By Jas Bains, Hafod Chief Executive
Housing associations have been a prominent feature of the UK social welfare landscape for more than a century. Many emerged with their roots in poverty and homelessness in the 1960/70s while others started out offering a single service and added more services as additional needs of the community became evident.
Today, services typically span housing, health, social care, housing support, training and employment, welfare advice, debt management, etc. Housing associations have shown to be uniquely positioned to provide holistic help.
Due to their history, broad range of services, size and scale, housing associations tend to be deeply connected to the communities they serve. They are a trusted source not only for residents, but for public service officials who know they can count on to administer new or existing services, this also partly explains their organic growth. Many associations also carry enough institutional clout to play a lead role in delivering broader community change. At their best, associations understand the context and circumstances of their customers’ lives and know the types of support they are likely to require over time. In the event they are unable to deliver one or more key services they usually have the connections and local knowledge to collaborate effectively with other organisations that can.
Delivering on this potential should be a comparative advantage, but that isn’t always the case. Instead, they focus on achieving narrow, short-term outcomes, which is not a bad thing, but they don't have the authority for helping customers achieve long-term, life-changing outcomes.
A deeper analysis of customer data shows a high number of tenancies with people who are experiencing complex problems. Hafod, amongst other associations, indicate 50% of households have one or more persons either registered disabled or living with a long-term limiting illness. However, a set of reinforcing strategic, financial, and operational barriers stand in the way, and with it a loss of human, societal and economic potential as well as reduced life outcomes. While the case for higher public sector investment is unarguable, it is not always about the money but also about service design, resource deployment, commissioning, leadership, and governance. Yet, for all the evidence and rationale, the status quo remains.
In 2017, Hafod introduced the relational model to deliver housing services. Responding to data, the organisation went full on with a comprehensive approach, increasing costs to the frontline but with a clear objective to improve the customer experience. This was more difficult to achieve with the traditional housing officer approach, which was becoming less personalised, remote, and automated. Corresponding with a drop in colleague job satisfaction. Our analysis showed approximately 70-80% of housing officers’ time was spent at their desks.
When Sheffield Hallam University drew attention to the empirical evidence, which indicated this approach as one of the most successful forms of public intervention methods, not pursuing it would have been doing customers a disservice.
Five years into the project, the evidence is positive. Against KPI metrics performance is good, particularly arrears, voids, and income maximisation but the strongest evidence is the way neighbourhood coaches are impacting quality of life outcomes. There are however limitations.
We would attribute success relatively accepting but it is still too piece meal and not as coherent as it could be influenced by decades of evolutionary growth, driven by dedicated funding streams for specific, single-purpose services. All the evidence also states individual services lack a culture to support collaboration and moreover people are often left to navigate complex local services. Not only does this make it hard to move a customer from one service to another, but it also places a huge administrative burden on the organisation. The reality is time and money spent on managing contracts are resources that could be spent on integrating and extending services. Commissioning hasn’t matured sufficiently to enable funding for integrative processes to connect funding silos. Additionally, government funding tends to measure results annually, making it difficult to focus on broad and longer-term outcomes.
Internally, people and information are isolated in their own silos, and a culture in which working in isolation is a norm. We recognise as an organisation that more needs to be done to improve organisation design that knits various services together and helps them talk to one another. Recent changes to the leadership culture across executives and heads of service resulting in a greater focus on the ‘we’ as opposed to the ‘I’ will help, as will the future workforce planning exercise.
Imagine what could be achieved when organisations committed to customer- centric services are not having to paddle upstream all the way, against a strong current of funding trends and the tendency of services and commissioning to be insular. This is about more than resources, and equally about service redesign to shift delivery locally, integrating frontline services and promoting early interventions with increased use of digital technology where appropriate.
For this to happen we require a mechanism for co-ordinated intervention across numerous leverage points against different government departments and budgets, but crucially beyond government too.