HQN ran a series of roundtables looking at the government’s professionalisation review of social housing and whether it’d help to drive up standards in the sector. Over two weeks, we spoke to nearly 50 staff, from chief executives to customer care advisors. Here’s our roundup of what people had to say.
What do you feel is wrong with the current situation? What needs fixing?
“This morning I was having breakfast and saw on television a report where a tenant was talking about damp and mould and they’re showing the property and there are rats running around. Then there’s another customer, then another customer. That’s three stories, all with similar circumstances. And that really broke my heart. So, that’s what’s happening and it’s happening every day. Things are going wrong and we need to fix it as soon as possible. It’s obviously damaging the sector and I know there are so many good people working really hard to try and make a difference to people’s lives.”
Housing association chief executive
“We’re not focused on what we’re here to do, which is to serve the tenant. We’ve lost sight of that and I’m not convinced that mandatory training will necessarily bring that back. I think we need to find our purpose again. What are we here to do? If you look at the tenant journey, from application through to the end of a tenancy and all the touch points that tenants might have with us, you’ve got so many different teams involved. We’ve segmented everything so much, these competing commitments, we’re losing sight of the bigger picture, which is where the tenant fits in to this. If people really need mandatory training to know the difference between right and wrong, then we’re really in trouble.”
Local authority business manager – housing income and leaseholder management
“What’s the scope of what a housing officer does? Do they just go out and deal with the tenant? Do they also deal with the property issues? This is something that having a more standardised training could help with. We don’t define roles across the sector, like we do for, say, a nurse. We let the organisations name roles and define them themselves.”
Housing association estates contract manager
“Those organisations that have tarnished and impacted the reputation of the sector failed due to lack of governance, lack of leadership, cultural issues, not listening to customers, not understanding their customers, and some ignorance. Some organisations aren’t responding promptly to the issues that we see or that we see on the news – damp and mould being the obvious example. And I think the government’s answer – after years of winding back useful and helpful regulation – that all of a sudden professional people will mean that you tackle all of these issues is wrong. I’ve worked in the care and nursing sector and being professional doesn’t mean you deliver a better service at all. Some of the most qualified people in the care and nursing sector are the ones that you would least want to deliver the service.”
Housing association executive director of customer and communities
“No one wants to live in social housing anymore and no one wants to work in social housing either. You feel that stigma now”
Housing association chief executive
“Our frontline staff are doing work that touches lives, like social workers or teachers. But how many people do you come across who, when they’re asked ‘how did you get into housing?’ they say, ‘I fell into it’ or ‘it was by accident’. So, I suppose arguably, that’s the problem. But whether this [professionalism] is the solution is perhaps a moot point, at least in the way it’s been presented in the press.”
Housing association housing and customer services director
“The reason that things like Rochdale happened isn’t because people aren’t competent, I believe. It’s because maybe some people don’t care enough, which is an entirely different issue. I really struggle to see how pushing people through any sort of competence-based professionalisation is going to change some of the fundamental dynamics in our sector. If you think about other sectors where they’ve had this professionalisation forced on them, I question whether it’s actually improved quality? It’s interesting to note that the CIH, as an organisation that has Ofsted reports, failed its last Ofsted and that’s one of the proposals that we’re being encouraged to consider as part of the professionalisation agenda.”
Housing association executive director, of customer experience
“You can’t train empathy. It’s either there as part of your DNA or it’s not. But what I’ve seen is that you can lose empathy. I’ve seen some good people in housing go stale. But I suspect if we were talking about any other sector, we would say exactly the same, that the system can grind you down.”
Housing association chief executive
“[Professionalism] is being used as a stick to solve some issues and while it might up standards, I also think it’s going to create lots of unintended consequences for the sector. Our salaries will go up, people might retire because they think, I’m not doing that, I’m near retirement, I’m going to leave the sector. And, of course, we’re hardly awash with people that want to join housing at the moment.”
Housing association executive director of customer and communities
“I worry that forcing people to have professional qualifications could have the adverse affect of alienating some really good people and forcing them out of the sector, just because they don’t have technical ability. I’d rather have people that actually care and have a positive outlook.”
Housing association neighbourhood advisor
“I don’t think it’s only about values and attitudes. I think there’s also something about resilience and about compassion fatigue. My housing officers are really, really caring, but actually, how do you sustain that caring over a period of time?”
Housing association executive director of customer experience
“Where’s the emphasis in recruitment? It’s really complicated, isn’t it? It’s not just the one issue that’s the problem. We’ve all had efficiency drives because the emphasis has been on trying to build more homes and so you try and get efficiencies elsewhere. There’s just so many contributing factors.”
