Julia Prichard, the new Chief Tenant Officer at Saffron Housing Trust, puts people at the heart of everything she does. She tells us how that approach has driven her through her whole career and is now informing her approach to the newly-created role at Saffron. 

“Helping people to thrive” is Julia’s motivation as she seeks to turn an “inspiring strategy” into reality on the ground, “embedding that tenant-centric culture, so, everywhere in the organisation, everybody understands why they do what they do and how it makes a difference to our tenants.”

And she’s very clear it’s tenants not customers. This is something Saffron’s tenants are very clear about: “They do feel incredibly strongly about it. In their words, this was because they have a tenant/landlord relationship with us. They want to be clear in that and they want to be able to hold us accountable to that part of the contract.”

Having been in post since last December, Julia’s vision is grounded in service improvement. With the new consumer regulation in place, and professionalisation on the way, she thinks it’s a great time for landlords to take stock and really think about what they know about the people that live in their homes.

Understanding tenants’ needs and preferences is a starting point, and it anchors her plan for the first 12 months as she also tackles those challenges that the rest of the sector is facing – squeezed resources and capacity, asset management, competing priorities and a complex operating environment.

Feeling that at Saffron they’re “pretty good at doing that” she’s taking it to the next stage and is passionate about embedding that engagement and communication with their tenants, making sure that they’re working together and that they hold themselves to account.

So, she’s been leading some key service reviews with tenants and board members, like void management, for example, and is planning on getting out and about as much as possible to see “how it feels to live in one of our homes and be one of our tenants and see what it feels like to be part of our community”.

Data, as we all know, is key to that accountability and having the information to base sound strategies for improvement, but Julia acknowledges “we’ve been a bit behind the curve on data”. She wants to change their approach so it’s “not about using data to beat ourselves with the stick – it’s about using data to look at the measurable improvements we’ve made by changing this”. This, she argues, is what will help people see real change.

With that in mind, she’s using the insights from the TSM data already collected as part of their delivery plans for 2024/5. She’ll be using them to learn from and to improve from, acknowledging that “some of those scores are incredibly low and nothing that we would want to aspire to but, actually, we’re collecting information consistently and it’s important to utilise that”.

At Saffron they’re on a journey with that information, and they’re planning a lot more surveying and tenant journey mapping to really understand where those pinch points are for their tenants and how they can really understand what that’s telling them about how to improve services.

Julia is also working on refining exactly what metrics and tenant insight they should all be looking at for assurance that they’re improving and getting things right for tenants. She’ll be reporting overall metrics to board as well as reporting more detail to the service quality committee, which will do a deeper dive into things like their complaints data, their root cause analysis.

The committee will then scrutinise and challenge that performance. Julia is up front that “it won’t be instantaneous change, but we’re certainly ambitious in our tenant satisfaction targets for 2024/2025 and I’ve no doubt that we’ll get there”.

So, how did the woman now leading end-to-end tenant services, including asset management, the DLO, contact centre, insight and resident engagement, start her housing career? As with so many committed and passionate people in the sector, it was something she fell into from the probation service, where she saw the immeasurable impact of having a roof above your head for people coming out of prison and how that helped people to move on with their lives.

It’s this passion for how housing can help unlock people’s opportunities in life that clearly motivates and drives Julia. “I still love being able to see my decisions make a difference to people’s lives, and it’s really important to me that I can track that through to the frontline and to delivery and to what it means for our tenants and our communities as well.”

It’s Julia’s clear focus on the outcomes for tenants that attracted her to the role. She says: “At Saffron, they placed the tenant voice truly at the heart of the delivery. They were really honest, and transparent. I was excited by the size of them, the structure and the tenant-centred approach.”

Saffron have created a much more powerful tenant and community-led structure (that’s called Saffron – community members) so there’s a tenant and stakeholder-led community that’s supported by a charter.

She works closely with Alison Inman, who’s a board member and chair of the service quality committee. They have a tenant representative on the Saffron board and on the committee. Julia says the committee “is very diverse and focuses on tenant voice. Tenants sit around the table with me and are invited to board meetings. Those committee meetings are really vibrant and lively – exactly how it should be. They’ve got a real voice, which I love”.

However, she’s still working on ensuring tenants are contributing to the community and the organisation in the best place and way they individually can. “One of the biggest challenges for tenant representatives and tenant board members is to step into the governance space and out of the doing space because normally they’re active members of their community and get involved in what we’re trying to do. And what I should be trying to do as we start to grow more of that tenant scrutiny and engagement is to work with those tenants to look at where they want to sit in that part of our governance.

“Where do they want to be? Because you can end up with some engaged, amazing tenants who are almost working full time on doing all of that. And I don’t want that either. But we’re really lucky. There are so many brilliant people who just want to get involved and they’re so passionate about their views and that’s not easy to achieve.”

It’s interesting that as someone who’s worked for a variety of different sized providers over her career, it’s the size of a smaller housing organisation that partly attracted her to the role.

Saffron manages around 6,600 homes across Suffolk, Norfolk and East Anglia and it’s both the connection to the community and local identity that Julia feels they have, as well as the “real agility to be able to flex and respond and that’s critical right now with everything that’s going on for our tenants and our communities”.

For Julia, the mix of a smaller number of homes but greater responsibility in her role gives her the satisfaction and opportunity to “join those dots up and triangulate that data, that insight and what needs to happen in a way that you perhaps can’t in a larger national provider. In a smaller provider you can see the whole picture and that really does add value.”

Her longer-term ambition for her role in the organisation is to embed that tenant-centric culture across the whole service. She thinks it’s going to be a tough 18 months for the sector: “I think we’ve got those economic headwinds; we’ve got the cost of living pressure which is just not going away for our tenants and our communities. We’ve got real complexity around the changes and the consumer standards, unprecedented levels of change for our tenants, for our communities, for our colleagues as well. And I don’t think we should ever forget that either.

“For me it’s about taking a step back, keep reflecting on what we’ve done, what we’ve changed, making sure that we’re continually improving and making a real difference.”

Finally, she has ambitions for the sector as a whole: “I want a sector that drives change, that adds value, that creates capacity and that supports people in need.”