A ramble with Greg Reed, Places for People’s chief executive

Mr Reed has travelled down to Berwick in the North East of England from Edinburgh today. He has lived in the Scottish capital for more than a decade with his wife – who hails from the same small town in Delaware, US – and their now-adult children.

He is wearing a PfP-branded windbreaker, a New York Yankees cap and a large class ring from his alma mater, Penn State University, where he now sits on the board.

He pauses at points in our conversation to snap a photo of a tuft of wildflowers, the train across the bridge and a pile of driftwood sculpted into a pirate ship.

Berwick-on-Tweed is one of 33 weekly walks across Northumberland, led by around 150 volunteer walkers and supported by Places Leisure, a subsidiary of PfP. Meanwhile, the Ramblers already has 148 walking groups across England and Wales.

The new partnership between PfP and the Ramblers, funded from the Places Foundation Impact Fund will train more volunteers to lead walks, with PfP hoping to add 60 more walks in its areas of operation.

“I didn’t know how to run leisure centres or manage property or build houses or run a social housing business, but I did have a long focus on customers”

“When we have a leisure centre, the people who pay and go in the leisure centre aren’t just the people who get the benefit from us,” Mr Reed explains. “We will also try to take health and well-being out into the community.”  

Mr Reed is something of a fitness enthusiast himself – and has been outspoken about his health journey – so he is keen to make exercise as accessible as possible. His hope is that the walks can address inactivity and poor health, and combat social isolation.  

“I’m in a running group, which I never thought would happen, but my wife and I started going every Saturday morning about 10 years ago,” he says. “And there’s about 15 of us and they’re our best friends now.”

Paul, who volunteers as a guide for the walks, got involved when he retired during the pandemic, and tells me that he hopes the Rambler partnership will see more attendees signposted from the GP as “social prescribing”. One long-time walker stopped attending due to her Parkinson’s, but Rose, the nonagenarian, still visits her every week.

The Ramblers partnership perfectly aligns with PfP’s strategy, Mr Reed says.

“Our strategy is about building communities, managing communities, health and well-being, education, employment, and inclusion. So this really ticks a big box on health and well-being, which is nice, and then it’s accessible, isn’t it?” 

But it presents an interesting question, one that much of the sector is grappling with: what responsibility does a social landlord have to its tenants, and how involved should it be in their lives?

In a cafe after the walk, we cross paths with a local journalist promoting her independent publication, and Mr Reed allows himself to be commandeered for an interview.

Not ideal for Inside Housing, maybe, but it is interesting to hear Mr Reed explain PfP’s sprawling network to someone from outside the sector.

He patiently rattles off the mission statement for her, and explains about PfP’s 300,000 homes, 100 leisure centres and its new trades training academy, PfP Thrive, which has 3,500 learners.

“Ooh, wow, that’s huge,” the local journalist says.

Mr Reed shrugs. “Well, that’s what we’re trying to do.” 

Beyond the ‘minimum’ 

PfP Thrive is an example of the “convening power of the sector”, Mr Reeds tells me.

He tells a story about a young woman who lives in a PfP home with her parents, who recently joined Thrive on an electrician apprenticeship.

“And then when I went to go see how she was getting on, she was in a course with, I think, Plymouth Community Homes, three people from Clarion and two people from PfP,” Mr Reed says. “That is what I want. We all need to help each other." 

Working for Places for People is “kind of freeing”, compared to his banking career, he says. Mr Reed moved to the UK for a role at MNBA, spending 10 years living in Chester, before relocating to Edinburgh to work for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

“When you were in banking you could really look after the customers, but you couldn’t really spend the shareholders’ money on ‘OK, let’s start an academy’, you know? Whereas now you can.” 

When he started in the role at PfP, he says, “someone said to me, ‘Are you going to get rid of the pools?’, and I was like, ‘No, they’re really key to what we want to do, we want them to be community centres.’” 

He adds: “You have to be really careful, but with how difficult it is for local authorities to do things, we’ve really tried to, without overburdening ourselves financially, do things like this. And if they’re community-led, all the better.” 

He is proud that the leisure centres and PfP Thrive pay the Living Wage Foundation’s real living wage.

“As a social enterprise, it’s part of who we are,” he says. “We can’t have people working for us who can’t afford to live.”

And his “basic rule” is that they need to be financially sustainable on their own. 

As he explains to the local journalist: “Some things are charitable and some things are commercial, but none of the money leaves the group. So, if we do a better job commercially, then we can build more homes and take better care of our existing homes.”

But ultimately, Mr Reed believes in going beyond the core landlord offering, even down to preferring to use the term ‘customers’ over ‘tenants’.

“If someone wants to be called a tenant, then I’ll call them that, but in my mind a ‘tenant’ is a contractual term, and it’s a minimum standard.”

That customer focus is why Mr Reed was brought on at PfP in the first place, he says. After his banking career, he was chief marketing officer, then chief executive, at repairs and improvements business HomeServe, and during that time took on a board role at Clarion. 

“Clarion was less of a learning curve, because I was sort of there to be the customer person, so that was fine, I learned a lot,” he says.

But coming to PfP was a different story. While repairs and maintenance and finance were familiar, the world of social housing regulation and government influence was all new.

“I didn’t know how to run leisure centres or manage property or build houses or run a social housing business, but I did have a long focus on customers,” he says. “And I think that’s what the board wanted, a real extreme focus on customers.”

‘We’ve got to find a way’ 

But he is clear that none of that should compromise the core missions: managing existing homes well and building new ones. 

“When I sat down and talked to the board when I first started, it was, ‘We need to do a better job on the existing assets, so let’s spend as much money as we can,’” he says.

But the “really very generous” package of measures from the government means the association can also develop new homes.

Mr Reed sees this as an imperative: “The support from the government comes with a requirement to build things, so we’ve got to find a way, even if it gets difficult.”

So even as the sector faces a difficult operating environment with rising construction costs, and many in the sector express disappointment about Homes England’s re-profiling of grant funding, Mr Reed warns against slowing down.