Category Archives: News

Resident Consultation isn’t a New Thing

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Consulting residents, service users and communities is second nature to us, we do it daily in our work. Yet increasingly the landlord organisations, architects and developers we come across seem to be reticent in engaging with the recipients of housing and regeneration services. It’s not rocket science, people are much more able to accept and support decisions (however difficult) if they have been party to the discussions leading to them.

Recent proposed landlord mergers appeared to have been led by the business case or a corporate vision with very little regard for the impact upon residents who ultimately pay for the service. As Carl Brown observes in Inside Housing, the National Housing Federation’s voluntary merger code failed to refer to a role for tenants. Following the collapse of the high profile mergers, twelve landlords are exploring an alternative code which we await with interest.

Statutory ballots always carry the risk that residents will reject a strong and coherent proposal, however with this as a true test of opinion landlords were diligent about involving residents in the details of the decision and providing reassurances. How else were so many voluntary stock transfers and regeneration schemes achieved in relatively short timescales?  Residents have much to  offer when developing options for saving money or improving service delivery.

On a smaller scale,  several times over the past year we have been asked to mediate where a resident has raised a serious and formal  complaint with their landlord regarding a decision that has been taken which affects their home. Without exception, these complaints have arisen because residents have felt dis-empowered by a seemingly high-handed attitude from their landlord. In each case, consultation has been one-way; telling and not listening, imposing a solution without a discussion regarding the alternatives. Housing staff were well-meaning and  professional but had failed to take the residents along as they developed proposals. Once a meaningful discussion was imperative, compromise and consensus was achieved – a successful outcome.

Sadly,  consultation techniques are not taught to project managers, housing officers, architects and employers agents when clearly the people demonstrating excellence have these skills in spades. The traditional consultation meeting is now only one tool in the kit to engage people, when people are time poor, less formal events, capturing views through conversation and social media provide an opportunity to hear what residents say.  three things:

  1. Resident consultation is not a new thing and it works.
  2. Listen as well as talk.
  3. Top-down approaches or imposed solutions are fraught with difficulty and often fail.

Building strength

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2016-07-16 12.42.35I heard on the grapevine of a relatively new TMO where an investigation is underway because of suspected fraud by the Manager and contractors. Whilst this could happen to a Council and to a Housing Association it is much more upsetting where residents have put their trust in a new resident led vision for their estate.

Tenant Management is one of the most underused yet most successful tools. At this time, we are seeing a very low number of projects going through the ‘Right to Manage’ route, which is a real pity given that many of the traditional avenues for resident control are closing down. In a universe where funds for resident involvement are being hit by Local Authority cuts and residents of Housing Associations are looking at their landlords becoming ever bigger via mergers, giving residents more control is looking less likely.

Tenant Management offers the opportunity for residents to set the standards for the services they receive, to spend their rent and service charges in the way they want and to build a truly local vision. To get to the point where your landlord and the Government agrees that you are competent residents have to go through nearly 2 years of planning and development and be subject to external assessment. However, things can still go wrong.

There are a number of key things that residents can do with support from there advisor to minimise the chances of this type of thing happening:

  • Way before going live, agree the exact report arrangements that you expect your TMO manager to adhere to. Set these up and do trial runs with the advisor to check on the data
  • During your recruitment make sure you take up all references, that you set clear probationary targets and you appoint against a JD that is clear about experience required
  • Once a quarter board members should undertake a ‘verification’ exercise to look at the raw information behind the reports. By setting up a scrutiny sub group who can focus on specific areas you pick up on any concerns
  • When agreeing your procurement policy and procedure make sure you put in place checks and balances. Residents should be involved at all stages, agree clear schedules of work with clear prices and have a system in place to agree an variations in cost that involves board sign off
  • Verify: before and after pictures from contractors Joint spot checks with the board and the staff of works completed
  • Once a year do a 100% doorknock to pick up on any issues

As board members of a TMO residents should not be sitting looking over a managers shoulder, this is not good for either party. Instead, put in place procedures and checks and make sure they are carried out!

It’s all about the money, money, money

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As Jessie J said we all have a price tag. There have been a spate of money related articles and reports that highlight how the conversation on Social Housing is increasingly being framed in economic terms. This is not entirely surprising as most of this is aimed at a Government that primarily uses, sometimes blunt, economic tools to deliver its policy. One of many worries here is that policy and the numbers are at odds.

Peabody and the CBI recently produced a report which attempted to quantify the contribution to London (£15.3bn) of social tenants. Just a while later we get the great and the good Moodys, downgrading the credit rating for Places for People and Genesis because more risk has been introduced because of diversification away from Social Housing. We also have the thresholds for Pay to Stay, £31,000 outside London and £40,000 in London. So it seems that the argument for social housing is now being fought on the numbers playing field.

