What has happened to the Dolphin Living dream?

Driven by residents

We meet Dolphin Living’s chief executive Olivia Harris in one of the subterranean rooms of the Westbourne Park Baptist Church. The church shares the ground floor with a Westminster Council children’s library
and occupies two further storeys underground.

The main church hall is a glorious cavern, flooded with light. A lift takes you up to Dolphin Living’s five floors of flats. With white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, the flats feel light, airy and functional. But it is not the attention to detail of Dolphin Living’s developments that catches the eye and the imagination. It is the personalised rent model, piloted on the New Era Estate and rolled out only, so far, in 11 of the 33 flats here in Porchester Road.

Personalised rents have been championed for basing rent on people’s ability to pay. But they are not without their problems (see box). For Dolphin and New Era tenants, they have been a blessing and a curse. While they have allowed people to stay in their homes on rents they can afford, they have helped to drive the decision to knock those homes down to make way for a more modern estate. The peculiarities of personal rent have also caught Dolphin Living in a Kafkaesque nightmare with the Greater London Authority (GLA), delaying the replacement of the estate.

Ms Harris says that the redevelopment was “essentially driven” by residents. “They were asking for improvements to their homes, which we couldn’t make on the existing land,” she adds. “I don’t think knocking it down was their intention. But all of the problems with the existing building, we can’t resolve with them paying the rents that they are paying.”

Dolphin Living is offering New Era tenants a new home on the rebuilt estate on personalised rents, somewhere to stay during the rebuild, and to cover the costs of moving. Lindsey Garrett, chair of the New Era Tenants’ Association, says that the redevelopment “isn’t ideal”, but adds: “We are going to be put in lovely new flats on the same rent. As long as we want to stay here, our rents won’t increase to unaffordable levels.”

Ms Garrett seems disappointed, however, that the New Era experiment has not taken off more widely. “For us, on this estate, we are all right. We achieved what we wanted to achieve,” she says. “But it isn’t changing anything anywhere else.”

But personalised rents are why the redevelopment is stuck in the planning system. Dolphin’s plans were approved by Hackney Council 18 months ago, but are being held back by the GLA for the “unacceptable” loss of affordable housing it proposes. Under one earlier timeline, tenants were due to return to a rebuilt estate this year. Ms Harris seems vexed by the delays and the reasons for it. She puts it down to a planning “misunderstanding”, something that has plagued Dolphin Living and its unconventional rent models from the start.

“We did look at trying to retroactively put personalised rents into something we were already operating. But then we realised that we were going to have to go through a completely new planning application. That could cost us £100,000. We decided against doing that”

What happened was that Dolphin in effect created what the GLA sees as ‘affordable housing’ at New Era when it introduced personalised rents on the privately rented homes. Now, in line with its planning rules, the GLA wants the equivalent amount of ‘affordable housing’ replaced. Dolphin is working with Hackney Council and the GLA to “unlock this development, and improve the affordable housing offer”, Ms Harris says.

This is not the first time Dolphin Living’s personalised rent model or its other ‘intermediate rent’ model have created difficulties. “We did look at trying to retroactively put personalised rents into something we were already operating,” Ms Harris says. “But then we realised that we were going to have to go through a completely new planning application. That could cost us £100,000. We decided against doing that.”

She sees the New Era situation as another example of Dolphin Living making life “difficult for ourselves” by doing things differently. “What we do is more difficult because it is unusual,” she adds. It was ever thus, a glance at the association’s brief history reveals.

Established in 2005, the Dolphin Square Charitable Foundation only really got going in 2009, three years after the Westminster Housing Commission, chaired by Lord Best, urged it to become an “innovative” provider and avoid “straightforward provision of accommodation”.

So the foundation initially shunned the convention of public subsidy, in the form of affordable housing grant, and focused on ‘intermediate rents’ with an aim to charge on average 60% of local open-market rates. Its “carefully calibrated” financial model would allow it to grow to managing 200 homes a year without state support, the Dolphin Square Charitable Foundation claimed in a report published by The Smith Institute in 2013.

Its first development of a dozen or so homes completed in 2013 but took “interminable time” to get through planning, admits Brian Ham, Dolphin’s chief executive at the time. Back then, its intermediate rent model was as anomalous to local authority planners as its personalised rent one is to them now.

“I thought we would get 1,000 homes under way in the first five years,” Mr Ham adds. “In the end, that proved a bit problematic on the planning front. We were trying to do something a bit different.”