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Let’s ditch the navel-gazing and stick to the basics
Looking after homes people want to live in should be our mission, not agonising over the way we describe values, says Alison Inman
Happy New Year and welcome to the new world order. We’ve had the election, everything has changed, everything has stayed the same. We’re likely to have a new secretary of state in the reshuffle and I’ve been wondering what they’ll make of us.
I’ve spent much of the day looking at housing association websites, trying to get a sense of how housing organisations describe themselves.
Several hours later and I’m not really any the wiser.
Having grown up calling a spade a spade (if not a shovel) I do sometimes struggle with the tendency of the housing sector to spend so much time looking inwards and, dare I say, navel-gazing.
No wonder councillors and MPs are so ambivalent about us, and too many tenants feel unheard, powerless and angry.
We go on and on with increasingly complex – or, even worse, “edgy” descriptions of purpose, mission, vision, values, objectives… the list is endless.
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A few years ago there was a fashion for an odd number of values, presumably because it looks better on the office wall. It’s probably apocryphal but there’s allegedly an organisation that wanted to go from having six values to having five. So they ditched ‘integrity’.
Lots and lots of work seems to go into defining three or four words that will distinguish one landlord from another.
But even so there are only so many words and it’s not uncommon for two organisations to have pretty similar values.
It starts to get interesting when you realise how very different those organisations are. That comes down to how people behave and surely we shouldn’t need a corporate rebrand to tell us to be kind, or to treat people with respect.
I interviewed one of the housing ministers, hard to remember which, at the Homes exhibition just over a year ago.
He wanted to talk about repairs, and why so many tenants end up in MPs’ and councillors’ surgeries with horror stories about the state of their properties.
This is what he wanted us to be worrying about, and what the millions that live in social housing want.
We are far more likely to be listened to when we talk about the urgent need for significant and sustained levels of investment in new supply if we give the impression that we are interested in the properties we already own and manage.
“No wonder councillors and MPs are so ambivalent about us, and too many tenants feel unheard, powerless and angry”
For large-scale voluntary transfers, this also means respecting the municipal endeavour that went into providing the homes in the first place.
Yes, housing associations are different in structure to council housing departments, but perhaps not as different as some would like.
To most of the public there is no difference between the two and where they end up living is purely down to when they were successful bidding on a council letting system.
For all the talk, what we do is both straightforward and highly complex.
We build, manage and maintain properties and, to a greater or lesser extent, do other work with communities.
Yes, we work across different markets, have different structures and have different stakeholders, but the core activities remain similar. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that some people find this a bit boring, that it doesn’t show quite how special they are.
For lots of us, though, providing high-quality homes that people want to live in, looking after them as well as we can and then letting people just get on with their lives is exactly what we are paid to do.
In such a great sector to work in, that all makes our work pretty darn cool. Let’s make that the message for 2020.
Alison Inman, board member, Colne, Saffron and Tpas; and former president, Chartered Institute of Housing
