Asset strategies for 2026: repair, regenerate or rebuild?
A roundtable discussion hosted by Inside Housing, in association with NEC Software Solutions, aimed to understand how social landlords are thinking about their assets and guiding strategies into the near future. Photography by Wilde Fry
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Housing policy in the UK is dominated by the government’s target of building 1.5 million new homes by 2029. That is the headline, at least, but it is just one of the considerations for affordable housing providers when thinking about their assets.
Residents, regulation and financial viability are top of mind, and underpinning all of these is data that must be collected, stored and analysed to make robust decisions.
To understand how organisations are thinking about their assets and guiding strategies into the near future, Inside Housing, in association with NEC Software Solutions – a technology and software services company – invited eight leaders from the sector to a roundtable discussion.
All agreed that they and their colleagues are currently operating in an incredibly complex environment.
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Mark Newstead is director of major programmes at L&Q, one of the UK’s largest housing associations. He sees a “perfect storm” from an asset management perspective, with housing providers anticipating a new Decent Homes Standard, while implementing Awaab’s Law, improving homes to get them to Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Band C by 2030, and building safety work.
“[There is] lots to do in the next five years,” he says. “I think not just about money and business plans, but the capacity of the industry to deliver.”
Long-term organisational objectives can often be at risk of being overshadowed by reactive changes to regulatory pressures.
Fiona Williamson, investment programme director at Enfield Council, says that costs have increased with new Building Safety Regulator processes, and the Building Safety Act has meant the designs have had to change partway through a development.
“Much of what we do at the moment feels like we’ve got shifting sands, and it’s trying to build a solid foundation to make those decisions,” she says.
Making just these kinds of decisions is Rebecca Bennett Casserly, corporate director of development and regeneration at WHG.
“My key focus is around keeping communities together, the quality of the home and the planet, and using embodied carbon where possible. And all of that is underlaid with viability, clearly,” she says.
As repairs and maintenance manager at Legal & General Affordable Homes, Tegan Ryan has first-hand experience of marrying strategic vision to execution in the field.
She believes it is vital for any high-level decision-making to be informed by the experiences of those who have to deliver but, ultimately, it must be shaped by the needs of residents. “[It’s about] making sure that we’re embedding that customer engagement in the strategy and decisions we make. It’s balancing the investment, the asset management and the customer insight. They’re the things that really are top of my list.”
Given the complexities discussed, the conversation kept returning to the importance of good data management in helping to draw insight out from huge datasets.
Sharon Jackson, head of product delivery for housing at NEC Software Solutions, has been working with the sector for 35 years. She emphasises the importance of ensuring that data is not siloed between departments.
“We’re now looking at trying to integrate data into a single source of the truth so that we undertake our warmer homes work in conjunction with decency – to provide that matched funding”
She says that with data together, “you can put AI tools on top of it. You can pull out reports. You can drive warnings and prompts that make a difference – there and then – to speaking to a customer on the phone. You can get a warning about something that’s going on in that property. So, it’s joining the whole world together.”
Ms Williamson from Enfield Council is able to speak first-hand of the benefits, but also the hurdles of merging datasets from different platforms. “We’re now looking at trying to integrate… data into a single source of the truth so that we undertake, if we can, our warmer homes work in conjunction with decency – to provide that matched funding. So, an integrated asset management approach,” she says.
However, with different housing and asset management platforms, as well as overlaid compliance data, teams are working with an “amazingly colour-coded spreadsheet” just to manage the data for 58 high rises.
So how, then, to go from the raw data that hints at problems within assets towards solutions that have meaningful impact for the people who live in them?
This is what Mica Joseph has been doing for the past two years as head of estate management at Notting Hill Genesis (NHG). Her organisation has chosen a selection of its most complex estates and sent teams in to look at the root causes behind some of the issues that residents experience. To take one example, an estate with a high number of lift complaints had several different types of lift across the development, making them complex to service and maintain.
She says: “Some of my work has been to get into the real nitty gritty of some of our problems, and take not only the residents on that journey, but also our business, to really understand the root cause. Because, unfortunately, the data doesn’t always say it.”
Hayley Hesse is head of asset intelligence at Places for People (PfP). She recognises the struggles that organisations experience in collecting data, but has also learned the importance of turning that data into meaningful narratives that inform actions to benefit residents.
She asks organisations: “How do you engage teams – particularly those members of the team that are the eyes and boots on the ground – to help them understand their role in data?”
