You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Let’s come together and guard against shoddy work from commercial partners
Following complaints about new build homes, Matthew Bailes calls for housing associations to come together like a pack of guard dogs to deter poor quality.
If you buy a new car, you don’t expect it to break down or develop faults. If it does – in the first three years, at least – you expect it to be fixed pretty quickly.
You certainly don’t expect it to have faults that could jeopardise your health and safety.
The car industry is far from perfect, but it generally meets these expectations. If and when it doesn’t, the backlash from consumers, regulators and company shareholders is pretty fierce.
It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to expect similar standards in new homes. By and large, those do not include new and largely untested technology – far from it. It should be perfectly possible with appropriate controls in place to deliver a faultless or near-faultless product.
But we all know that this is far from the reality, far too often. I have been shocked by some of the things I have seen and heard about some new and refurbished homes.
“I have been shocked by some of the things I have seen and heard about some new and refurbished homes”
The most egregious recent failing was the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the dangerous nonsense that is slapping flammable material on the sides of tall buildings.
But this is just the tip of a big iceberg, which ranges from other basic health and safety issues to failing to prevent and quickly deal with relatively minor defects.
READ MORE
There are clear signs that the market isn’t working. At the root of the problem is the fact it is very hard for buyers to spot problems that are ‘under the floorboards’ – both literally and metaphorically.
They are therefore not in a good position to make clear-eyed choices between higher and lower quality products based on price.
In fact, price differentiation based on underlying quality rather than aesthetics is minimal. There are therefore strong incentives for housebuilders to slash costs in ways consumers can’t easily notice, compromising quality and potentially safety. Ultimately, this benefits developers and landowners, not consumers.
“Buyers are not in a good position to make clear-eyed choices between higher and lower quality products based on price.”
In due course, these savings for housebuilders could create costs for society, including taxpayers. History suggests that today’s poorly designed and built homes become tomorrow’s regeneration or major refurbishment projects.
Consumers and taxpayers need the protection of a robust regulatory system, but no such system exists. The building control regime is probably the most broken regulatory system in the country, but there is not much sign of this changing, save for on the very specific issues raised by Grenfell concerning tall buildings.
Of course, in this context, housing associations are both consumers (buyers of properties from developers and contractors) and sellers (when we sell or rent properties).
This puts us in a very difficult position, given the state of the market. If we take on substandard properties, we also take on risks concerning costs, health and safety, and consumer satisfaction – and therefore ultimately our reputation as well.
It would be most unwise to rely on the government to come and solve the problem, so we need to look after ourselves.
At Paradigm, we are improving quality through our overall strategy (by being more land-led), terms of trade (for example, our design standards, contract terms and key appointments), project management and governance, the proactive assurance we are getting while schemes are on site, handover, customer care and dealing with defects.
We sometimes express this with our informal ‘dog scale’ – we aim to have the same approach to safeguarding quality as a hungry Doberman does to guarding its home.
I am sure most other providers are doing very similar things. Hopefully this will lead to some progress, notwithstanding risks from the availability of skilled labour and the potential for more corner-cutting in a depressed market.
“If we were better at sharing our experiences – good and bad – we could create much better incentives for our commercial partners”
However, I can’t help but feel we are missing a trick. Consumer power has been transformed by user-generated content on the internet.
Twenty years ago, it wasn’t easy to get much information about the quality of a hotel; now, it takes five minutes on TripAdvisor. The information is not always perfect, but it is much better than it was before.
Collectively, housing associations are very big players in housebuilding. If we were better at sharing our experiences – good and bad – we could create much better incentives for our commercial partners, including developers, contractors and service providers such as employer’s agents.
Delivering shoddy work for one provider and then moving on to the next would no longer be so easy.
Put another way, we all need our guard dogs, but they might be more effective if they hunted as a pack.
Something for our trade body to consider?
Matthew Bailes, chief executive, Paradigm Housing Group
