Howard's way

Positioned beside the chief executive’s desk at St Mungo’s Broadway headquarters is a hat stand bearing a curious object: a brown, rubber wolf mask which glares aggressively out of the window.

‘That’s for my union meetings,’ the mask’s owner, Howard Sinclair, explains.

He is clearly joking. But the mask is an apt momento, given the notoriously affable former Broadway chief executive is being forced to bare his teeth and make unpopular cuts just six months after taking over the newly merged organisation.

Last week, he and his management team were dealt a vote of no confidence by the trade union that represents nearly half his staff.

It has been a tense summer for St Mungo’s Broadway, which was created by the merger of London-based homelessness charities St Mungo’s and Broadway, in April.

Unite, which has historically represented St Mungo’s staff, claims Mr Sinclair’s appointment amounted to a takeover by Broadway, whose £15m turnover is one-third the size of St Mungo’s.

Unite is now preparing to ballot its 500-plus members at St Mungo’s Broadway on industrial action, citing ‘swingeing cuts to pay’ for new members of staff.

The problem with Mr Sinclair for union leaders is that he is hard to dislike. Speaking with Inside Housing at his drab office in Hammersmith, west London, Mr Sinclair warbles enthusiastically about his first job, aged 17, in the late 1970s at Friern Hospital (formerly known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum), which he took because he ‘couldn’t get a job at Woolworths’.

‘On my first day I turned up at 7 o’clock and was told to get 45 people up and dressed, washed and cleaned and at the table for breakfast by 7.45,’ he recalls. ‘It was bizarre but that’s how it was, and that was care back then.’

He describes having to rouse the men, some of whom were shell-shocked from the war, some who had first-stage syphilis (‘if anything teaches you about sex education, that does’) and some who were from Poland – in the institution because no one could understand them.

So did Mr Sinclair always want to work in the homelessness sector?

Mr Sinclair responds with a characteristic grin and a self-depreciating joke, rather than giving away too much.

‘No,’ he replies. ‘I wanted to either open the batting for England or play centre midfield but somehow that hasn’t come my way.’

Funny business

Paul Doe, chair of St Mungo’s Broadway (and previously chair of St Mungo’s), believes this sense of humour belies a ‘serious’ side.

‘He can’t be separated from his iPad and at times I think he’s even sending me emails when he’s on his motorbike… he will think about something for too long when he’s on holiday.’

More than this, Mr Sinclair has recently proven himself to have a steely side, and is willing to take up some controversial stances - both within his own organisation, and the rest of the sector. For instance, he openly calls for greater regulation of homelessness hostels in England.

Last month, Inside Housing research showed that more than half (57%) of councils have dropped the nationally recognised Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) for regulating hostels and supported housing since 2009.

Mr Sinclair says the 2,500 people living in St Mungo’s Broadway accommodation ‘are just as vulnerable as elderly people, children in care and people with mental health problems’.

‘Yet the bulk of services in our sector are not registered or inspected. What QAF brought in was some accountability. That is going and I think it is wrong.’

Mr Sinclair worked as a learning disabilities training manager and development manager at Clwyd County Council between 1989 and 1992, just as the horrific stories of those who had historically been abused in children’s homes in north Wales began to emerge.

In 2013, a previously suppressed report commissioned by Clywd Council revealed ‘extensive’ physical and sexual abuse of young people over a substantial period throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the authority’s children’s homes.

‘I have seen what happens when there isn’t an independent check on service quality,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t believe everyone who works in care works with the best of motives.’

Mr Sinclair believes his big job is to try to inform the public about homelessness, and lobby for the government to ‘prioritise spend’ on homeless people. He says that local authorities slashed what they would pay for Broadway’s services from £26/hour to £16/hour over four years.

With council contracts squeezing adult social care services, charities such as St Mungo’s Broadway increasingly have to do more with less. How will providers survive the next five years?

‘I don’t think that matters,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that is the first question.

‘The question is: will there be organisations that can best use the resources they have got in order to meet the needs of the people presenting to them?

‘If that means there are more organisations or less organisations, that doesn’t matter.’

Urge to merge

But Mr Sinclair does have some ideas about how charities can keep their heads above the water during a climate of funding cuts.

For instance, he is open to working with the private sector and big contractors such as Serco.

‘I think the private sector can bring skills experience, resources that we don’t have.’

And St Mungo’s Broadway is leading on the £36m Real Letting’s fund. Over the past 18 months, the fund, backed by Croydon Council and Big Society Capital, has used £36m of private investment to buy 181 homes on the open market.

The other way charities will survive, he predicts, is through mergers.

‘Broadway is gone,’ he says wistfully. ‘Twelve years of my life gone.’

One of the key reasons for the merger, he explains, was the anxiety that tighter public funds for running services would lead to poor-quality provision.

‘Basically, we would have not been able to run services in the way and with the safeguards we believed in.’

Accounts dating back to 2009 show Broadway was running a deficit for at least the five years to 2013, when the charity posted a shortfall of £25,000.

St Mungo’s was in a stronger financial position, but its surplus more than halved between 2012 and 2013 to £1.3m.

Mr Sinclair says the savings from the merger will be ‘over a million’, which seems small, given that St Mungo’s turnover was £49m in 2013. Some of these savings will have come from the loss of 20 senior staff positions in both organisations in the merger.

Mr Doe describes a different motivation for the merger: the desire to expand the regional reach of the organisation, beyond London and the south of England.

He sees it as a chance to ‘talk to different cities and keep an eye on contracting opportunities outside our core area’.

Liverpool is one potential venture.

‘We are aware that there are opportunities there but we have not made any bids yet.’

Daniel Currie, an independent consultant, believes St Mungo’s Broadway has laid down the gauntlet to other homelessness providers by becoming a ‘gigantic’ competitor.

‘It sends out a challenge to some of the other organisations in the sector, the Thames Reaches, the Single Homeless Projects, because [St Mungo’s Broadway’s] size is so great. It might make them think about either a merger or a high degree of specialisation.’

Rat’s tale

For now, though, Mr Sinclair has some internal problems to sort out, namely his dispute with the organisation’s main trade union, Unite.

St Mungo’s Broadway proposes to change the pay structure for new staff, from one set by the National Joint Council – which is negotiated with unions – to market rate salaries.

Unite argues that, because salaries have been depressed in the housing sector, this represents a substantial pay cut. At the time of the interview, it is unclear whether pay and conditions will also be changed for staff involved in any restructuring.

An anonymous employee emailed Inside Housing to say they are ‘appalled’ by the pay cuts. ‘Many people were enthused at the merger. That is no longer the case,’ it says.

Unite is balloting for industrial action and the week after our interview, the union protests outside a board meeting, along with a 9 foot inflatable rat.

Mr Sinclair remains adamant that funding cuts for homelessness services means the charity can no longer afford to maintain previous salary levels for new joiners.

‘We need to manage our money and cut our cloth accordingly,’ he says. ‘We can afford to maintain [current staff] pay, and terms and conditions, but for new staff coming in, we cannot continue at those rates.

‘We have so many common concerns [with Unite], I don’t know why they are choosing to squabble with us.’

Mr Sinclair suddenly looks sad when asked if the atmosphere at the charity is ‘fraught’. After all, given his history as a 17-year-old employed in a care setting and having previously been involved in strikes himself, it must be difficult to be on the other side of the picket line?

He shifts and looks up abruptly. ‘I have to justify [the changes] to myself and look myself in the mirror. I hope I can get that over [to staff]. If I don’t do that, so be it. It doesn’t mean I am wrong.’