Associations should do more to demonstrate transparency

Earlier this year a Welsh Assembly member tweeted my salary, alongside that of other Welsh housing association chief executives, when it appeared in documents being considered by the Public Accounts Committee, of which they were a member.

The tweet was shared and the story picked up by the Western Mail even though those salaries had been published in our accounts and on the Inside Housing website for some months. Although the information was already out in the open, popular perception was very different: that perhaps the sector had something to hide.

Fast forward a few weeks and I am sitting, alongside Pobl’s chair, in front of that same committee in the Senedd, Wales’ parliament, having been invited to discuss the current regulatory arrangements. The committee was interested in hearing about Pobl for two reasons: first, our size, and second, our identity as a group resulting from the merger of Seren Group and Grŵp Gwalia.

“There is a gap in perceptions of what Welsh housing associations are in 2017 and the working reality of Welsh housing associations.”

Our session with the committee lasted around an hour, but it only took 10 minutes to establish that there was a gap between some of the panel’s perceptions of what Welsh housing associations are in 2017 and the working reality of Welsh housing associations.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in respect of financing; when discussing our commitment to deliver 3,000 homes over the next five years towards the Welsh Government’s target of 20,000, I mentioned how borrowings of nearly half a billion pounds are making that happen.

A member of the panel, assuming they’d misheard or that I’d mispoken, sought clarification of the figure as half a million pounds. We need to open up and open our books if we’re to open eyes and minds to our work.

Throughout that evidence session it felt like we were pulling back the curtain to reveal the true scale and impact of what Welsh landlords are doing. It felt cathartic, because it’s not a curtain we want to twitch behind.

Before we left I invited the committee to come and visit a 250-home, mixed-tenure garden village we’ve been building in Newport. The committee visited in March, meeting staff and residents. Nobody was briefed, much was shared and that visit was the best evidence of our true role and purpose.

These experiences have left me more determined than ever to ensure that Pobl is a proactively open organisation. In our increasingly open world, it is our capacity to embrace openness that will define our success. In the age of fast-flowing information, closed organisations will wither, while sharing and connecting organisations will thrive.

The futurist David Price writes in his book Open that a ‘social revolution’ is now taking place in which the winners are those individuals “happily connecting and collaborating through global networks… motivated by the easy access to ideas and information, and the informality, immediacy and autonomy that it brings”.

The losers, Mr Price asserts, are “formal institutions: businesses, schools, colleges and public services… failing to grasp the enormity of the change taking place”.

“As a sector we must open our floodgates to collective wisdom and participation.”

Mr Price may be a futurist but he’s talking about now. If housing associations don’t want to end up like our increasingly isolated political and public institutions, we had better recognise the revolution in our workforce, our communities and among our customers. All of those audiences increasingly demand of us true, absolute transparency as a prerequisite to trust. Many wish to be invited in such that they can influence, rather than simply receive or consume our services.

We know we’re not there yet but we’re sure that tokenistic engagement and cyclical surveys of staff and stakeholder satisfaction – though well-intentioned – merely skim the surface of a rich, untapped sea of knowledge, creativity and capacity.

As a sector we must open our floodgates to collective wisdom and participation before a flood of energy, ideas and innovation drowns our long-established business models.

Pobl Group’s choice is to open up, to play our full part in enabling and creating new models of affordable housing and care and support provision in a world where money isn’t just mediated by banks, where energy networks are local not national, and where economies exist between people, not for them.

Pobl Group will be open for business in decades to come because we are opening up, not with reluctance in the face of scrutiny, but proactively, in search of the new ways we’ll work in a world that has already opened.

Amanda Davies, chief executive, Pobl Group