What seems like a lifetime ago, long before his current tragic fame as one of the survivors of covid most badly affected by the virus, Derek Draper set up the first student union in the tertiary college he attended. We had stood against each other for the lofty role of first president of the student union. Derek beat me (by all of five votes!) and became the first President. Whoever wrote the election rules hadn’t really thought it through because as the runner up I became the Vice President.
The Principal of the college was deeply committed to there being a student union. So much so that he gave us our own office space. Or rather he gave us a disused toilet on the edge of the campus. Over two or three balmy hot (and unpleasantly fragrant) summer days in the mid 1980s Derek and I set about dismantling the toilet partition, taking out the sink and the toilet too. We were particularly pleased by our ingenious method of capping the sewer exposed after taking out the toilet proper, although after my almost thirty year career in housing I realise our cardboard and paper towel combo cap wouldn’t meet modern building regulations.
And here comes the punchline of this slightly egregious reminiscence. As we were taking a very well-deserved breather from our toilet demolition work one particularly hot afternoon, we went past the reception office for the college. We caught a snippet of conversation that went something like this: “isn’t it great working here when the students aren’t here, you get so much more done.”
Almost three decades later, I’ve never forgotten that fragment of memory because it says so much about the culture of the college. As we ever so slowly wend our way towards the new consumer regulation regime it seems especially pertinent for the sector that housed me as a child and gave me the career I have today. Culture is everything.
The new Consumer Regulation regime will herald a new decade of compliance anxiety for Execs and Boards. The cottage industry that grows up around it will pay the school fees of the kids of some of the consultants who will help deliver it. But at the end of the day, doing the right thing for your tenants is about culture. If your first response when the local press or the news publishes pictures of dense black mould cascading down the wall of one of your properties is to stick a headline on your website saying “We met all our statutory obligations”, if your Execs spend more time wining and dining your bankers than with your customers, if complaints are a pain in the neck rather than little golden nuggets of data that can help leverage changes in your approach, if the staff who do the most face to face work with customers aren’t paid as much as other colleagues, and if your chief exec has to hitch a ride to a scheme visit with a junior colleague because they’re worried their BMW might get scratched, if you lose no sleep at all at the thought of putting your tenants’ rent up by 10%, then serving customers is always going to be a problem for you.
Some of the best providers in our sector go out of their way to meet the needs of their customers. They bend over backwards – sideways, everyways, to understand their needs, their problems and try to develop creative solutions to meet those needs. Some providers go out of their way to address the needs of seriously marginalised groups of people in an environment both of swingeing cuts to public expenditure and consequently, the ability of local authorities and third sector agencies to meet those needs, and an environment where political players stir up hatred for those groups.
I know one chief executive who – puzzled by a series of complaints from a tenant – went to visit her and spent an hour in the tenant’s kitchen listening to what had gone wrong for her. The following day that association’s kitchen replacement programme was paused and the day following, a new specification was introduced. It cost a few tens of pounds more per customer, but there were no more complaints. I know other chief executives who have never spoken to a customer outside a scheme opening or large meeting. For the first chief executive the organisational culture is probably right. For the second, I have to wonder.
Probably the oldest running social housing provider in the country, the Great Hospital in Norwich, was founded in 1249 to meet the needs of the aged, the sick and the poor. With some tweaks to the language, it’s a mission most of us in the social housing sector would recognise almost 800 years later. Our sector has a long and proud history of providing good quality homes for those who need them.
As providers start to think about meeting the challenges of the changed customer regulation regime, let them start by thinking about their culture: is it fit for purpose? The ticklists, process maps and policy documents can follow….
Darren Watmough
Principal Consultant
22nd June 2022