Housing association head of housing projects
“I think we’ve become quite process driven, over the last decade or so. But, as we know, delivering services is more than that. This is a people-to-people business. So, the whole thing about culture, behaviours, exercising professional judgment, rather than just following steps in a process or being quite transactional, means it isn’t just about getting a professional qualification. It’s about ongoing learning throughout your career.”
Housing association head of policy and training
“The housing officer role has a unique function in that they should be an expert on the tenancy agreement. Most of the work of a housing officer is based around this document. It’s about making sure tenants understand their responsibilities but also that they understand their rights. And I think that’s something the housing officer function can sometimes neglect. Arguably, some of the high-profile problems we’ve had in the sector are because tenants haven’t been able to fully exercise their rights and haven’t had the housing officer support to do so. I do think for housing officers to have the skill and the knowledge to represent tenants to their organisation is important.”
Housing association head of neighbourhoods
“Whilst I understand the outcome that the [professionalism] review is hoping to achieve, I’m not sure it’s tackling the right kind of issues. The lack of digital and data skills, combined with the legacy systems we use, have prevented a joined-up approach to service delivery – which were identified in both the Awaab Ishak and Peabody cases.”
Housing association head of customer experience
How can the sector and the profession be made more attractive to employees (potential and current)?
“In terms of our neighbourhood roles, we weren’t getting the applications to the level that we wanted, so we ended up reducing the number of roles and going for more junior entrance posts, recruiting into those roles then providing training and development opportunities to ‘grow our own’. That’s starting to prove really successful. Most of the people who are coming in at that junior level are now moving into the full neighbourhood officer roles. For roles where we’re looking for more experience, we’re just not getting the applications, so you end up poaching people from another organisation and you end up with that circular thing between people in a tight geographical area.”
Housing association director of customer and estate services
“A lot of my family work in the civil service and they’ve really struggled to recruit into certain roles, specifically in validation, because nobody really quite understands what they do and how important they are. What they’ve done is spend a lot of time on their recruitment process – doing open Zoom meetings and getting people who are in the role to talk about what it is, what they do, the pros and cons. And we’ve nicked that idea and it’s massively increased the number of applications from people that want to apply. It’s not something you can do for every role, but I think it’s a useful approach. It gets the people who have the right behaviours for the role interested in applying in the first place.”
Housing association assistant director, talent and engagement
“We’ve always struggled to recruit in some trades, some roles, some sections of our organisation, but now it’s becoming wider and more general. I think most people out there who are looking for jobs or careers don’t understand what housing is. They see the negative press or they just don’t think about the sector as an option. There needs to be a greater connection with schools. It’s a big issue for us. We put an advert out and we get hundreds and hundreds of people, or we get no one applying. The people that apply just totally misunderstand what the role is. We’ve always had this issue about raising the profile of housing, making a career in housing valuable and worthwhile. On the whole, the pay is good, the pensions – on the whole – are good. But people just don’t understand who we are, or they think we’re something that we’re not.”
Housing association executive director of customer and communities
“When I started out as a housing trainee, I had a degree, I left university and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. It was only because my dad used to be a local councillor and he happened to mention housing that it became an option. At no point do I remember housing ever been mentioned as a sector throughout my entire school or university days. And I’ve had this conversation with so many people over the years, and I still don’t think it’s happening.”
Housing association diversity and inclusion manager
How do you think housing compares with other sectors and professions?
“When you relate housing to teaching or social work, qualifications and regulation have been so important. So, I do think it’s a good thing and it will make a difference. I know Ofsted has come in for quite a bit of criticism but when I look back to some of the teachers I had as a child, they wouldn’t be teachers now. And I think that level of regulation around practice and teaching practice has been good in a lot of ways for education. I think it’s ruled people out that really weren’t doing the job. But it isn’t a fix-all guarantee. Take social work, despite the qualifications, they’ve had their own issues. I do believe instilling a culture of continuous improvement and performance management is so important. And it doesn’t have to be a punitive or negative thing, but I think that’s the culture an organisation should be taking on.”
Local authority customer operations officer
“If you think about Ofsted and if you think about schools that are failing, they’re essentially put under special measures. They look at what they’re going to do to improve and really raise that standard where it should be. I think the drive towards professionalism, and some kind of naming and shaming, isn’t going to get the results that would lead to really improved services. So, my question would be, what’s the agenda here? Is it genuinely about improving the services for some of those organisations which perhaps have failings in certain areas? Is it genuinely a systemic issue across all of the sector which is being portrayed at the moment? There’s a danger that you have a broad-brush and you paint everybody with the same failings. What could be better is a less emotive approach and a real kind of attempt to understand what’s going wrong.”
