16 minute read
Resilience roundtable
Resilience roundtable – housing management and estate services
Last month, HQN brought together housing professionals from across the sector to discuss what organisations are doing to protect themselves and residents from the impact of the rent cap and the cost-of-living crisis. In this roundtable, we talked to housing management and estate services staff about what they are seeing on the ground and the pressures they face.
Attendees:
• Lydia Dlaboha, Deputy CEO, HQN
• Elizabeth Ddamulira, Income Services Manager, Stevenage Borough Council
• Sean Ellam , Head of Neighbourhoods, South Lakes Housing
• Derek Streek, Head of Communities, Standards and Partnerships, Vivid Homes
• Lorraine Chastanet, Estate Services Manager, Wandle Housing Association
• Donna Lilley, Neighbourhood Team Manager, Ipswich Borough Council
• Clare Greensall, Regional Manager – Communities & Neighbourhoods, Platform Housing Group
• Rob Duhig, Community Warden, Clarion Housing Association
• Debbie Larner, Associate, HQN
• Rebecca Cullen, Head of Housing Management, Stockport Homes
• Emma Langstaff, Estates & Neighbourhoods Manager, Soha Housing
• Valerie Billing, Tenant and Estate Services Manager, Bassetlaw Council
• Judith Mullineux, Housing Services Advisor, Six Town Housing
Lydia Dlaboha (LD): During Covid, housing management and estate services were the ones on the frontline and they still are. So, what’s your approach to the cost-of-living crisis and how useful have previous situations been in shaping your current thinking?
Derek Streek (DS): We discussed this in the senior leadership team and the first question we asked was – how is this any different to the situation where we had a rent reduction for a number of years? It was explained by our finance people that interest ratesare significantly different – and that has a direct impact on the financial position overall. Every organisation is going to be starting off from a different position.
In terms of what we’ve learned from previous situations, one of the key points is in relation to how we talk to people. It’s about being kind to each other and kind to customers. We’ve signed up to the sector’s commitment to no evictions. We’re also trying to find different ways of encouraging residents to pay their rent and not go into arrears when we know there’s not much money around.
We’re also effectively putting some things on hold, such as recruitment. We don’t want to add to our costs. This is the usual time of year that we’re looking at budgets, anyway.
LD: Do you feel there’s a value being attributed to your service? If anything, the Covid situation was probably quite positive for housing management and estate services, because you were the eyes and ears of the organisation.
Clare Greensall (CG): Very much. So, I look after all of our tenancy sustainment services and the board were, I think, impressed with our response to Covid. In the past, some of our services might be regarded as ‘discretionary’ and possibly the first thing to cut. But there’s recognition that this is a situation in which customers are suffering, and therefore tendency sustainment and welfare funds are a priority.
Sean Ellam (SE): One of the lessons learned from the previous rent cut is about the social heart of the business and what we’re actually here for. The conversations that we’ve been having around business plans come with the caveat that it’s not just the decisions that we make that are impacting on people. It’s the increase in fuel costs, it’s all the other pressures that people are under in terms of the cost of living, and the price increases linked to CPI.
We already have people asking for their gas to be capped or looking for alternative, possibly less safe, sources of energy.
We’ve also got staff who are worried about their pay and jobs and are struggling themselves.
The response to Covid very much put our services more at the forefront of people’s mind in terms of the ability to react and support customers so that’s probably worked in our favour.
Valerie Billings (VB): We’re trying to do a lot more engagement with our customers. During Covid, we couldn’t do a lot of tenancy support visits due to the restrictions. But now we’re going back out to customers’ homes, we’re finding a lot of people are in very difficult situations – in terms of the conditions of the property and the way they’re living. They haven’t always been reporting problems or calling us the way they should.
The other challenge that we have is our housing officers are in a situation where they feel like they are social workers and not housing officers, so we’re doing a lot more referrals to our partners in health, social services, the fire service, hoarding services, mental health services. And we see the issue that two years plus of not being allowed inside people’s homes, how much more vulnerable they are now – general needs as well.
LD: In some ways Covid has been good because it’s highlighted the importance of housing management and support services, but it’s also meant that you’ve got a backlog of issues to deal with, which you need to think about when it comes to possible cuts or reducing services. How receptive are your partners and stakeholders to investing more resources at a time when they’re also cutting back?
VB: We try to work quite closely with our partners like you all do. But the resource isn’t there. We currently have lots of anti-social behaviour issues and the police aren’t intervening. In my location, the police are asking the landlord to move individuals. It’s an easy way out for them but from our point of view, you can’t just keep moving the problem around.
