Grenfell there has been an enhanced focus on ensuring our homes are safe and well managed. The recent spate of regulatory downgrades has reinforced the importance of effectively managing all the ‘big six’ compliance areas.

My Adam Ant-inspired piece back in April 2017 highlighted the need for us to maximise our capacity and demonstrate we have played our part in delivering the new homes required to address the housing crisis.

This requires a revised approach to how we assess financial viability.

Despite the best efforts of the regulator, within the current system V2 is still not viewed as ‘a badge of honour’.

This would entail a shift to a five-point scale, with V1 being the new V2.

This would mean those organisations who have geared up to deliver, secure the highest rating.

And last but not least is ‘revolution’.

There’s a need to completely rethink our approach. The current model merely responds to service failure. We wait for something to happen and then respond to this in an unplanned, expensive and, from a customer’s perspective, inconvenient way.

The approach needs to shift from being reactive to pre-emptive.

20 years ago you drove a car until it broke down.

Then you’d take it to a garage to be repaired.

“We can pre-empt many of the common service factors we deal with.”

In 2018 your car uses a combination of sensors and real-time data analytics (such as driving style and conditions) to determine when it requires service interventions to prevent a breakdown from occurring.

Our housing model is no different, as we can pre-empt many of the common service factors we deal with.

This is not just repairs, but also when payments are likely to be missed, tenancy terminations as well as a range of other housing management issues that merely serve to frustrate our customers as and when they happen.

Then there is the way we build homes. This hasn’t really changed since the 15th century as we still rely on stone and mud – it’s just we now call these bricks and mortar. Modular and panelised build systems are still in their infancy but it won’t be very long before these will offer a huge opportunity to revolutionise how we build homes for the future.

The five Rs are my way of keeping the focus where it’s needed, especially in a world where there is always the temptation to be distracted and drawn in other directions.

Nick Atkin, chief executive, Halton Housing