Money talks

‘I really don’t spend any time thinking about it,’ says Jane Ashcroft, chief executive of Anchor, the UK’s highest paid housing association boss, when asked whether criticism of her paypacket is fair.

The 44-year-old took the helm of England’s largest not-for-profit housing and care provider 10 months ago. Six months later, her sector-topping £290,000 a year pay was revealed in Inside Housing’s annual chief executives’ salary survey (Inside Housing, 24 September 2010). Unsurprisingly, it stirred up a long-running debate about housing chiefs’ remuneration.

Perhaps just as unsurprisingly,

Ms Ashcroft doesn’t want to dwell on her six-figure salary. ‘The job’s the job,’ she says. ‘There are so many things I want us [Anchor] to focus on and be fantastic at,’ she adds, keen to move the conversation on.

Others, however, might be interested to know exactly what such a richly rewarded role involves - and what the highest paid person in housing is actually like.

Inside Housing meets Ms Ashcroft in Anchor’s head office in London’s bustling Covent Garden. Far from high-and-mighty, the boss personally greets us in reception and offers to help the photographer carry his equipment.

Having worked for Anchor for 11 years, joining as head of human resources in 1999, Ms Ashcroft has gradually built up her role within the organisation. In 2007 she was promoted to managing director and company secretary, and when her predecessor John Belcher suddenly resigned in November 2009 she became acting chief executive. Her permanent position running Anchor was confirmed last March, the same month in which the organisation announced a £286.5 million turnover for 2009/10, up from £267 million the previous financial year.

Power and influence
With more than 50,000 service users and around 10,500 employees working in 1,000 locations across England, Anchor is an influential organisation and Ms Ashcroft is determined to use its status to raise the profile of older people’s services.

‘It’s important to respect the job,’ she states in a northern accent that’s difficult to pinpoint and belies her Merseyside roots. ‘I understand it’s a big job in a big organisation and it’s important to use it wisely. I want to make sure older people’s services get their share of the cake in these difficult times.’

Besides the day job, she’s also chief executive of The English Community Care Association, the largest representative body for community care in England. She attended all three political party conferences last year as an advocate for older people in an attempt to influence decision-makers.

The need to address the housing and care of an ageing population practically speaks for itself. The Office for National Statistics projects that by 2034 nearly a quarter of the population will be over 65, while just 18 per cent will be under 16. Ms Ashcroft believes the range of services offered by Anchor - care homes, retirement housing to buy or rent and also in-home care - makes her organisation particularly relevant. ‘The integration of services fits with the policy agenda at the moment,’ she smiles.

This certainly seems to be true. In November, the Department of Health published Vision for adult social care: capable communities and active citizens, which puts ‘personalised services and outcomes centre stage’. Ministers want to see care and support delivered by partnerships between individuals, communities, the voluntary and private sectors, the National Health Service and councils. And that includes wider support services, such as housing.

Ms Ashcroft brims with enthusiasm about the publication, not least because it’s likely to feed into this month’s Health and Social Care Bill. ‘I’m really pleased about the importance of housing in that document,’ she beams.

Funding cuts
But while policy may be travelling in a direction which favours older people specialists like Anchor, as in all areas funding is being cut. Specifically, councils’ purchasing power is being seriously curtailed by wider budget cuts to Supporting People funding. Overall spending to help vulnerable people with their housing has only suffered minor cuts compared with other areas, declining from £1.64 billion in 2010/11 to £1.59 billion by 2014/15; but the money is not ring-fenced, making it prey to councillors struggling to finance non-related services following overall budgets cuts which average 4.4 per cent.

At the moment, 63 per cent of Anchor’s income from rented retirement housing comes from private sources. Of the 37 per cent from the public sector it received £37.5 million from housing benefit and £6 million in Supporting People funding in 2009/10. In addition, 40 per cent of its income from care homes is private. Anchor must now work harder to attract customers able to pay their own way. In the past, says Ms Ashcroft, ‘the vast majority of people came through a third party, now people will be finding their own services’.

Ms Ashcroft is optimistic about the opportunities that could arise as a result. By 2015 she wants Anchor’s turnover to be at least £365 million. Then it’s estimated that 70 per cent of the organisation’s customers will have actively chosen to purchase its services, either paying with their own money or through a personalised budget. However, given the massive array of competitors in the housing and care market, she must ensure her organisation ‘demonstrates good value for money regardless of who is paying for the service’.

Anchor is unable to put a value on the diverse UK housing and care market. It benchmarks its performance against other not-for-profit older people housing specialists such as Housing 21 and Hanover, but there’s a whole range of other companies whose services overlap. All have an eye on becoming major players servicing the ageing population’s needs.

