24 April 2024
NFA Conference 2024: The housing management journey
Eamon McGoldrick
NFA Managing Director
AS we prepare for the gathering of the NFA family in Birmingham tomorrow, I have been reflecting on how very well-chosen our conference theme is this year – that housing management is a journey, not a destination. In many senses, it encapsulates the thrust of the new regulatory regime that we are all now getting to grips with.
When I started my housing career over four decades ago, the strongest possible focus was placed on supporting entrants like me to be good managers. It was understood that housing was a local authority service that called for specialist knowledge in exactly the same way as social care or children’s services. The young housing officer’s eye had to be trained to see far beyond the basics of unpaid rent and scruffy gardens, and we were expected to monitor every aspect of the homes and estates we were responsible for.
How were communal spaces being used? Was everything in its place? Why had that gate suddenly appeared in a previously blank back fence? And then, where on-the-ground experience couldn’t tell us all we needed to know, we were sent on training programmes and day-release college courses to get the qualifications we needed.
Over the years, as I progressed from delivering housing services to overseeing them, council housing management largely shifted from the proactive to the reactive. And it was for this very reason that the ALMO model was created in the early 2000s – to revive a specialist approach to council housing management. As head of Islington’s ALMO for eight years, I saw at first hand what a difference this made to the services tenants received.
Where the Regulator inspects and finds a landlord wanting – and poor TSMs will certainly alert a newly proactive Regulator – nothing less than a detailed plan of action to put things right will do.
So I am an enthusiastic supporter of the work that is being done this year to take a fresh look at competence and conduct standards in the housing sector. This is a big step forward for our sector because it makes it clear that the management of homes and neighbourhoods is not a generic local authority function.
So, over the next 24 hours, and drawing on my time as an ALMO chief executive and as Managing Director of the NFA, I will be mulling over the future of local authority housing management with our members.
Expertise
I think it’s clear that some level of expertise will now be vital for every council landlord. Like all others in the sector, they must respond to an emboldened Housing Ombudsman, a Regulator for Social Housing with newly sharpened teeth and a Building Safety Regulator who has a wide remit, including all matters in the fire and structural arenas.
All three of these social housing management scrutineers have given us a clear steer on what we need to do to satisfy them that we are doing our job – and we need to make sure we have staff who are properly qualified to follow those instructions.
Continuous improvement
Looming large now are the first full-year results from the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. All good landlords will have an up-to-date improvement plan in place at any given time. But if landlords see poor scores coming through from their first TSMs, they will certainly need to swiftly publish and implement a bespoke improvement plan that addresses those shortcomings. Where the Regulator inspects and finds a landlord wanting – and poor TSMs will certainly alert a newly proactive Regulator – nothing less than a detailed plan of action to put things right will do.
More transparent governance
If there is one aspect of the ALMO approach that every council landlord can learn from in this new regulatory environment, it is the ALMO model’s independent board structure that is accountable in the round – from both the elected councillor and local authority management side, and from the customer side. In the Regulator’s pilot inspections over the last 12 months, it has become clear that ALMOs are able to deliver the hard performance and compliance evidence now demanded of social landlords. Meanwhile direct management housing departments within councils are struggling to disaggregate the necessary evidence from their council’s other functions.
Best practice from the ALMO approach
On governance, and on many other aspects of council housing management, the ALMO experience has a lot of valuable best practice to share with the rest of the sector. It may be that the NFA and its members will find a way in the coming year to formalise that knowledge exchange.
Sector-led support for all council housing landlords
What councils lack is a co-ordinated, sector-led resource for the sharing of best practice in delivery of housing management services. The Regulator has made it clear that it is not their role to share best practice. And yet existing local government trade bodies do not have the resources or capacity to do this sort of work across the sector.
A council housing director recently described to me the long and bumpy road his department had travelled to come out of regulatory supervision. It had taken years – and he said he was sure it could have been a much quicker and less painful – and less lonely – journey if he and his officers had some means of plugging into best practice.
And, in summary …
- Regulation is upon us and it will intensify when inspections start and TSMs are published.
- All councils will want to think about how to respond and deliver improvement where failings are identified.
- Councils will want to look at alternative governance models to improve performance such as ALMOs, Housing improvement panels and Advisory Boards.
- A relatively modest funding pot from central government – such as the successful equivalent set up to help local authorities effectively deliver social care – would create the hub for best practice exchange that the sector so badly needs.
Eamon’s career in housing spans four decades, beginning as a management trainee with Greater London Council and then working with the London Boroughs of Brent, Hillingdon and Barnet. In 1998, he became CEO of Homes for Islington. Now an independent consultant, he took on the role of MD at the NFA in 2006. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Housing and Institute of Management.