Interview: Michelle Reid, TPAS

Why nothing is gonna stop us now

When TPAS celebrated its 25th anniversary, the organisation’s then chief executive took time out of a busy conference schedule to tell Mark Cantrell why there must be no let up in promoting tenant involvement

From Housing Magazine, October 2013

Michelle Reid

WELFARE reform; there’s no getting away from it, even – perhaps especially – at a major national gathering for social housing tenants. When TPAS held its annual conference last month, the issue certainly generated some “quite feisty debates”.

Actually, at risk of being a tad tongue-in-cheek, the conference was so good TPAS repeated the experience. Prompted by its 25^th anniversary, the organisation decided to use the milestone to shake things up. Instead of one massive national conference, it held two – one in the South and one in the North. Talk about piling on the workload, but for TPAS’s chief executive, Michelle Reid, it was certainly worth it.

“It was a more intimate conference; we really built in lots of time for people to network,” said Reid. “You could just see all the connections being made. People really had time to sit down and talk. You could find people the next day, which you can’t always do in a big conference.

“The people there really appreciated the time to learn from each other and spark ideas off each other, and check out how they’ve handled particular situations. The ability to get together, to talk, to inspire each other, to get ideas, to make connections across tenants and staff, that always comes out of our conferences as one of the key areas of value.”

Housing caught up with Reid in between the two, and if it sounds rather like one is a rehearsal for the other, she soon disavowed the notion; rather the first “whetted the appetite” for more, she said.

“People make conferences,” she added. That’s why no two events are ever the same. “There will be similar things – the networking, the passion, the enthusiasm, the working together – but it will have a different feel to it just because it’s a different conference with different people. I think there will be the same level of feisty debate.”

There was certainly a lot to discuss. September proved something of a tumultuous month. The social housing regulator at the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) was subjected to a barrage of criticism in a Communities and Local Government Select Committee report. Naturally, TPAS had its own views to air given the aspect of consumer regulation is a close concern. The UN’s special rapporteur Raquel Rolnik lit the blue touch paper with her comments on the bedroom tax. And, lest we forget, Ed Miliband effectively made housing a key battleground in the coming election.

So there was a lot of fuel for discussion, but on top of this came the usual ‘bread and butter’ matters of tenant and resident involvement, of sharing knowledge and networking, and developing the already deep pool of tenant empowerment expertise, but over all of this lingered that dreaded spectre of welfare reform.

For Reid, the case for tenant involvement goes to the heart of a social landlord’s business, but isn’t there the temptation, given the pressures of welfare reform, that it will end up on the back burner?

“There’s always a risk,” Reid admitted. “And it may be put on a back burner by some organisations, but it’s not going to be put on the back burner by the groundswell of involved tenants, and the groundswell of landlords who want to work with their tenants. We all know that welfare reform is probably the top priority for housing providers. 

There are people who are taking the view that they need to disinvest in tenant involvement, perhaps put resources into income management roles, so yes welfare reform has the capacity to scupper some of the resident involvement that’s going on, but I would argue that it is absolutely crucial to successfully mitigate some of the impact of welfare reform.”

Another threat, perhaps, is the ‘deadening hand’ it might exert on tenants feeling able to take an active role with their landlords. However, there is a flipside. “Welfare reform galvanises people,” Reid said. “We’ve seen tenants protesting, we’ve seen tenants leading conferences on welfare reform for tenants and professionals to go along to, and there’s been a real coming together over this issue, so sometimes adversity can really galvanise and re-energise that spirit.”

Spirited tenant involvement is all very welcome, of course, but there is the worry that the adversity of these times may sour the relationship with social landlords. That’s something TPAS is understandably keen to avoid as its heads into its second quarter century. For one thing, it’s the relationship between tenants, staff, and social landlord that holds the means to clearing the hurdles of these troubled times; for another, one might say that the tenant empowerment movement has come too far to be turned back now.

“If you think about 25 years ago, if you think about the role of tenants in 1988, and the role of tenants now, then there has been a lot of progress made. Most providers have a baseline of resident involvement and empowerment. There are some really good trailblazing organisations that really get the business case for resident involvement – but there’s loads more to do,” said Reid.