First, there are domiciliary care companies like Allied Healthcare to contend with - it has a 10,000-strong workforce offering similar services to Anchor’s home care business. Then there are private retirement housing providers such as Audley Retirement and Beechcroft. Add care home providers including BUPA - where Ms Ashcroft worked for a year in 1998 after it bought Care First, a private care home group where she was personnel director, just before the job of HR chief at Anchor came up - and that’s some competition.

Building the brand
The boss must see to it that Anchor holds its ground - it owns 37,163 homes, including care home places, and has a turnover of £286.5 million, whereas Housing 21, for example, has revenues of £166.4 million and 17,294 homes.

Ms Ashcroft wants her organisation to be the go-to provider for many combinations of housing and care she says people will need as they live longer. ‘When people think of services for older people, we want them to think of Anchor as an obvious partner, whether that’s a local authority or a GP or an individual family looking for services,’ states Ms Ashcroft.

She has already overseen a re-branding exercise. ‘People need to know where to find out more about us,’ she explains. The organisation has restructured to make it simpler for customers. Division names, such as Guardian Management Services, its leasehold property arm, and Anchor Retirement Housing, its rented sheltered housing, have been dropped. Now everything’s simply Anchor.

And, as Inside Housing reported last week, Ms Ashcroft has overseen the transfer of Anchor Staying Put, its repairs and maintenance service, to contractor Mears. Anchor will now concentrate on its core business: housing and care.

One person who believes in Ms Ashcroft’s ability to make the right judgements is her former boss, Mick Kent, chief executive of Bromford Group - where she first worked in housing in 1993, when she joined the Wolverhampton-based landlord’s HR department.

‘She’s a good people person, she’s very enthusiastic and a very quick learner,’ says Mr Kent, overflowing with praise. ‘She’s positive and upbeat and she just bubbles and exudes enthusiasm.’

One aspect of Ms Ashcroft’s role that she’s less effusive about, however, is personal publicity.

‘The consequence of this job is that there’s a profile that goes with it,’ she says. ‘I have the best job in the world, except for this bit,’ she tells the photographer while he’s positioning her for a portrait. ‘I’ve been compared to Cherie Blair in the photo department,’ she adds to raise a smile.

It’s fair to say that Ms Ashcroft is no ego-maniac. She blushes slightly when asked to talk about herself. Born in Liverpool, she considers herself a northerner, she says, though her family relocated south to Hampshire when she was very young.

She moved to Scotland to study history and education at Stirling University, planning to become a teacher. Experiencing life in the classroom put her off, she says, though it did teach her how to deal with ‘landing in front of a group of people and talking to them’. Instead she joined Midlands Electricity, where she worked her way up from graduate trainee to assistant company secretary.

Ms Ashcroft didn’t just walk into the chief executive role when Mr Belcher - who was paid 26 per cent more than her - left Anchor. Although she was acting chief executive, she still had to go through what she describes as a ‘pretty demanding recruitment process’.

At the time there was a veil of mystery around who else went for the job, and if Ms Ashcroft knows who her rivals were, she’s not giving them away. ‘I knew there was a fantastic response. I believe that at the final interview there were five candidates,’ is all she’ll say.

Engaging with the sector
Mr Kent reckons other social landlords have felt ‘a bit distant from what was going at Anchor’ in recent years. Ms Ashcroft is addressing this; last month, for example, she reversed a decision taken in March 2009 for Anchor - and Housing 21 - to quit the National Housing Federation arguing the trade body wasn’t lobbying enough on behalf of older people. Both organisations have rejoined.

‘I’m keen to make sure we work with the federation on older people’s housing issues,’ says Ms Ashcroft.

On top of this, she’s finding ways to engage directly with government initiatives. For example, she’s jumped straight onto the new role given to GP commissioners in the recent Decentralisation and Localism Bill and is already working with some of the 52 GP consortia acting as pathfinders in this area. From April 2013, primary care trusts will be abolished and groups of GPs will assume new statutory responsibilities - including procuring housing and care services.

‘We can talk about a range of services and we can look at cost-effective options,’ she says. These include the reablement services Anchor is planning to offer to help people leaving hospital resume normal life.

Now she’s getting ready for the ‘medium-term stuff coming out two to three years down the line’ such as the fallout from the Dilnot Commission, which is charged with coming up with a fair way of paying for care in old age and, controversially, could lead to people having to sell their homes to pay for support.

As far as Ms Ashcroft is concerned, her work as chief executive at Anchor has barely begun. ‘Getting the job is the easy bit,’ she says. ‘It’s what you do with it that’s important.’