At PfP, she says, “the data people structure what they need to get from the systems, and we tell [colleagues] why it’s important”.
This kind of ‘data storytelling’, both with residents and internally, is yielding results at NHG. Ms Joseph and colleagues can bring back the detailed results of their work in estates to inform decision-making with the organisation. “We can now report back to our business in a formatted, formal way; that then really does open up the conversation of what we’re going to do,” she says.
“For the regeneration sites that we already have in planning, the conversations now are a lot different – not just internally, but also with the partnership with the local authority and the independent tenant liaison.”
Ms Ryan counts herself lucky in that she is able to be involved with new developments from the start and has developed a specification for homes with a database of 250,000 components. “I know, even down to the bath taps, what we are asking for, this is the reason we’re asking for it,” she says.
“So I can literally look at a repair and say, taps at this development have failed 16 times. That tap is no more. So it really is that triangulation of data to drive those decisions, which is really important.”
Recent research conducted by Inside Housing and NEC suggests that housing providers are moving towards greater data maturity, and use of AI. Ms Jackson points to the case of NHG’s lift repairs, where she believes AI could potentially help, if the right data is there.
“With AI, you have to know what the question is,” she says, “but if you’re clear on the question, you can drive so much – if it’s got a dataset to work with and learn from.”
Although they manage millions of homes between them, housing providers must not lose sight of the fact that each one is someone’s home. The resident voice, therefore, can inform asset strategies just as much as stock condition surveys or EPC ratings. And several around the table have been looking at how to integrate this.
At Aster Group, chief operating and technology officer Emma O’Shea says the organisation has been encouraging residents to provide information about their experiences.
“[We have been] really working with our customers to promote [the fact that] the information you give us helps us deliver better services, which then reduces costs and reduces the pressure on the investment portfolio,” she says.
Ms Hesse says Places for People has been looking to amplify the “silent voices – customers that may not engage for a variety of reasons. This involves customer-led questions to find out about them and their homes, as well as the ability for residents to submit photos”.
“[We have been] really working with our customers to promote [the fact that] the information you give us helps us deliver better services”
“We’re by no means done,” she adds. “But we’re hoping that it will start to support some of the wider business engagement, the decisions that we make around homes and how customers utilise them, and what we need to do to support them.”
L&Q uses resident data as one way to keep its stock condition data live in between formal surveys.
“We are now grading our stock based on condition, repairs [as well as] financial metrics like NPV [net present value],” Mr Newstead says. “But we’re also bringing in resident satisfaction and complaint data to RAG [red, amber, green] rate properties, so that we can see whether we’re getting the right investment priorities.”
Complex problems often require new ways of thinking about solutions. Ms Bennett Casserly gives an example of a retrofit project WHG carried out on a complex estate where there was poor customer feedback. Around 50% of the homes are owner-occupied, often in semi-detached houses attached to WHG homes. Rebuild and densify would have been the obvious option, but the mixed tenure made this extremely difficult. And WHG did not want to break up the stable community that lived there.
The result? “One of the first net zero carbon ready neighbourhoods”.
“We’re going to deep retrofit our homes, and we’re going to offer affordable retrofit through third-party external funders, like ECO4, etc, to the owner-occupiers,” says Ms Bennett Casserly. “And at the end of it, the vision is that this estate should look brand new again.”
Ms O’Shea from Aster believes that housing providers can be optimistic about both compliance and about the ability to use technology to make proactive decisions about maintaining homes. She gives the example of damp and mould, where landlords have had to stand up new services very quickly and look holistically at the root causes in their properties.
She says that regulatory change can be “a real, great opportunity to deliver those proactive services, which just brings down the cost of servicing and offers better value for money for our customers”.
“But it does really underpin and start with that customer insight.”
Participants
Martin Hilditch (chair)
Editor, Inside Housing
Rebecca Bennett Casserly
Corporate director of development and regeneration, WHG
Hayley Hesse
Head of asset intelligence, Places for People
Sharon Jackson
Head of product delivery for housing, NEC Software Solutions
Mica Joseph
Head of estate management, Notting Hill Genesis
Mark Newstead
Director of major programmes, L&Q
Emma O’Shea
Chief operating and technology officer, Aster Group
Tegan Ryan
Repairs and maintenance manager, Legal & General Affordable Homes
Fiona Williamson
Investment programme director, Enfield Council
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