“Tenants and landlords, working together in partnership, make real, tangible differences to organisations. But we’re also looking to celebrate what has been achieved, because there is an enormous amount of resident involvement going on across the country. There’s thousands of residents; I’m just really inspired by the ways that people are helping their landlords to improve. There are thousands of hours of volunteer time that’s given by people up and down the country to really get involved with their social landlords. It’s a huge amount of community expertise.

“So we’re using the 25^th anniversary to try and get the message across. It’s not just a nice thing to do, it’s not just the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do.”

This interview was first published in the October 2013 edition of Housing magazine and subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 24 March 2014. Since first publication, Michelle Reid has become group chief executive of Cynon Taf Community Housing Group in Wales.

Cover Story: A holiday in a coastal 'ghetto'

It’s enough to make your candy floss weep

Traditionally, the summer months are when our seaside resorts burst into life and earn their bread, but a report into social deprivation from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has rather cast a cloud over the promenade. The towns concerned are not best pleased at being likened to post-heyday ghettos

By Mark Cantrell

From Housing magazine, September 2013

TALK about having sand kicked in the face. Regardless of how this year’s holiday season actually went, it’s not been a good August for certain of our seaside towns. After all, they were painted as an ‘archipelago’ of social deprivation – and that’s enough to put a frown on the face of anybody’s civic pride.

The towns in question – Rhyl, in Denbighshire, Wales; Margate in Kent; Clacton-on-Sea, Essex; Great Yarmouth in Norfolk; and Blackpool, Lancashire – found themselves the subject of a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), ‘Turning The Tide’, which said that they were struggling with the social costs of decades of decline – and not just their own.

Britain is spending almost £2bn a year on welfare payments to people of working age who live in these “once flourishing seaside towns”, the report said. Greater efforts must be made, it added, “to recapture the prosperity” of their bygone heyday.

Just to add to the woe, later in the month the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released its own statistical report into seaside towns to present a profile of England’s larger seaside destinations. Now, that let Rhyl off the hook, being a Welsh resort, but Blackpool and Clacton found themselves ranked among the three most deprived seaside destinations out of the 57 defined by the ONS. The other one was Skegness and Ingoldmells.

If it’s any consolation, at least the ONS just stuck to crunching the numbers and held off delivering any kind of commentary or judgement; it naturally leaves off that kind of thing. The CSJ, on the other hand, is hardly backwards in coming forwards when it comes to saying what it thinks. Well, it would be a funny kind of thinktank if it didn’t.

“Living standards in some of the UK’s best-known coastal towns have declined beyond recognition and locals are now bearing the brunt of severe levels of social breakdown,” said Christian Guy, the CSJ’s director. “We have found inspiring local people, services and charities working hard to turn things round but they are struggling to do this alone. Some of these areas have been left behind. We must ramp up efforts to revive Britain’s coastal towns, not just for visitors but for the people who live there.”

Measured on the main indicators of poverty – school failure, teenage pregnancy, addiction, absent fathers and lone parenting, and worklessness – the report said that the five resorts endured problems as severe as any deprived inner city area. It’s enough to make the thinktank’s former founder, now work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, choke on his Mr Whippy.

The CSJ said that in Rhyl, two thirds (67% in parts) of working age people are on out-of-work benefits. In Clacton, some 41% of adults are said to have no qualifications, almost double the national average for England and Wales.

Local employers are said to have complained of “major skills gaps” and were “forced to turn to migrant labour” because of the lack of skills or will among local residents. Of the 10 wards in England and Wales with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, Great Yarmouth is said to have the highest. In some neighbourhoods, more than 40% of families with dependent children was said to have the highest rate of children in care – 150 per 10,000 which puts it far beyond the English average (59).

