Bolton wanderer

Three weeks into his new job as chief executive at arm’s-length management organisation Bolton at Home and Jon Lord is still settling into his spacious corner office.

He admits he’s quite daunted. ‘This is the first private office I’ve ever had. I had a tradition for a number of years of hot-desking, just plonking myself down on an empty desk, so it came as a bit of a shock,’ he laughs.

An interview with Mr Lord is an informal affair. The 46-year-old has never liked wearing ties, and just because he’s taken over from George Caswell as chief executive of the three-star ALMO doesn’t mean he’s going to start sporting one.

The life-long Boltonian is open about personal details, with conversation branching off into recollections of his former career as a funeral director and stories about his 18-month-old grandson who he describes as the ‘joy of my life’.

But he has a more serious side. In 2008, Mr Lord received an OBE for his services to social housing. Now he’s about to lead tenants living in Bolton Council’s 18,200 homes into a ballot. It could result in ownership of their properties transferring from the council to Bolton at Home, the organisation that has managed the council’s stock for the past seven years, transforming it from an ALMO to a large-scale voluntary transfer organisation.

The vote will take place in ‘mid-summer’ - Mr Lord won’t specify exactly when. Defend Council Housing, the nationwide group that campaigns against social homes leaving local authority ownership is ‘sniffing about’, he explains. ‘We’re trying to keep the exact date under wraps.’

Ownership options

It’s crunch time for ALMOs - with the decent homes programme ending this year, the money they received for improvements has all been spent and councils with ALMOs face the decision of whether to maintain their management organisation without additional funding from the government, taking the management of their housing stock back in-house, or going down the same route as Bolton. In this last option, tenants decide whether they want their homes to stay under the ownership of their local authority or to be transferred to a housing association - which may well be their existing ALMO in a different form.

Judging by the outcome of the two previous ballots of ALMO tenants, both of which took place in north west England last month, it’s likely that Mr Lord will find himself with even greater responsibility after Bolton’s tenants vote.

First Choice Homes Oldham, another Greater Manchester town just 15 miles east of Bolton, was the first ALMO to take full control of the 12,000 homes it previously managed on behalf of Oldham Council (see feature, pages 36-36). Eighty-six per cent of tenants voted ‘yes’ to the transfer.
Days later in Warrington, Cheshire, a massive 91.9 per cent of council tenants voted for their homes to be handed over to ALMO Golden Gates.

The financial argument for a transfer is made clear in a document entitled ‘Your Bolton, your home, your vote’, which was sent out to tenants in March. ‘In the first five years following the transfer, it is estimated that around £124 million would be available to spend on homes and estates, compared to around £66 million currently estimated to be available to the council in the same period,’ it reads.

Awarded three stars by the Audit Commission in 2005, Bolton at Home received £150 million in decent homes funding and met the decent homes standard by April 2009. ‘Although Bolton at Home has gone a long way to improve homes,’ the document sent to tenants states, ‘the additional money required [to maintain the decent homes standard] is no longer available.’

Mr Lord calculates that around 1,000 properties per year will fall back into non-decency without further investment. The document spells out that transfer is the difference between an estimated 1,773 homes receiving new kitchens and bathrooms over the next five years under council ownership, and around 6,650 being delivered by the existing Bolton at Home. Presented with figures like this, it seems highly likely that tenants will go for the second option. Defend Council Housing will have its work cut out.

Eileen Short, chair of the campaigning group, argues that literature sent out by councils pushing for stock transfer is one-sided. ‘They’re not empowering tenants’ decision making as they’re not giving them the full picture,’ she says. ‘We said when ALMOs were set up that this was two-stage privatisation and we were right.’

At the heart of housing

If tenants do indeed vote ‘yes’, Mr Lord will be their main man - and he’s well qualified for the job. Born and bred in Bolton, he’s spent nearly 23 years working in housing in the town.

Since starting as a trainee in the housing department at Bolton Council in 1987, he’s worked his way through most of the local authority’s housing roles. ‘I’ve had seven or eight different jobs on my way through,’ he says.

In the early 1990s, Mr Lord worked in tenant participation, then, in 1995, he became access and advice manager, covering temporary accommodation, homelessness, and Gypsy and Traveller services. In 2001, he became a chief officer for community housing at the council, overseeing frontline housing services, including allocations and homelessness - services left with the council after Bolton at Home launched in 2003.

With so much of his own career dedicated to Bolton Council, does the potential housing association chief executive have conflicting feelings about the possibility of the town’s housing stock being taken out of local authority hands?

