By Kate Still, ex Housing COO and current CEO of social sector change consultancy Recensere Associates 

Housing is facing another self-inflicted crisis – and we’ve all started wringing our hands and tearing at our metaphorical hairshirts again. “How did we get here?” we all cry, in despair. I’ve been in housing for 15 years as an exec and studied it for nearly 30. If we don’t know the answers to these pretty basic questions by now, there literally is no hope for us as a sector.

Many organisations are now setting off on yet another pointless round of restructuring and re-naming things: decentralising services they just spent the last 10 years centralising in the hope that this perpetual process of movement and disruption will at some point deliver something that works.

No one mentions the reasons they were centralised in the first place – usually dire historic outcomes for residents delivered because of poor leadership and governance of federated or regionalised models. Do we think that every time the housing minister changes, we all experience collective amnesia of what went before?

What’s this process really all about, though? We’ve done everything in every form over the last 50 years and we continue to end up with worse and worse outcomes: our deflection of blame onto inert things such as structures or systems or the fact we used the wrong name for a housing officer; our fixating on all the things that no one really cares about, but not mentioning the real reasons.

As someone who lived in social housing as a tenant for 25 years and then for another eight as a leaseholder, the inner workings of a housing provider are a bizarre thing to behold from a resident’s perspective.

The endless turgid conversations about language: customer, resident or tenant? Housing officer, customer service advisor or tenant success operative? Creating pointless campaigns with no substance about how much tenants influence our services. All these things seriously miss the point about what’s wrong. Our biggest problem is our inability or unwillingness to really talk about things in any kind of real or truthful way.

So, if we really want change, perhaps it’s time we started naming the elephants in the room. Here’s my starter for 10:

1. Lack of strategic technical operational management skill – housing associations are big complex businesses. Creating the right business architecture, aligning strategy, process, systems and people requires serious technical skills. We simply don’t have these people in the sector. The way organisations have grown in the last 20 years has outpaced the capability within the sector. Too many people have evolved into jobs they don’t really understand.

Go into many organisations and try to talk to them about the principles of strategic business architecture or operational design and they look at you like you’re insane. I once tried to talk about enterprise architecture in an organisation and received a dismissive chuckle of “oh, ha ha ha – that’s not a thing, Kate”.

Services are restructured or business entities created without any design principles being applied. Boards try to ram through major structural changes such as insourcing hugely complex technical services with people with no start-up experience and then scratch their heads when it’s all gone horribly wrong.

The perpetual failure of organisations to drive transformational change is rooted in a simple lack of understanding of it, particularly the skills of execution. People with zero change and transformation understanding are put in directorial positions in hugely complex organisations because they read an interesting book once or went on a two-day course on agile management. I wish I was joking. I’m not.

The problem with all this is that these people spend huge amounts of time acting as a blocker to people that do have these technical skills, usually to the point where they just give up trying and leave the sector.

If we want better organisations, we need to have much better understanding of the organisational complexity we face and employ people with those skills, then let them get on with their job.

2. Lack of Leadership – despite the hard-edged realities many frontline housing teams deal with daily, there’s an amazingly bland resistance to talking about the complexity of leadership this, often brutal, context requires.

Try to raise difficult ethical questions or mention the lack of outcomes being achieved in many organisations and you will be gaslit into believing you’re the problem. Too many teams think the objective of good leadership is being nice. Raising issues is often labelled as being difficult, not a team player.

Being ‘difficult’ – i.e., talking about what’s wrong – will often get you on a fast train to Exitville. We often seem to believe that we exist for the comfort of our employees, not for the outcomes of our residents.

Yes, the sector is full of lovely, well-meaning people – but being lovely doesn’t mean you’re achieving anything. At the root of this problem is a lack of understanding of situational leadership. We seem to have two primary modes: non-listening command and control or total collaborative inertia. The contextual application of both approaches appears to be largely random.

Fundamentally, we’re ignoring the basic issues of leadership in the sector. Being bold in this area would mean calling out the basic problems for our customer. Let’s start with a particular bug bear of mine: letting standards. We seem totally incapable of showing any kind of leadership to solve this basic issue at a sector level. Wondering why tenants are angry with us? Let’s start by not offering properties that look like they were last let as Mad Max’s Airbnb.

Instead of crying “we wish we could afford it, but we can’t” we should see it as an indictment of leadership that something so fundamental seems beyond our capability to resolve.

