By Alistair McIntosh, HQN CEO

Finally, we get to hear from one of the most ignored groups in the UK. Every day from my window at a busy junction I see loads of operatives vans. But very few people in charge of housing have any idea about what they’re up to.

Turns out the operatives are only too happy to spill the beans. A new book, Middle Ground: A Frontline Journey in Social Housing, by Joe Carpenter – disappointingly, not his real name – takes us through his time working in a housing association DLO. It may be the best book ever written on the repairs service. Read it but brace yourself. He thinks “housing associations have become faceless corporate giants prioritising numbers over people”. Can we prove him wrong?

If you want to get to grips with housing you’ve got to talk to tenants. But not just the handpicked ones. Everyone knows that. Why don’t inspectors also talk to frontline staff? By the way, Joe worked on some frightening estates, so he makes no apology for using the term ‘frontline’.

Clips of mechanics telling motorists what cars to avoid are a big hit on TikTok. HQN takes a leaf out of their book. Our starting point is listening to the repair operatives and call handlers. They’ll tell you what’s going on pretty damn quick. Yes, you’ve got to talk to boards and leaders to check out what they know about real life. But it shouldn’t be either/or. The RSH focuses on the boardroom and too often ignores the frontline. Have a walk around – do those C ratings always ring true?

Joe socks it to us, warts and all. He tells us about managers who fiddle data to make themselves look good, know next to nothing about the service, get too cosy with contractors and place their useless friends in jobs. At times it reminded me of Billy Connolly’s story of a hopeless manager who was, as he put it, “a stranger to the shipyard”. As a result, he kept bumping his head on the equipment. In much the same way, the housing vans came with the 15 boxes of tiles ordered by the bosses, not the one or two that the operative needed.

Is this going on in your organisation? How do you know?

Some tenants have tough lives. Joe takes us through awful cases of domestic abuse and cuckooing. He despairs of the human cost of the cuts to services made due to austerity.

As you’d expect, damp and mould features heavily in the book. Joe doesn’t think that asking tenants to clean up for themselves using hazardous chemicals or handing out inane pamphlets works. Practical in-person advice to the tenant in their home is a better idea. At the other end of the spectrum, he shakes his head at new homes with massive windows that are in effect uninhabitable greenhouses.

So, what are the answers for Joe? He wants local management and smaller patch sizes. Just like the Housing Ombudsman, he points to the failures of mergers. Now that some of our behemoths are selling homes to others, this trend might be reversing. But it’ll take time. Yesterday, I walked past a local office that had been open since I came to London in the 80s. Thanks to a merger, it’s now shuttered. We’ve never seen the area look so tatty.

The book calls for better IT systems, so the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Sorry, but I’m all out of optimism on that one. Yet Joe’s plea for better training might come to pass with the new competence standard. Time will tell.

Joe sets out the problem succinctly. We need the “management skills” to cope with the “chaos and urgency of reactive repairs”. Let’s not “wait for meetings and reports”. It’s time for “immediate action, decisiveness and a real understanding of the human impact”. Well said.

Boards, councillors and regulators must read this book. We’ve ignored the workers for too long. They’re real people that do real jobs. Don’t just delete them in a spreadsheet when the heat is on. And I’d take a good look at fraud. Too many dogs are barking.