‘There’s a feeling that it’s a shame that Oldham and Warrington have had to go down the LSVT route,’ he answers. ‘I think we would have loved to have stayed an ALMO and had access to the resources we need to deliver our customers’ ambitions, but it’s not available. We tried approaching the government with different sorts of ideas, but none of them have been accepted.’

Staring into the middle distance as he talks, he adds: ‘If the [proposed] housing finance reforms come to fruition - and that’s a big if - for some ALMOs it may well provide a way forward, because they’ll have a bit of [financial] wriggle room to actually be able to maintain decent homes and fulfil their ambitions.

‘We didn’t have that wriggle room. We’ve just done the calculations [if the tenants vote yes to the transfer, Bolton at Home would have a capital investment programme of around £26.5 million, if the vote is no and the government introduces self-financing for councils through housing revenue account reforms, then it would have funding totalling around £16 million] as part of the consultation prior to the ballot with customers,’ he concludes.

Doing the sums

Even if the housing revenue account reforms, details of which were published last month, are implemented in their current format, ‘there’s still £10 million a year difference between what we would get through housing subsidy and what we will have if we go through an LSVT,’ he calculates. ‘That is £300 million over a 30-year business plan, and not something you can ignore.

‘If it had been close - you know, if the gap had been less than £5 million - local politicians would have questioned whether they wanted to go ahead with the stock transfer, but the gap is still sufficient. We can only realise our ambitions through stock transfer,’ he states in a Boltonian brogue, straight out of Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights.

He may only be in his mid-forties, but Mr Lord is the father of four grown-up children and a grandfather of one, with another grandchild due in October. ‘I’ve always been in a rush with things,’ he laughs. He is characteristically impatient when it comes to improving Bolton’s housing stock.
‘Our ambition is not just [meeting the] decent homes standard, but to take properties to what we call the Bolton standard, which is beyond the decent homes standard,’ he says.

Nearly 70 per cent of the ALMO’s tenants are on benefits, he says - and that’s not a result of the recession. The unemployment rate in the town is ‘static’, states Mr Lord. ‘It’s always been around 65 to 70 per cent [within the ALMO].’

Mr Lord says that one of his greatest ambitions is to work with the council to narrow the ‘gap of 20 years’ life expectancy between some of the poorest areas and some of the more affluent ones’.

If the stock transfer goes ahead this summer, a stock-owning Bolton at Home’s board will be made up equally of independents, tenants and elected members.

Direct tenant relationship

Passing management of housing stock from a local authority to an ALMO or shifting full ownership to a LSVT organisation, can be a very healthy thing to do, believes Mr Lord. ‘You can have a very direct relationship with tenants,’ he expands. ‘I think that ALMOs and LSVTs are unique, in that they’re focused, predominantly, on one community.’

As a stock transfer association, Bolton at Home will have an ‘equal’ and more effective relationship with the local authority than it does as an ALMO. ‘At the moment the relationship is a bit like parent and child, because when you’re an ALMO they’re the owner shareholder,’ he explains.

The frontline housing services that have stayed within the council since the town’s ALMO was formed seven years ago are likely to remain, so Bolton at Home and Bolton Council will need to work ‘in partnership’.

Roughly 1,100 people work for Bolton at Home - what will happen to them if tenants vote in favour of the transfer? ‘It’s a three-star service, so it doesn’t need major restructuring, but it will need some changes,’ he responds. When pressed, he adds, ‘We’re making quite a considerable offer to customers in the offer document and we need to make sure we deliver it’, implying that the new organisation will need to be as efficient as possible and savings may need to be made.

His new employees make jokes about him having his photo taken, but the affable Mr Lord laughs them off. He may have only moved from Bolton’s town centre council offices less than a month ago, yet he’s a familiar face around Bolton at Home’s modern building in a business park on the edge of town.

Over the past couple of years, he’s held a ‘bridging role’ between the local authority and the ALMO, being on both the council’s development and regeneration management team and on that of Bolton at Home.

One of the strangest things about his new office is that it’s across the road from the undertaker he used to work for. ‘I’m getting my lunches at the same bakers that I used to when I left school,’ he chuckles. ‘I get déjà vu when I walk in to get my pasty at lunchtime.’

There’s no doubt Mr Lord has come a long way since his late teens and he’s hoping a yes vote from tenants will keep him so busy, he won’t get the chance to be lonely in his new office.