LastWord Name: David McQuade Position: Chief Executive Company: Flagship Group David McQuade has worked in social housing for 35 years starting his career in 1981 with City Housing in Glasgow. He worked in London and Kent from 1988 before joining a Suffolk based Housing Association in 1993. He was Deputy CEO of Flagship when it started in 1998 and in 2008 became Group Chief Executive. David leads the Operations Board to deliver the company’s strategic and business plan objectives.
42 Briefly tell us about your business? Flagship owns and manages more than 22,000 affordable homes across East Anglia. Our purpose is to provide homes for people in need. Our core business is to develop, manage and maintain our homes, aiming to build about 500 new properties every year. We have a number of subsidiary companies including RFT Services (repairs and maintenance), Flagship Homes (homes to let and for sale), and Gasway (gas services). MARCH/APRIL 2017
associations, local authorities and develop a wider range of commercial services for private sector customers. How many employees do you have? The Group’s turnover is around £120m, and we invest more than £70m per annum in our asset management and development programmes. The company is rated A1 by Moodys, and has the highest grading from the industry regulator in Governance and Financial Viability. We are keen to grow our service offer, working with other housing
We have around 750 staff consisting of 300 Flagship Group employees, 300 RFT staff and 150 in Gasway. What has been your greatest success to date and why? We have provided much needed affordable homes for rent and sale for communities in East Anglia, and, with key Local Authority and Private Sector partners, built thousands of new homes since we started in 1998. This is vital given the significant
challenge for local people in finding suitable affordable homes. What is the next challenge for your business and how will you achieve it? As in other parts of the UK, East Anglia faces a huge challenge where demand for affordable homes dramatically outstrips supply. We need to increase our efforts working with Local Authorities and other partners to help tackle this major housing crisis. We will do it by trying to continually improve our performance, and using our resources and talented staff, keep finding new and innovative ways to build more homes for local people.
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