By Alistair McIntosh, HQN CEO.

Nigh on 25 years ago, David Garland and I set up the Housing Quality Network. Why did we do it? Council housing was in a terrible state after years of neglect and we, among many others, wanted to see a big improvement in standards.

For a time, it was working reasonably well. That all came to a halt as austerity cut off funding and put a stop to inspection, together with the purging of the resident voice.

All decent people knew what was going to happen next. The shocking reports from ITV, the Grenfell Inquiry, and the Housing Ombudsman show that we’ve gone backwards not forwards in too many places.

We were on the side of everyone that wanted to make housing better all those years ago, and we haven’t dimmed: we’ll be on the side of those that want to turn it round today. Our members want to do the right thing despite the obstacles that get in the way.

But to be of any help to you, we need to get better ourselves. In particular, we must step up on diversity. We’ll be making no grand statements about this. Our motto is deeds not words. What have we done since I last wrote to you on this?

The first thing we did was to talk to the Housing Diversity Network. Our shared objective is to make sure that more diverse people move into leadership roles. So, we’re helping to pay for HDN to put 30 staff from BMENational organisations through their highly regarded mentoring programme free of charge. We’ll be meeting with HDN to look at other work we can do together.

We reopened entries to our Housing’s Next Generation competition. And we added Olu Olanrewaju (Altair) and Lennox Thomas (GGT Solutions) to the judging panel. Kath Menzies (Link Housing Association) is on the panel too, as last year’s winner. I was the sole HQN representative on the panel.

We’re writing to the people who made it to the next stage and those that didn’t over the next few days. Lennox will be designing the development programme for the participants, as he does great work on this across G15 landlords.

You’ll have seen many more diverse speakers at our events and in our blogs. We see from member feedback that that these contributions are very much appreciated and improve our output.

Our magazine promoted the ground-breaking work of Saba Salman on telling the stories of people with learning difficulties. And we commissioned Positive About Inclusion to produce an equality, diversity, and inclusion self-assessment toolkit.

We’re looking at ourselves in the mirror too. The vast majority of our senior staff are women and that’s been the case for a long time. But we must do more.

So, we asked Davina Boakye and Elaine Bowes (Global HPO) to carry out a review. Our aim is to make sure that diversity and inclusion are at the front of our minds at HQN at all times. Davina and Elaine will come back to check that we do what we say.

Remote working gives us the opportunity to recruit in more diverse areas than where our office is based. That means we ought to be able to have a staff group that’s more aligned to that of many of our members.

Are we doing enough? Of course not. But I’m determined to keep us on the right path.