We’ve got the tools to deal with certain situations, such as mediation and community orders, but the criminal aspects of these issues are not being dealt with, such as drug dealing and county lines. We need the police’s support and they just don’t seem to have the resources available. We’re not enforcers, we’re trying to sustain tenancies.
Our housing officers are becoming more vulnerable because criminal elements in the community aren’t necessarily respectful of housing. If they aren’t respectful of the law, they’re not going to be respectful of housing officers. But our people are expected to be out on their patches alone and often put in difficult situations.
CG: One of the things we’re getting a bit of grief about from our councillors and MPs is around this idea of whether we’re still providing a local service for local people. Since the pandemic, we no longer have any offices, so customers can’t come and see us. They can’t walk in anywhere and talk to us.
If I look back 10-15 years, they’d have offices on every estate, but life has changed. We’re trying to encourage customers to contact us in different ways. We are making ourselves more available, so rather than coming to see us in the office, we’ll go and see them at home.
But we’re also trying to encourage them to sign up to the customer portal, use those digital self-service options, and for some customers that’s fine. But we’re also aware that lots of our customers aren’t able to access digital services – they might be digitally excluded, financially excluded – so we’re really looking at doing things differently and what works best for them.
We’ve also been lucky enough to be able to have a wellbeing fund for the last two years, which means our customers can apply for essential support, basically things like school uniforms, food bank vouchers, energy vouchers, and things like white goods.
We know that not having a washing machine or tumble dryer means that they might not be washing their clothes properly, not drying their clothes properly. It could lead to things like condensation and mould in their homes. Having a washing machine will make a massive difference to them. Having a cooker or freezer, so they can cook, and access to meals, and things like that will make the difference.
Debbie Larner (DL): I’m hearing a lot through the Health and Safety Network and the Asset Management Network about the issues around gas capping, unblocking fireplaces, Calor gas, and the safety implications of all that. And the other issue that’s been picked up on is the link between not using heating or washing machines and damp and mould. So, it’s the impact on the property as well as the people that we’re seeing.
Lorraine Chastanet (LC): Our main issue seems to be illegal fly-tipping. We remove it, it comes back, we remove it, it comes back. We can’t cope. The last bill for one months worth of fly-tipping was – wait for it – £18,000. That’s the thing we’re dealing with the most. Some of it is our tenants, and some of it comes from outside – people just offloading trucks and lorries because they know we’ll remove it. You can have one mattress in the bin store then, all of a sudden, there’s 25 more.
Rob Duhig (RD): I was really interested in what Lorraine was saying about fly-tipping and that cost of £18,000 a month. I get a lot of fly-tipping problems as well and I wonder how you pay for it? Do you service charge that cost back to residents?
LC: Yes, it’s service charged back to the residents.
RD: So, we had a fly-tipping problem on an estate in Ipswich, and in the end we re-introduced weekly rubbish collections. Instead of having refuse collected one week, and recycling the next, they now have refuse every week and recycling every two weeks. We have to pay extra for that but it’s more than compensated itself because we don’t have so many fly-tipping problems.
LC: That’s not something we’ve looked at because we work across a lot of London boroughs and many have moved to recycling once a week. Wandsworth Council have said no to extra collections because they want people to recycle in the right way. We don’t really have a problem with general waste – it’s when people are dumping large amounts, when clearing houses or whatever.
There are maybe 30 or 40 flats on the estate and we do a weekly drive-by to clear the flytipping but the residents seem to believe that more CCTV is the answer to everything. It’s not. They [fly-tippers] put their biggest hats on or hide their number plate. They’re not telling everybody ‘look at me’. They’re doing it in disguise, so you can’t catch them.
LD: Talking about services, have any of you looked at your service agreements with a view to renegotiating terms? Maybe scale back on some of the things that you’re doing for tenants, or do more? Or even just look at ways of providing the service but in a different way?
SE: That’s just something that we do naturally. We’re just going into a new contract with a call monitoring provider in terms of care calls and we’re very much challenging them on value for money and getting the best service for the customer.
The Lakes is a bit of a micro economy. So, in terms of getting contractors, attracting staff, even supplies and materials – it’s all more difficult to come by in rural areas. If you’re using local contractors on a smaller scale – for example, we have a subsidised gardening scheme – we’ve had quite a few issues with that this year in terms of engaging with the contractor and he probably regrets taking it on because of the distance he’s got to travel, the cost of fuel and everything else associated with working in a rural area.