3. Poor governance

Over the last few years, I have interviewed for many board roles. Interestingly, the only ones I tend to get are regulatory turn arounds where something needs to be saved from collapse. What have I learned from these interviews and advisory roles? We seem fixated on consensus building and terrified of doing something that other people aren’t doing.

We make terrible decisions because someone on a sector WhatsApp group told us they were making the same terrible decision. But what if consensus is the wrong answer or will just drive a melange of nonsense?

At some point someone needs to draw a line in the sand with some real values-based governance. A key part of this is making sure your organisation has a code of ethics and a moral decision-making framework that decisions are actively compared to. It also means seeing your organisation as a completely independent entity – making decisions in the interests of your specific residents, pushing back against doing things for political reasons that don’t fit with your organisational values.

Too many boards are worried about sticking out, being an outlier or upsetting someone who might one day get to talk to the housing minister. In reality, all this fear of not fitting in is in our own minds. It’s not real. There’s no greater risk management strategy than sticking to your values through thick and thin – whether people agree with you or not. You definitely need a thick skin, I admit, as one thing we love to do is point out those people who are not doing what we’re doing, or think differently. However, those organisations who are blown by the wind in different directions invariably come unstuck.

At a sector level , we also need to recognise our single major collective risk is understanding the implications of undermining the tacit social contract we have with society by demoting social justice as our foundational decision-making framework and replacing it with managerialism.

4. A focus on slogans in the place of vision and strategy

“Being the best that we can be”; “Creating dynamic sustainable communities”; “Creating the best dynamic community.” We all know the slogans – can any of us put our hand on heart, though, and say what any of it means in concrete terms? We seem to have a love of soundbites over strategy. We hate anything that requires deep thinking or complexity. The problem is the stuff we’re doing is often highly nuanced with huge amounts of systems complexity. What if all this simplification in the effort to communicate ends up taking all the important stuff out and just leaves us with “blah”?

Our next mission, should we agree to accept it, is recognising stuff this complicated can’t be reduced to a five-word slogan – we need to give people more credit. People want detail, specifics and clear strategy that recognises the challenges and constraints we face. We need to stop the perpetual process of dumbing down so something can meet the ideal word limit on a social media post.

5. Recognise our core cognitive dissonance.

In 2020 I left the housing sector for a bit. I’d had enough of doing stuff I didn’t believe in. Growing up as a tenant in social housing, I wanted to do things that would create sustainable housing and promote social equity and mobility. What I felt I ended up doing was asset stripping social housing to fund the development of homes for middleclass people – pushing out planned investment to support treasury requirements for development agreements and overseeing the brutality of welfare reform.

The ‘customer’ model of housing, affordable rent, universal credit, the shockingly low rate of social rent building in the sector – all these issues have a core principle at heart: neoliberalism. We’ve participated in the lie that doing this stuff increases real choice, drives accountability, improves supply, and standards for people the market has failed, when it actually does no such thing.

Want to know where stigma in social housing comes from? The decades-long political campaign of convincing society that people in social housing are there because of their own personal choices, rather than structural inequality created by neoliberal economic policy – a productivity and meritocracy lie that pretends that the root causes of all the things we’re faced with as a society are driven by the personal deficits of the individual – Thatcher’s “there’s no such thing as society” lie.

For me, the most mind blowing of these policy areas is the concept of affordable rent. We’ve used social housing rents to uplift our income to fund development of largely non-social rented homes. The result? Making the homes for our core purpose unaffordable, accelerating the residualisation of social housing so that only those that are in receipt of full benefit can access it and creating a housing access crisis for those on the lowest incomes. Once we have created this situation, we wonder why we have so many people with multiple complex needs living in the same neighbourhood, and sometimes (shock, horror) in our brand new mixed-tenure new builds.

Shared ownership and market rent is important, too, you say? I agree, but not at the expense of being able to maintain social housing to a decent level and certainly not at the expense of those people with no home at all.

In this situation, where we have such constrained resources, we need to make difficult decisions. A person with no home or living in squalor should take precedence over someone who would like to gain an equity stake. Is that hard on the person who would like to buy a property when other generations found it easier? Absolutely, but that doesn’t make it less ethically right in this context. It also doesn’t make that dichotomy the responsibility of housing associations to solve – we need to stop absolving government of its responsibility to develop a functioning housing market.