The latest indications on what government grant will be available point clearly to a policy that is about fiddling at the edges of market intervention on build for sale and is not about increasing social housing supply. Indeed, as the details emerge on the Right to Buy for Housing Associations and the money effectively being removed from Local Authorities another avenue for increased building is shut off.

So we have a situation at best where social housing rental supply will be at best static. It seems that supply will be met by using Pay to Stay to push people out into the private market and ‘free up’ units. Mmmmm, there are a few issues here that don’t quite make sense:

  • An already overheated private rental market and lack of affordable sale properties for those being pushed into leaving the social rented market
  • Brexit pushing properties off the market
  • HA’s risking more borrowing costs because effectively they cannot build the level of social housing they would like and therefore higher build costs = either less supply of new homes or inflated costs

Throw in Housing Benefit caps and (if ever) Universal credit and the numbers look less like adding up.

Maybe we need a bit more advanced economic modelling which really takes into account the benefit brought to the economy by workers accessing really affordable housing and what the impact on our economy of the multiple squeeze on this group will be.

One other important point made by CIH and NHF, in the last recession virtually the only significant building was of social housing which saved us from even worse economic turmoil.

Regeneration in a Post-EU Market?

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However you voted, not many will have been prepared for the political turmoil of the past month. There has been much more talk about the referendum amongst  our clients, tenant groups, council officers and registered providers since the result than there was before voting opened, as the practicalities of an EU exit are assessed. Call me old fashioned,  but I would have liked a much fuller discussion about this before I put my X in the box.

A Development Survey carried out by Inside Housing published 1 July 2016  revealed that 40% of new starts by the 50 largest builders are for private sale or shared ownership. Inside Housing suggests that if the housing market falls then the scope to cross fund social housing will be reduced – presumably in two years time when these developments are completed just as mainland Europe pulls up the drawbridge.

Where is the response to the housing shortage, in all tenures, that we have NOW? Where is the confidence in our economy promised by the brexiteers. There are still tens of thousands of families living in temporary accommodation; young adults on lower incomes either still living with their parents or trapped in the private rented sector often dependent on benefits  – we have no choice but continue to build.

Regeneration has been delivered in a rising property market with apparent ease and the challenge will be to meet house building targets in a less certain market. Although London is cushioned from a potential market crash, it is here where low-cost homes are desperately needed to ensure that people who provide services to the Capital can actually live within commuting distance of their workplace.

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Resident’s Happy with Regeneration? Really? (Well they can be)

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Maybe I’ve been around the block a few too many times (including refurbing it, knocking it down, rebuilding it and making it green). When I saw reports from the LSE being trailed as ‘RESIDENTS HAPPY’. Anyone who has worked on long term regen projects immediately asks which residents? With some projects taking over 10 years you are very often talking about completely different communities at the start and at the finish. I often work with community groups to help them become a ‘critical friend’ so here goes! The LSE report is very focussed on a particular estate and what they define as a specific model. I am sceptical about some of the interpretation of the findings and real wider application. As someone who has regularly worked with residents on 100% door knocks and making sure that we have met with all households I do question that the study is based on 50 independent surveys. However, I am a massive fan of the LSE and its studies of regeneration and in particular Anne Power and I think there are some clear messages to be taken from this report.

Anne Power is quoted as saying ‘(the scheme) shows that it is possible to rebuild a former council estate with most of the existing tenants in place. By providing local management and community resources, the landlord can help the community flourish’
In just one sentence a few key points have been identified:

  • The landlord has to have as one of its aims of regeneration that the community flourishes. All too often little time or space is given to considering what this means. Who is the community now, what will happen to them and who will the community be when we are finished? Are not questions that are really formally addressed. Too much emphasis is placed on building costs and ASB stats as the drivers. These are just numbers!
  • The need for well thought out community resources. All too often it’s a case of there was a community centre so we will just re-provide a bright new one it will be fab and have a mezzanine! So little thought is given to how it will run and survive, too much reliance on assumption of a ‘community trust’ in Business Plans or PDAs. The community changes over the life of a regeneration project so must the community offer. Please! No more white elephant centres, S106 get outs and small community groups scrabbling for survival. If you have a new estate, where is your new community resource model!
  • One of the recurring things you hear from residents on estates that ‘need regenerating’ is it feels like things are being done to them. If you really want to regenerate an area how about regenerating the power balance. So much time is taken to involve resident’s in the planning and getting ‘sign off’ this needs to be developed into a longer term model of greater community control

So 3 things:

Have a worked vision for the community and demographics in regeneration.

Have your short/medium and longer term community resource model and methods for continually testing its validity.

Build in your plan for greater control, the community may change but you can still build the structures (ever heard of a TMO or EMB?).