Housing association assistant director, customer and neighbourhoods
“I was just thinking about our company induction. A key part of that, especially for the contact centre, is that it covers the history of social housing and the link to homelessness. So, just by giving that very broad picture to start with, along with a section on organisational values and behaviours, it forms a golden thread to our strategic objectives. So, I do think that if there was a qualification where that kind of background and some more housing elements were covered, it would actually help us, because I think that there is some inconsistency.”
Housing association head of customer experience
“This is an interesting question, but not one to be taken too literally because sectors aren’t homogenous and so comparing a sector to another sector is fairly fruitless. Maybe what’s more interesting is to be curious about organisations rather than sectors who do a great job at looking after their customers or providing the service that they need to or delivering their purpose. And one way that we can do that is looking at the Institute for Customer Service and the organisations that come top of the UK Customer Satisfaction Index. There are some organisations that are routinely in the top ten and have been for many years. They must do something that most other organisations don’t – that’s what we should be curious about. Are we doing a similar thing in our sector to some of those market leading organisations? First Direct are top of my mind because they’re always there for their customers and not all organisations can say that. So, there are things we can learn from individual organisations but maybe not from sectors.”
Housing association executive director of customer experience
“There are a lot of other sectors where things are going wrong and you have to decide whether housing’s problems are the exception or the rule? At the moment, on balance, I’d say they are still the exception. You can point to other regulated sectors where things are going spectacularly wrong but you can also point to unregulated, non-professional sectors that are shining examples of customer care. So, I don’t think the professionalism drive is necessary the answer to everything. Sometimes it’s the intangibles that you can’t measure – empathy, how we talk to people.”
Housing association chief executive
What does ‘professionalism’ mean to you? What are the key characteristics you look for in a ‘professional’?
“Empathy is the key. As housing officers, I don’t think you can come into the role without it. But I think a lot of the issues come down to the maintenance side of companies. A lot of the things the government are trying to fix are actually down to maintenance teams refusing to do the work or not being contactable. So, I’d ask, as professionalism goes, should they have to go through the training as well? Empathy doesn’t seem to run through some of the higher-level roles, especially in maintenance. They just blame the tenants when things go wrong.”
Housing association welfare co-ordinator
“We need to have real values, not tick-box values. A professional code that professionals sign up to, actually needs to mean something. I sit here as a CIH member, but how often do I look at their values and think about how I should conduct myself? There has to be something in place that’s meaningful – an oath of allegiance, or whatever it looks like, you need to live and breathe it and you need to be judged by that code.”
Housing association chief executive
“I’m currently doing the CIH level Four even though I’ve worked in housing for many years. I’d argue I’ve always behaved like a professional even without the certificate that says so”
Housing association customer engagement officer
“The quality of customer service isn’t just about the people on the frontline. I think there needs to be a focus from the whole organisation on the people that we’re serving. One of the things that affects us greatly is the quality of contractors. If there was ever a way of getting our cultures through to those organisations as well, I think that would make a huge difference. I don’t know how we do that, but I’ve thought that the entire time I’ve worked in housing.”
Housing association neighbourhood services manager
“A lot of things have been said around empathy, culture and values. If the professionalism qualification could cover that as well as some of the technical stuff, I would very much welcome it.”
Housing association customer involvement officer
“One of the words that we haven’t really mentioned is accountability. And, actually, accountability here is key and it’s about whether we deliver on promises, whether we do what we’re saying we’re going to do and raising concerns when we see something that isn’t right.”
Housing association head of customer experience
“Getting everyone to do qualifications feels a little bit like putting a plaster over a gunshot wound. The problem isn’t people being under qualified, the problem is obviously attitudes. A criticism I’ve never heard from a tenant is about people being underqualified. It would always be, ‘these people don’t care’, or ‘they don’t listen to me’. They’ve never said they don’t have the technical knowledge to be able to do it.”
Housing association neighbourhood advisor
“I was speaking to someone in our learning and development team and asking what her take was, and she used the word ‘integrity’. People have talked about values and attitudes and that’s something that’s very hard to train someone in. But I also think with the commercialisation of housing associations, and the way we’re moving away from our original social purpose, that when new staff come in, they no longer have the same values or purpose as others. The integrity of an organisation is so important – it’s about the culture and values and everything that flows from that.”
Housing association customer engagement officer
“It’s all very well officers [caring about residents] and let’s hope they do. But if they’re working in a culture where they cannot raise concerns, that has to be taken into account. People have to have the confidence to be able to say, ‘I’ve seen this and it bothers me’. But that can only happen in a no blame culture.”
Local authority housing operations officer
