The sector has changed
Five years on from taking on his first chief executive job, Boris Worrall considers how the sector has changed
Five years on from taking on his first chief executive job, @BorisJWorrall considers how the sector has changed #UKhousingThis may be a controversial and even unpopular view, but housing has been largely insulated from austerity and benefited from a benign operating environment – despite what a minority, with a tendency to moan, might have you believe.
Huge swathes have been cut from local authority funding, and even sacred cows such as the police and health service have struggled to attract the resources they so badly need.
“While the lifeblood of grant funding and rent certainty still pump reassuringly around the sector’s system, it is easy to underestimate how much other fundamentals have changed”
Thanks to generous capital funding for new homes, and a rent settlement which is, in theory at least, pegged above inflation, our fundamental financial position remains strong.
In that sense then, we remain well-placed to deliver the social impact which matters so much to local people and communities and remains core to our reason for existence.
But while the lifeblood of grant funding and rent certainty still pump reassuringly around the sector’s system, it is easy to underestimate how much other fundamentals have changed.
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I joined Rooftop five years ago this month – a rookie chief executive with big ideas, little experience, and a blissful naivety about the deep responsibilities I was taking on.
Fortunately, I have grown into the role. And I needed to, because the job of running a housing association today is a completely different proposition from when I started.
The tragedy at Grenfell sent a shockwave through society and quite rightly demanded major operational and cultural changes in how we view and deal with building safety, as well as significant additional resourcing and investment.
“Customers are frustrated by delays in repairs and planned maintenance, and have understandably grown weary of excuses”
That was the spark which ignited the development of the Social Housing White Paper, a welcome wake-up call for all of us. The white paper moves beyond ‘tick-box’ engagement to embrace the concept of a fundamental power imbalance, and the need to acknowledge and address a partial erosion of trust between housing organisations and tenants.
In turn, we must now rise to the challenge of much stronger consumer regulation and a new and very active complaints ombudsman, as well as a code of governance demanding much more of us in areas such as equality, diversity and inclusion, and open engagement with those we serve.
The challenges of climate change and the need to invest billions into existing homes to ensure that they achieve energy band C by 2030 is starting to punch a huge hole in our balance sheets.
And Brexit and the pandemic have combined to push repairs and maintenance costs up by a staggering 10-15%, as skills shortages mean wages are rising exponentially and materials like timber and plasterboard remain stuck in far-flung reaches of the globe due to the shipping crisis.
Meanwhile, customers are frustrated by delays in repairs and planned maintenance, and have understandably grown weary of excuses. This, alongside growing issues around anti-social behaviour and general societal stress, have led to customer satisfaction falling, perhaps by 5%.
It’s no wonder that leaders across the sector can feel under siege sometimes – I certainly do.
Everything feels harder.
We now face the kind of difficult choices which were probably last seen in the 2015 era of the 1% rent cut.
So how do we deal with this new world order?
I believe we should return to where it all starts: with our charitable purpose. There’s both comfort and continuity in that. Our charitable purpose transcends political and funding cycles, as well as our own personal views; it transcends the hand-to-hand combat of daily management and concentrates on the thousands of individual homes with families living in them.
Over the coming months we will go right back to where it all started for Rooftop almost 30 years ago and start to reconfigure who we are and what we do around that social purpose, which is embedded in our charitable articles. The language might be dated and slightly clunky, but the intention is clear.
With the storm raging around us, those articles will be both our guide and our inspiration as we charge into the headwinds we face. We will move forward with a brutal honesty about what we need to do and a relentless determination that we will succeed – for our customers and the communities where they live, whatever it requires of us.
Boris Worrall, chief executive, Rooftop Housing Group
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