LD: What about technology? Any good ideas or good examples of how organisations have used technology to help?
Rebecca Cullen (RC): During Covid, because we couldn’t do the same number of tenancy visits, so we used technology to stay in touch, like WhatsApp. Things like allocations and mutual exchanges all continued throughout Covid, and we used video to show that the property was in good order, but we didn’t do the normal checks that we would have done previously so we did see that as a bit of a risk area.
We were still going out, doing emergency jobs, so our teams were checking on people as well as properties. We’re undertaking tens of thousands of repairs each year and we wanted to make sure that operatives were not challenging or questioning the customer, because they’re obviously not best placed to do that, but certainly feeding back and setting something up if there were any concerns.
During Covid, we were making more calls to customers, so we did have the contact, but we weren’t doing the actual visit, and we’ve done some analysis of that. And actually we do recognise the importance of doing those tenancy visits with customers to identify how we can support.
Just a couple of other things I picked up as people have been talking. Fly-tipping is a big issue and I suppose that’s why I was on here today, so to see if there’s any good advice right now.
We do have a really good system called Sweep Up, so I suppose that’s the technology we’re using, where caretakers can take photographs of fly-tipping and then they’ve got the ability to be able to share that with the housing officers if they need to do follow up work. We can then look at CCTV and identify who might have flytipped, or if we’ve got anti-social behaviour or vandalism then it’s a really good tool to improve communication.
One of the big things about the cost-of-living crisis is that it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep an eye out for customers. I’ve just delivered a session along with the customer finance team for our housing officers about the things that they can pick up and give some basic advice without it having to be an official referral, and we’re really trying to skill up the officers.
Energy efficiency is another big thing for everyone. You know, getting people to come up with ideas and take responsibility. Downsizing, for example. People might have been able to manage before but can they afford to stay in a large house? How can we support them? Not only would it free up the accommodation but would also see a reduction in bills for the customer if they move to a smaller property.
Judith Mullineux (JM): Our biggest problem at the moment is trying to recruit. The housing world has become quite unattractive. We’re losing people who are very experienced and very good. And when you get new people in it’s difficult to train them quickly in what can be quite technical roles. People are leaving housing because of the pressures and what they’re having to deal with mentally.
They’re bringing incentives in to try and keep staff and we’re working on initiatives to look at how we better protect staff from what’s going on out there. We talk a lot about mental health but our customers’ needs are becoming more and more complex. Over the last three months, we’ve had about six or seven fires in our properties, caused by candles – so, linked to the cost-of-living but alsomental health. Someone set fire to a neighbour’s property and the knockon effect in terms of costs, materials and the inconvenience caused to the resident is huge.
We don’t have anyanswers sometimes, we’re just lurching from one thing to another, and it’s just getting bigger and bigger, and certainly the local authority and the police don’t have anyresources to assist. The other day, the police asked us what we’re doing about the drug dealing on our estate!
Elizabeth Ddamulira (ED): We’ve got such a high staff turnover. The nature of the job requires resilience and we’ve historically recruited the sort of person who can cope with whatever is thrown at them. But I think from 2020, the cumulative impact of the last two years has just literally broken even the best, strongest people.
And it’s not just the increase in complex cases, but the level of complexity. It’s no longer just a 10-minute phone call – they’re now more like 20 minutes, followed by an hour of followup work, trying to do signposting, trying to deal with everything else. And then, of course, they’re expected to have answers to everything that’s happening, and very often we don’t.
LD: Finally, what’s your number one current concern?
Emma Langstaff (EL): The viability of our contractors. As some of you have said, recruitment is an issue and their costs are soaring so it’s how viable they will continue to be.
ED: For me, it’s staff retention in the current market but the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and energy bills [are making things much worse]. We’re trying toreach all the residents who are in buildings that have communal heating and trying to explain to them that their bills might increase because they aren’t protected, so that’s a worry. The reaction is going to be quite interesting.
And then it’s about rents and service charges and how we communicate this and collect them.
DS: I’d say something similar. The cost-of-living crisis and the impact it’ll have on our properties as well as the customers. The increased fire risk from the use of candles and people potentially trying to open-up old fireplaces, the damp and mould that will come in those properties, and the increased pressure that we’ll get as a result.
SE: From a bigger perspective, I think we mobilised really well as a sector prior to the previous rent cut in terms of putting pressure on central government. My fear is that there’s way much too much apathy around what’s going on. We don’t see the leaders of our sector mobilising in a way that’s going to have any great impact on the decisions that are being made.