One running theme – maybe one should say ‘running sore’ was the impact of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs); the resorts had high levels of these, unsurprising given the role that guesthouses and bed and breakfast accommodation would have played in catering for tourists. However, as the demand for these declined, many were bought up by private landlords and converted into bedsit flats.
To turn the knife, as it were, the CSJ added that “poverty is attracting poverty”; not only are these resorts sinking under their own deprivations, but they are also becoming “dumping grounds” for the social problems of inland authorities.

“As employment has dried up, so house prices have fallen, and so less economically active people – such as single parent families and pensioners – have moved in seeking cheaper accommodation and living costs,” the report said. “Similarly, vulnerable people – such as children in care and ex-offenders – have been moved in as authorities take advantage of low-cost housing as large properties have been chopped into HMOs. Parts of these towns have become dumping grounds, further depressing the desirability of such areas and so perpetuating the cycle.”

But there’s hope, apparently. The report concludes that whilst the problems facing many seaside towns are “substantial” they are not “insurmountable”; they retain “considerable potential” as tourist destinations, though in this age of cheap air travel, they are unlikely ever to restore the vigour of their heydays, it added. If these resorts are to truly develop, then they need to build economies which are “dependent neither on tourism nor welfare”.

None of this has exactly come as news to the authorities in these seaside towns; they are not without their problems, and they know it, but there’s a certain world-weary indignation, you might say. The towns concerned might be down, but they’re not out. Indeed, this seaside quintet might argue they’re no more down than any inland town and city wrestling with the social fallout of modern Britain’s rampant inequalities and economic problems.

“This report is not a surprise and I doubt Blackpool residents would be surprised by it either,” said Councillor Simon Blackburn, the Lancashire resort’s council leader. “People living and working in Blackpool know only too well the challenges the town faces. We have a housing imbalance, which we are trying to address; in turn this will tackle some of the problems highlighted in the report.

“At Queens Park we are demolishing one-bedroom units to make way for family accommodation, and at South Beach the selective licensing scheme is doing vital work driving up standards of the private rented sector. At the moment, if you turn up in Blackpool with £50 cash and a bin bag full of possessions, you are able to find somewhere to live. This is a situation we want to change, but it will not happen overnight.”

If Blackpool’s council leader was not surprised, the leader of Tendring District Council certainly was – by the report’s naïveté, if it can be put that way. “I am surprised [the CSJ] are surprised about it being similar to inner city problems,” said Councillor Peter Halliday, whose local authority takes in Clacton-on-Sea. “We’re all living in the same communities with the same issues, the same social difficulties, the same employment difficulties. We’re no different to any conurbation across the spectrum in terms of pockets of deprivation and how we deal with it.

“The issues are the same [as elsewhere] compounded in the winter months when you haven’t got the crowds ‘drowning it out’. I do think it’s important that we focus on the positive because that will naturally bring confidence, and the more we focus on the negative, the more negatives we’ll have to deal with. The town itself is still a very pleasant place to live, work and bring up your family, just don’t be naive and think we haven’t got any issues, because we have – but we’re doing our best to sort them out.”

The leader of Denbighshire Council was a little less generous in his response, although to be fair, an article in the Sun newspaper had really stoked his ire – “Town on the dole” the headline screamed (11 August) – claiming that the unemployment rate in parts of the town (population circa 25,000) was even higher than the figure quoted by the CSJ (closer to 80%, as the paper put it).

Councillor Hugh Evans OBE, who is cabinet member for regeneration as well as the leader of the council, was less than pleased to read what he regarded as an article that focused on an “outdated viewpoint”, although he conceded that the CSJ report itself had a point.

“The recent report by the CSJ has rightly identified that, as with other seaside towns, less economically active people have moved into parts of Rhyl seeking cheaper accommodation, and vulnerable groups have ended up living in the same neighbourhood putting a substantial strain on local services,” he said.

“There’s a saying that what we focus on we make real, and perhaps what needs to change most of all is the pervading negative mindset of the few – at a time when the very fabric of the town is seeing vast improvements. If we continue to frame Rhyl as a bad place to live, then it will be despite the best efforts of the people and organisations who are doing their utmost to look to a brighter future.

