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From the frontline - John Place
John Place, customer experience manager at Accent Group, talks about his experience of social housing as both a tenant and staff member
Tell us about your job
I am Accent’s customer experience manager for the association’s Yorkshire region.
This new role, established following a recent restructure, has ultimate responsibility for the day to day housing management of all Accent’s properties across the region. I am responsible for providing the 5000 customers we have in the region with great homes and great services.
I’m really enjoying the new role. Being responsible for the needs of some many diverse customers means my responsibilities are very varied, but extremely rewarding. I feel like I have really helped to make a difference at the end of the day.
How did you get into housing?
When I left school, I worked for a small organisation which carried out maintenance work for social housing landlords. This was a fortunate opportunity – for both my career and my first home.
The job not only introduced me to social housing, and the vital role it plays in our communities, it made me realise I had secure housing options. I moved out of my family home at a young age, and became a tenant as a result.
Had I not had the opportunity to find out about social housing, my first experience of being a tenant may not have been so positive.
What is the best part of your job?
Absolutely the chance to make a difference to people’s lives and providing our customers with a safe, secure and happy place they can call home.
As a manager, I do not always have direct contact with our customers, but through supporting, coaching and mentoring staff, I can be influential in making sure we provide quality homes, quality services and a positive experience of being a social housing tenant.
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What’s the worst part?
When we have to evict someone. This is absolutely the last resort. We are driven and focused on preventing tenancies from failing.
We provide a great tenancy sustainability service and we are creative in retaining our customers – over 1700 customers accessed this service last year - and our eviction and turnover rates have steadily fallen since 2013. If we eventually have to apply for an eviction, it is more often than not because the customer has not engaged with our service and refused to work with us to prevent their tenancy from failing.
What would you change about the housing sector?
The housing sector should be the sector of choice, for all tenure types.
We should be the answer to the housing crisis and we could become so by working more collaboratively as a sector with local authorities, builders and with our future customers.
If you could be prime minister for the day, what would you do?
A lot! I’d make more land available for developing new homes and support this with investment into the local infrastructure. I’d also review Universal Credit and how this impacts people and I’d develop new policies to make sure vulnerable people were protected. It’s a lot to achieve in a day, but I’d do my best.
What’s the most private thing you’re willing to admit to your colleagues…
My journey of how I got to where I am today and how my life could have turned out very different had I not had that first experience of social housing.
