Housing associations face complex challenges but the solution is simplicity, says Alison Handley, director of strategy, planning and change at L&Q
Housing associations today manage around 6m homes in England alone, with landlords like L&Q providing homes for 250,000 people from London and the South East to Manchester and the North West. They build too and fund social programmes to improve people’s life chances.
The non-profit housing sector has had a long evolution since the small-scale philanthropic initiatives that sprang up to alleviate poverty in the 19th century. L&Q itself can trace its roots to a key turning point, the so-called “new wave” of housing associations formed in the 1960s during a wave of public consciousness about homelessness.
However, much of the rapid expansion of housing associations has taken place within the last 30 years, after successive policy changes encouraged the transfer of homes from councils, the introduction of private finance and an increase in merger activity to secure economies of scale.
The legacy of these changes has brought many benefits, enabling housing associations to achieve transformative things for society and increase the supply of new affordable homes. This year, L&Q alone built 4,000 homes, of which 70% were affordable.
At Barking Riverside, our size and strength (enhanced by our partnership with the mayor of London) allowed us to deliver on ambitious goals. These included major capital investments in infrastructure, including a train station and riverboat pier, which acted as a catalyst for wider regeneration.
Housing growth breeds complexity
The non-profit model works and should be nurtured by governments as a partner and source of investment. But we should recognise that a side effect of rapid growth can be complexity. As a result, many housing associations are now managing overly complicated operating models which have evolved piecemeal over the years.
Our systems, processes, structures and data management practices are the foundation for providing a good service to residents. If they aren’t consciously designed as one ecosystem and joined up, it’s much harder to provide a reliable, repeatable and consistent experience.
That can only be tackled through holistic thinking and organisation-wide efforts, with carefully considered choices about how each part combines to make a whole. A few years ago, we recognised this challenge at L&Q and developed our long-term strategy, Future Shape, in response.
What’s our vision? Wherever you live and regardless of the tenure of your home, you should be able to rely on us. You should receive a reliable, repeatable and consistent service alongside a quality, safe and affordable home. We call it operational excellence. It sounds simple, right?
Maximising efficiency in the workplace is a start
There are lots of things we are doing to get there, but the big cross-business effort is our Transformation Programme. This is a £45m investment over multiple years to create a lean, modern organisation which focuses on what it does best for the benefit of residents. We will achieve this by introducing simpler, consciously designed ways of working and processes enabled by technology.
We recently signed contracts with NEC and Unit 4 to help us deliver the first phase of our programme, building better housing management and finance systems and underpinning new ways of working. Successive mergers over the years resulted in legacy technology architectures which were bolted together.
Getting the right tools in place and making sure they join up, and ensuring that the right data is available in the right format at the right time, is the foundation for everything we need to do now and in the future as a business.
For example, our seven-year contract with NEC will involve overhauling the technology we use to support our housing management services, like rent collection and reporting repairs. We’ll ensure these systems work smoothly alongside each other and improve the way we store and manage data so there is one version of the truth.
The end result will be a situation where residents find it easier to deal with us, and we’ll be able to provide faster and more efficient customer service.
Mindset matters
Of course, culture and mindset really matter too. You can have the most refined processes and systems in the world, but if you aren’t motivated by our social purpose to improve people’s lives then housing isn’t for you. We’re continuing to build a strong team to support us on this journey.
Traditional housing professionals will always have a key role to play, but we’re complementing this with other skill sets, like transformation and service design experts, technology and data specialists, and change professionals.
Whatever you do at L&Q, behaviours and values, and putting the resident at the heart of everything you do is essential.
We think there’s a compelling offer, too – a fantastic opportunity for colleagues to contribute to the transformation of a housing association business and to design and deliver a new, simple and efficient operating model. There aren’t many sectors offering an opportunity to shape something like this from the ground up, with such far-reaching social consequences.
Being bigger means that you can be more ambitious at achieving more wide-reaching social value, so we shouldn’t be afraid of growth. By embracing operational excellence and simplicity as a principle, we think we can achieve better services and outcomes for those who rely on affordable housing in England today.
Alison Handley
Director of strategy, planning and change
L&Q
Tel: +44 (0)300 456 9998