Car Free schemes

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Key to the  green agenda, particularly in cities, is to get people out of their cars and onto public transport bicycles and even our feet. The rise of the car free scheme is not without its critics. By calculating public transport accessibility levels (or PTAL) it is possible to make a judgement as to whether cars are necessary. The rating from 6, where public transport opportunities  are abundant down to 1 where public transport is limited.

Whilst the calculations are not perfect, for example the destinations of each transport option are not considered, PTAL scores are a useful tool for planners and developers to:

  1. Agree the density of a housing development.
  2. Decide how to allocate land for car-parking.

Unsurprisingly, in London PTAL scores are high and so are land values so the result is the rise of the car free development with only 10% car parking reserved for blue badge holders.

The first of the car free developments in London have been rolled out and as people move into them, it is clear that the British love affair will the motor vehicle is still strong and the fall in car ownership may take a generation or more to achieve. Where tenants are returning to new-build council housing on regeneration estates they left 8 years ago, the lack of parking is a huge culture shock and in many cases  a barrier to them accepting the new home many of them campaigned for. Very few issues have engendered such emotive response as the reduction in car-parking and controlled parking zones.

For new tenants off the homeless register and shared ownership leaseholders it is less of an issue, but I was recently asked by a bus driver living on a car free scheme how he was expected to get to the bus station 6 miles away from his home  to drive the first bus of the day.  And it is not just the resident who is affected, elderly residents report that visits from their family are tainted with parking anxiety

The problem with using a pseudo scientific calculation  of PTAL ratings is that there is no discretion and there are occupations (community midwife, nurses, doctors, bus driver, train driver, etc.) which require the worker to have access to their own transport. I suspect that politicians would probably say get on your bike, from their chauffeur driven cars which are presumably parked overnight in Central London. Many people are too afraid to cycle in urban areas and  carrying a week’s shopping with two children in tow is definitely not an option.

There are no incentives to freely surrender your car, car clubs are prohibitively expensive and do not provide the comfort of having a vehicle available to use in an emergency or to know you can travel out of London to see family on a whim. Even with a year’s free membership the take up on a scheme built 3 years ago was zero.

I admit to being a dinosaur, I love my car and the freedom it gives me. I would not move to a car free scheme so I can empathise with residents who are unwillingly leading the way to a London less dominated by cars.

Key things which can assist:

  1. Full consultation with residents on regeneration estates about parking identifying car use and preparing for a car free future.
  2. Cost-effective car clubs or car sharing arrangements.
  3. Discretion to issue permits for people in key occupations.
  4. Proper arrangements for visitor parking and delivery drop-offs

 

 

More than one kind of capital

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Sheffield Hallam, CIH and Poplar Harca have produced a report that is trying to strongly make the case for housing led regeneration. It is very much worded in a way that is about the financial model/economic benefit mode. It is a case that is needed because we are talking to a government who needs to understand the economic reason for anything.

This all got me thinking about the need to bring some of the focus back to the other capital, the people and how they can really deliver a return on investment.

Let me come clean, I worked for Harca on the community investment side when it was still new, which why I started thinking about this. Harca was quite unique in its set up (last century) in its avowed intent to place people and community at its heart as part of who it was and how it operated. It had a population where more than 50% was economically inactive and its property stared the lovely shining island of canary wharf in the face.

My job was to recruit a group of 20 (it crept up because I’m bad at saying no) and train them to set up advice services to run within the series of community hubs that Harca created. I spent 3 months training with the most fabulous, creative, amusing and occasionally infuriating group of people. At the start of the journey I did not know that my real aim was not to turn them into advice workers but to make sure that what they saw as success at the start was completely changed by the end of my time with me. More important was that they could actually achieve what THEY wanted.

For the first month, I was slightly bemused to discover that 80% of my groups’ only wish was to become housing officers, having done this role (no disrespect to good HOs) I was surprised by this being the pinnacle of desire. It wasn’t just about pay it was about ‘respect’.

Having grown up on a ‘bad’ council estate (any good ones in the press?), I recognised what I came to call the poverty of aspiration, I’d seen it at home when I wanted not to go into trade but to go to college (shock horror). I’d also seen it in South London running a placement scheme where the only job anyone wanted to do was social work. This kind of constraint can really hold communities back, you can only have so many housing officers, social workers or in my own case steel workers.

What the willingness to invest in social capital did was give a lot of unforeseen returns. The group achieved their primary aim and delivered local advice services, in particular services that helped hundreds of residents maximise benefits and supported many of them into work. It had the knock of effects of setting up a ‘hit’ outreach team that was also used by neighbouring landlords and health services. Most importantly, it allowed the group to diversify. The original 20 + went on to work for private contractors, the health service, running a call centre, setting up their own business and some went to university. They brought more diversity into the local community and crucially higher paid roles.

Last time I checked in at least one of them was still delivering benefits advice on the estates albeit now at such professional level they should be training other advisors. That is the next step….