“The decline we have seen in many, many towns across the UK has happened over a long period of time and for many different reasons. There is no quick fix but we are confident that we are on track to revitalise our town and we are already seeing the green shoots of progress.”

Seaside resorts, it seems, are being castigated for social problems they share in common with inland towns and cities; urban areas that are generally no more or less successful at dealing with such issues than their coastal counterparts, unless ‘dumping’ your social problems by the seaside counts as a successful strategy. In that sense, perhaps the seaside makes for a convenient distraction.

As for the bods from the CSJ, presumably, they aren’t planning any trips to the seaside anytime soon, but just in case – the seagulls have been primed and put on alert.


This article was first published as the cover story for the September 2013 print edition of Housing magazine and was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 18 March 2014

Procurement: getting a good deal for housing

The value of everything

Over the years, it’s become an accepted truth that social landlords are pretty savvy at harnessing their buying power to lever in added benefits for the communities where they operate, but are they as clued up as they like to think? 

By Mark Cantrell

From Housing magazine, June 2013

SOCIAL landlords have long prided themselves on standing for more than ‘mere’ bricks and mortar, with social value being at the heart of their operations, but new legislation now means that individual housing organisations need to be sure it isn’t just talk.

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 places a duty on public bodies to consider social value before embarking on the procurement process – and that includes housing associations. The emphasis is placed on considering the economic, environmental and social benefits at the pre-procurement stage.

That’s something that social landlords are considered to be good at, but as Mark Cook, partner at Anthony Collins Solicitors, has pointed out, that prowess is not uniform across the sector, so individual housing providers can’t afford to rest on the industry’s overall reputation, but must build up their own capacity in this area.

“Some housing associations are taking it very seriously, and others don’t even know about it,” said Cook. “It hasn’t come across their radar, but quite a lot of different organisations have been holding workshops. We as a law firm have spoken to a number of workshops involving people in procurement, particularly at the repairs and maintenance level, but I am not convinced that the senior hierarchy – the chief executives and directors – necessarily have become familiar with the implications for the whole organisation.”

The Social Value Act began life as a private members’ bill, introduced to Parliament by the Conservative MP for Warwick & Leamington Spa, Chris White. It received royal assent in March 2012 and became live in January this year [2013].

The aim is to “support community groups, voluntary organisations and social enterprises to win more public sector contracts and to change commissioning structures so that a wider definition of value rather than just financial cost was considered.”

In a guidance note on the new Act, published in December last year, the Cabinet Office said: “In these tight economic times it is particularly important that maximum value in public spending is achieved. However, currently some commissioners miss opportunities to secure both the best price and meet the wider social, economic and environmental needs of the community. Commissioners and procurers should be taking a value for money approach – not lowest cost – to assessing contracts and the Act complements that approach.”

The Act doesn’t single out housing associations, of course; local authorities, government departments, the NHS, PCTs, fire and rescue services, and so on, all fall under the legislation’s remit. In theory, given the housing sector’s long-standing involvement in multi-agency partnerships, it is a powerful advocate for social value among these bodies. So it does rather put the onus on the sector to show the way; there’s a lot at stake, after all.

“Billions of pounds are spent in local government and this Act now clarifies that purchasing decisions will not be based solely on cost,” said John Skivington, director at procurement consortium LHC. “It will change the way of working to actively encourage the delivery of added-value benefits such as training and employment opportunities for local people.

“However, the authority still needs to ensure that it focuses on product and service delivery, and proportionality needs to be a key focus. By including social, economic and environmental considerations in tenders, the importance of other evaluation criteria shouldn’t be diluted and the correct balance must be struck.

“It is a challenge for the authority as ultimately the ‘social factor’ doesn’t show up on an already strained balance sheet, and many will need advice to ensure that they can incorporate this alongside efficiency, value, product and service delivery quality, which all remain vital elements of the tendering process.”

For Cook, it’s about organisations changing the way they think; meeting a community’s needs – its tenants’ needs – means that a social landlord needs to be “much more methodical and much more intentional” in the way it designs and delivers it services. It means “re-engineering their services” so that they don’t simply deliver their immediate function, but serve to help deliver considered added benefits that address local need – in a way that isn’t “tokenistic” or a “bit of added value you bolt on”.

