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By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. Ignore the hype. This week’s “Rooseveltian” New Deal is no such thing. The Prime Minister’s “build, build, build” reboot of the economy amounts to no more than £5bn of existing money, and even reduces the…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. Planning reform has been a constant in government thinking over the past ten years. If only, the thinking seems to go, the process was simpler, faster, and less bureaucratic then it would deliver the homes…
By Ali Akbor OBE, Chief Executive of Unity Homes & Enterprise, and Secretary/Treasurer of BME National The need for BME-led housing associations is sometimes questioned. But the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement is a reminder of why the…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. Forty years ago I wrote my degree dissertation on the links between ethnic minority communities and poor housing in London. I visited Islington’s council offices to study their small area census data, and inputted the…
By Patricia Dearnaley, Head of Support and Employability at Rooftop Housing Group and HQN Associate We began planning our COVID-19 response in mid-February, when our Disaster Management Team became aware that there was a potential issue with this little-known virus…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. When the Prime Minister and the heir to the throne were struck down by coronavirus, there was a lot of guff in the media about this being a democratic disease that can strike everyone, be…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. At such a time it seems rather irrelevant to write about anything other than coronavirus, but last week the UK Housing Review was published by the Chartered Institute of Housing and it’s a reminder that…
By Stephen Cook, housing consultant. The housing profession can sometimes over complicate what it does, or what it thinks it should be doing. As a cynical old housing manager, I used to challenge these illusions of grandeur by reminding colleagues…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” A health warning to begin with. This blog is a series…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. It’s official. According to the Met Office, February was the wettest ever recorded in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with around 260% of rain falling above the 30-year trend. We averaged over 20cm of rain…
By Colin Heyman, Lead Associate, and Tahir Idris, Equality & Diversity Manager at Together Housing It’s a question I’m often asked: how do we get more diversity on our boards? It’s a constant challenge for many – indeed I would…
By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. The sacking of Esther McVey last week and the appointment of Christopher Pincher as housing minister was a depressingly familiar event. We’re now on the 28th housing minister since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister over…
