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Meet Matt Harrison, chief executive of Great Places Housing Group
Great Places Housing Group recently completed a merger with Equity Housing Group – the first of this scale since the coronavirus pandemic hit. Nathaniel Barker caught up with chief executive Matt Harrison over a video call from his Stockport home
I was wondering whether you would be one of those people who suits up for video calls but evidently not. Am I to read into that as anything about your style as a chief executive?
Well, I certainly haven’t worn a tie for about 20 years, so I’m relatively relaxed in that context, yeah. I do wear a suit to work but my domestic attire [gestures towards his baggy grey t-shirt], there’s no middle ground. It’s either a suit or it’s something a bit more low brow, so I struggle with the in-between bit really.
How did you come by a career in social housing, are you one of those people who fell into it?
I did, but there are threads which kind of show that it wasn’t a complete fall in from nowhere. I did a geography degree and, for me, it wasn’t about rivers and mountains and all that kind of stuff. For me it was the urban geography, the political geography, the human geography [that was interesting].
I also did a subsidiary in my first year in sociology, and one of the elements of that course was about the politics of high-rise housing and how the government in the post-war years and into the ‘50s and ‘60s got stuck into high rise and the planning of the high-rise urban utopia.
“Life’s moved on over the past 10 years in terms of the way organisations are run and the way leaders are expected to behave”
So I got fascinated by that really, and so at the end of my degree I kind of piled all that stuff and interests and decided I hadn’t got a clue what I wanted to do, so I did a masters in housing policy at what was then called the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Birmingham Uni. And then I emerged from that and decided it was time to get a job and I was offered a job in development by a housing association.
[Reporter’s note: that housing association was North Cheshire Housing Association, which later became Equity Housing Group and is now part of Great Places.]
“We’re in a position whereby we can support the government in getting the building industry back to work as fast as possible and we’re really keen to play our part in that”
Great Places (which has 19,000 homes) recently merged with Equity (has just less than 5,000 homes). Was the way you approached the merger informed by other previous mergers you worked on or elsewhere in the sector?
That’s an interesting one. We as Great Places haven’t gone through a merger for the best part of 10 years. So it felt very different to be honest. I think from our experience we, to some degree, started from scratch, and life’s moved on over the past 10 years in terms of the way organisations are run and the way leaders are expected to behave.
We did look around the sector a little bit and [at] some recent merger activity, and we really wanted to get it right for Equity colleagues coming into the business and we wanted to get it right for the Equity board. We were anxious that it wasn’t seen – people talk about acquisitions and takeovers and all that kind of stuff – we were anxious that it wasn’t seen like that by anyone inside Equity and indeed by stakeholders as well.
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There is some quite ambitious development plans associated with the merger, such as the target of 8,000 homes over 10 years, and Great Places already had quite a stretching pipeline. Is that something that is going to need to be reviewed in any way?
We’re ambitious about growth and my pint pot is always well more than half full when it comes to development activity. I really want the organisation to fulfil its ambitions around growth. We’re in a position whereby we can support the government in getting the building industry back to work as fast as possible and we’re really keen to play our part in that, so I want to see things through an opportunity lens rather than a doom and gloom lens.
Is the efficiencies process going to be changed at all given the current climate?
No, we have a plan which will realise efficiencies over an integration period which we’ve always assumed to be two years. We haven’t had a big redundancy programme at day one or anything like that and don’t intend to have a big redundancy programme at all. But nevertheless there are one or two areas where there is a bit of overlap and we want to just go through in a timely but considered way how the organisation’s going to look and feel.
But the pandemic hasn’t – we don’t want that to change things for us in that context but equally we don’t want to pause as a result, either. I think there could have been a temptation to pause it but I don’t think that’s the right thing to do at all. We need to press on with integration. But we’ve always thought the financial efficiencies which we can generate will happen over a couple of years and that is plan A and it’s what we’re going to stick with.
What have you made of the sector’s response to the crisis?
I think the sector’s responded really positively. I think it’s been a real opportunity for the sector and I think the sector’s done – from what I’ve seen – a brilliant job in terms of mobilising, getting our people doing things. We’ve a financial contribution to make, we can connect with vulnerable people, we can connect them to health services, we can connect them to the food supply network – we can do all sorts of things. So I think it’s been a fantastic response from our sector and it’s been really visible in the Greater Manchester context.
I think the sector’s sometimes struggled with its reputation – for reasons I’ve never quite understood because we do amazing work – and this is an opportunity to showcase that amazing work and be part of recovery and be part of, hopefully, a societal recognition that there are an awful lot of people who are very vulnerable to shocks like this.
How have you been finding the lockdown personally?
Well, I think it’s a mixed bag. I love the sense of community about work. I like being in the office and I like seeing people and talking to people. So obviously I miss that. But equally there are some benefits of it. It’s provoked us to think more about technology and the way we can use that for work.
I think it’s reinforced my view that there’s a balance with this stuff really. I think I’d really struggle within an environment which didn’t have some office base and that opportunity to see people and say hello on that casual, almost water-cooler conversation-type basis. You get a lot from that as a chief exec and being isolated from it is not great really.
Outside of work is there anything that you’re missing at all? I can see a few posters around you, are you a frequent gig goer?
I’ve had four gigs cancelled, which is a bit irritating. We were going to see the Jesus and Mary Chain and that’s been rearranged. I had Steel Pulse organised which is – you can guess something about my age by these bands I’m naming here – but that’s bitten the dust as well. Something a bit more modern: I was going to see King Krule and that’s gone as well. I was looking forward to that.
I like going to the football so that’s a bit of a miss as well, albeit my team were losing all the time. I’m a big Sheffield Wednesday fan, so I tend to go home and away watching the football. So that’s a big part of my life which is not happening right now.
[Reporter’s note: behind Mr Harrison sits an impressive Private Eye collection. His brother bought him a subscription as a 17th birthday present in 1981 and he’s been getting the magazine ever since.]
*Some answers have been shortened.
