Associations should consider sharing CEOs, says Lewis

Speaking to Inside Housing at the Conservative Party conference on Tuesday, the housing minister signalled he believes the sector has too many chief executives.

The minister also said landlords should consider whether they should be providing extra services, such as welfare to work programmes, if they are not using their asset base to build homes.

Mr Lewis said housing associations should be more aggressive about saving money and “like local authorities” should look at “sharing chief executives, sharing management, coming together and joining up”.

There are more than 1,500 housing associations in the sector, the majority of which have fewer than 250 homes.

Mr Lewis said: “That’s roughly double the number of local authorities; some local authorities have three or four housing associations in their area.”

The minister also responded to housing figures who have argued that many associations are not primarily house builders, but are chiefly landlords with specific social and care functions.

“If housing associations are doing welfare work, as well as building houses, that’s great,” he said. “If it’s at the expense of building houses, they’re not using their asset base to build houses. I do expect them to start looking at themselves and asking why.”

George Osborne announced in July that social housing rents in England will be cut by 1% a year for four years from April.

The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) last month said the government would not consider an exemption from the social rent cut for struggling providers unless they had first considered merging with another landlord.

Chris Wood, partner at consultancy Altair, described the suggestion that associations share CEOs as “half-baked” and said it would be difficult for associations to do this because they often have large geographic spreads and different social ethoses. “The better solution is to reduce the number of associations and have more mergers,” he added.

Jon Lord, chief executive of Bolton at Home, said many housing associations already take part in cost-sharing “as a matter of course”.