“They can be organisations that help catalyse the thought process elsewhere,” said Cook. “Housing associations and local authorities are better at talking about their relationship to place, whereas central government departments really don’t understand their relationship to the place they serve – and that’s going to be the big test here.”

The Social Value Act makes no changes to procurement law, though the knock-on effects will undoubtedly impact the process and outcomes, but change is nothing new. The procurement function has evolved considerably over the last 30 years or so, from simply buying materials at the cheapest price, to today’s more strategically focused approach, with an awareness of the added-value aspects that have come to be enshrined in the Social Value Act.

“There’s a stronger emphasis on sustainable procurement when there’s a good procurement strategy. There’s an emphasis on the amount of impact on the local economy,” said Andrew Carlin, commercial director with Procurement for Housing (PfH). “In a traditional sense, there’s not that broader understanding of its function; we’re just buying things today for what we need tomorrow.”

The evolution from what you might call the ‘institutional consumer’ to the modern procurement professional is currently the focus of a research project commissioned by PfH; not the history of it, but the ongoing development, the next steps as it were. To that end, it is looking to explore just how sophisticated the sector’s approach to procurement has really become.

“Our first [aim] is to test to what degree social landlords are taking on the culture of commercialisation, and we’re trying to ascertain whether or not some myth-busting needs to be done,” said Carlin. “I think when people mention that term they immediately think of profits and shareholders – and that’s not what it means in the context of social housing.

“It’s about building that more commercial intelligence in the business, and unlocking a culture where everyone within that organisation becomes very cost-aware about every line of activity; whether that be about the physical property management, the maintenance, or whether it’s about some of the social value and social investment that landlords make in their local communities. When we’re considering that, we’re also bringing into consideration the role that procurement strategy and procurement people in organisations play in driving commercialisation.”

Carlin is leading on the research with Dr Jo Meehan of the University of Liverpool, which was commissioned to conduct the project, with assistance from Affinity Sutton. The research is exploring how procurement functions and people in social landlords are responding to the changing environment – the impact of welfare reform, the changing funding regime, the diversification of the sector – as well as assessing the implications of such changes.

The research aims to challenge the assumptions of traditional approaches and policy rhetoric, with an aim to help the sector create the next generation of procurement innovation. The project grew out of a survey PfH conducted of its members last year. The results were intriguing and prompted further inquiry; hence the research project with the university.

“The survey revealed some very interesting things,” said Carlin. “The first thing was that social landlords only had 42% of staff that were actually qualified procurement professionals. Only a third of organisations in the sector thought they were sufficiently resourced from a procurement perspective. Only 14% thought they had total spend ability, where they get an understanding of where the money was going and whether that was contract compliant; 80% didn’t think that the procurement team would increase in size, but 70% felt the procurement function was becoming more important in their organisation.

“So that, really, triggered us to start to delve a little deeper and think about where procurement is going as commercial pressures are coming the landlords’ way.”

The research programme remains ongoing, so findings are hardly definitive at the moment. The organisation will be hosting a discussion of its provisional findings at the PfH Live event at the CIH Conference and Exhibition in June, with the full report to be published in September.

“It’s fairly early stages, but it’s telling us that procurement definitely needs to mature more within the sector,” said Carlin. “I think we’ve got the evidence there’s been a lot more collaboration on procurement, but we’re still tethered to process probably a little too much more than we are tethered to the outcome.

“The other key thing is that there are differentiating positions based on organisational size, so as you’d expect, the larger organisations have got more commitment to procurement as a function in terms of resource and head count. Some of the smaller organisations still have procurement managed by functional heads and don’t have any procurement specialism. So, it’s about how we go about transferring the skills and knowledge into those organisations to build their procurement capacity.”

The sector as a whole might be a savvy spender, then, but there’s clearly a lot of scope to get smarter. But that’s evolution – it never ends.

This feature first appeared in the June 2013 print edition of Housing magazine and subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 14 February 2014