You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
The Miller’s Tale: we interview the new Clarion chief executive
Clare Miller is Clarion’s third chief executive in seven months. Jack Simpson meets her to talk social housing, Brexit and fixing the organisation’s repairs service. Photography by Jon Enoch
The turnover of chief executives at the UK’s largest housing association has been matched only by housing ministers over the course of 2018.
Appointed at the start of October, Clare Miller became Clarion’s third chief executive in seven months.
Inside Housing meets her nearly seven weeks into her new role – meaning she has already spent a third of the time in charge as her predecessor, Ruth Cooke.
Ms Cooke was appointed in April after the retirement of long-standing boss Keith Exford. But in September she stepped back, citing “personal reasons” and Ms Miller took over as interim chief executive.
By the start of October, Ms Cooke was officially gone, and Ms Miller had stepped into the hot seat. She was formerly director of governance and compliance at Clarion, a role she held at Affinity Sutton before the merger with Circle.
“Ruth went for personal reasons, I can’t say more than that,” Clare Miller
When asked about the circumstances surrounding Ms Cooke’s exit in October, Ms Miller will not reveal the details.
“Ruth went for personal reasons, I can’t say more than that,” she says.
It was a turn of events Ms Miller could not have expected when Ms Cooke was appointed. However, taking on leadership of the organisation is not something she would have refused, having applied for the position and missed out to Ms Cooke when Mr Exford announced his retirement.
“I have great fondness for the company, it does fantastic work; I would always have been delighted to think I might be in charge one day,” she says.
Inside Housing meets Ms Miller at Clarion’s offices at More London, an upmarket complex in London Bridge, positioned adjacent to the headquarters of professional services giants EY and PwC. As a former accountant, Ms Miller will feel at home. She started her career at Price Waterhouse before it merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PwC.
READ MORE
It was a job auditing the accounts of Spiral Housing Association, now part of Sanctuary, in the early 1990s that piqued her interest in social housing. But it was not the organisation’s balance sheet that sucked her in.
“I don’t confess to be an enthusiastic accountant,” she says. “I just thought they [Spiral] were doing a great job and I wanted to learn more.”
By 1992 she had joined the Housing Corporation, first as a financial regulator. Over the next 18 years she would move up the organisation to become director of regulation, followed by a brief stint in a senior role at the Tenant Services Authority.
“At the regulator I had a unique perspective – I knew who the good associations were and Affinity Sutton was definitely up there with the best performers,” she says. In 2010 she left the regulator to join Affinity Sutton.
In 2015, however, this role expanded somewhat. Affinity Sutton opened merger talks with Circle Housing Group. This merger would not only be the largest in the sector’s history – with 58,000 and 70,000 homes respectively, Affinity Sutton and Circle were two of the biggest landlords operating in the sector. But it was further complicated by a repairs crisis at Circle that had led the regulator to brand the landlord non-compliant with its basic standard for governance in April of that year – citing “chronic failures” resulting in “exceptionally poor provision of repairs”. Director of compliance was about to become a more complicated role – and Ms Miller’s experience rooting out and helping to solve problems at the regulator was put to good use.
“I certainly have a background of seeing where it doesn’t go so well,” she says.
Just a month after Clarion was formed, Circle was slammed again by the regulator for risking serious harm to tenants due to ongoing repairs failings. Ms Miller says Affinity Sutton looked closely at Circle’s problems during merger talks but ultimately believed the issues could be overcome. “We always took the view that the bigger prize here was to bring together two organisations so we could release talent and capacity – we knew we could fix these problems,” she says.
Clarion agreed an action plan with the regulator, and after a year of oversight and monitoring the situation was hitting the regulator’s targets.
"The fallout from the repairs saga has had an impact on other parts of the organisation, not least its development plans"
The regulator confirmed this in March when Clarion was upgraded to the top rating, with the regulator reporting that the business had the governance in place to manage risk around its repairs service.
However, the crisis is bound to have strained tenant-landlord relations.
Ms Miller admits the business is still “on a journey with repairs”, but says it has made great strides with residents. She points to customer satisfaction rates being in the high 90s for the repairs service.
The experience has also upheld Ms Miller’s belief that repairs should be a fully in-house function.
“Our vision for our repairs service is that it will be delivered in-house,” Ms Miller says, extending Affinity Sutton’s in-house repairs arm to former Circle homes.
Two weeks ago Clarion Response, the organisation’s in-house repairs team, took over the 18,000 properties formerly serviced under Circle’s problematic repairs deals in north and east London, meaning repairs on 80% of all Clarion’s stock are now carried out by Clarion Response.
But the fallout from the repairs saga has had an impact on other parts of the organisation, not least its development plans. One of the main drivers behind the merger was to leverage the size of both businesses to build more homes. Clarion aims to be able to deliver 5,000 new homes a year.
Last year it fell short of its target of 1,328 completions, hitting only 1,263.
Ms Miller explains Clarion’s charitable constitution needs to balance two aims: looking after its current residents and providing houses for those that can’t afford them. “We always have in mind that balance. If you look at our first year post-merger when we were dealing with residual problems we inherited, I would say the balance was more towards our existing residents and investing in existing stock.”
She says this year Clarion hopes to better satisfy both, and focus more on the delivery of homes. The organisation has been increasing its land options and plans to deliver 1,600 homes by the end of the year.
Clarion’s pipeline includes the £1.2bn regeneration of Merton; a 7,500-home new town in Honingham, Norfolk; and a joint venture for a 2,600-home scheme as part of Ebbsfleet’s new garden city. As is the case with all large housing association developments in this era, all of these will include homes for private sale.
Walk through the Clarion offices and you would be forgiven for thinking you were walking into the offices of a developer. The view from Ms Miller’s office, which includes HMS Belfast and the Shard, would rival that of any boss at a London corporate firm.
But Ms Miller is keen to stress that the association’s development for the private market is a means of building more affordable homes. Clarion wants two-thirds of its new homes to be affordable.
“We will do commercial and build homes for sale but only do it to the level where we can support the affordable output we are looking at,” she says. She decries the current grant system, saying it is holding back the organisation from building more truly affordable homes.
Breaking from her usually measured responses, she bursts into action taking out a pen and picking up a nearby scrap of paper to show the difficulties she faces.
“It would cost £400,000 to build a two-bed flat in London,” she explains.
“Over 30 years I can hope to get social rent of £100,000, grant at the moment from the [Greater London Authority] is at maximum £80,000.
“Let’s take the maximum £80,000, that’s £180,000, so that’s £220,000 I have to make up for one social home. I can’t do a lot of that and if I do, I can’t do other things.”
She says as a result, private sales on schemes like Ebbsfleet and Honingham will act as the “money makers” to fund the construction of more social rent properties.
“Those are all places for the minimum amount of risk, we can get the maximum return,” she says.
Minimum risk, though, is still risk. The looming threat is, of course, Brexit. With the country teetering on the edge of a no-deal, Ms Miller says it is “something that keeps [me] awake at night”.
She says that depending on the severity of the impact on the UK economy the organisation could rail back on its 5,000-homes-a-year target.
But Ms Miller wants to build. If Brexit hits the private market it means associations will need more grant. “If we could secure more grant we could absolutely build more,” she says.
With the turnover of Clarion chief executives resembling Premier League football managers this year, Inside Housing cheekily asks how long Ms Miller expects to stay.
“I’d like to be here long enough to make a change,” she says. “I would like to build more social rent, I want to make a real contribution to tackling homelessness.”
A period of stability at the top might be just what Clarion needs.
