Housing sector leaders are under increasing pressure to do more, while the corresponding resource pool available shows somewhat less flexibility towards the upside. Demand for homes is at unprecedented levels and just seven months into the new government’s tenure, its 1.5 million new homes pledge is leading to many raised eyebrows.
A toxic combination of systemic underinvestment in UK social housing and then a race to the bottom to catch up has proved fertile ground for a series of wholly avoidable and well-documented tragedies. Grenfell Tower and two-year old Awaab Ishak loom painfully large over the sector.
While Awaab’s Law and Grenfell are the most tragic catalysts for change, they hit a sector that’s not universally known for the rapid adoption of transformational change. The typology, age and quality of social housing assets varies markedly across the UK, and leaders face extremely tough choices around allocating scarce resources, balancing the push and pull factors of demand and remediation. Resident safety must be the number one priority for housing providers, and high-profile critical failings, alongside the associated media headlines, focus attention on decisions and prioritisation. But how this plays out culturally within organisations is a key factor in successful implementation.
The 24/7 news agenda and the dominance of citizen journalism through social media platforms brings increasing scrutiny and accountability – and this is a positive development that gives voice to those so often ignored in the past. But it’s the sectors response that really matters, and this is something that Dame Judith Hackitt has spoken at great lengths about since her review of building regulations and fire safety in 2018.
It’s Hackitt’s analysis of response to fire safety, which she discussed at a recent Harmony Fire event, that has led me to summarise her findings into the three animal types alluded to at the head of this article. The hamster characterises those organisations or leaders that are busy getting nowhere fast. Adopting a blind compliance approach to regulations, progress is often assessed by the number of actions ticked off the Fire Risk Assessment (FRA) list – often with a debatable approach to prioritisation. For this group, it’s important to note that meeting minimum legal standards is not the same as prioritising resident safety.
The ostriches could be observed to be burying their collective heads in the sand and waiting. New legislation weighs heavily here and the perception of the challenge leads to a paralysis in the delivery of a meaningful response. Ostriches may go through the motions of conformity, but there is often a skills or cultural gap preventing decisive action.
Eagles represent our exemplar typology – making pragmatic decisions on resident safety that make a tangible difference. Recognising how easy it is to become bogged down in following a blind compliance pathway, eagles wisely take a holistic view of the challenge and work backwards from the overarching goal to keep residents safe. Decisions are prioritised on a hierarchy of risk and this process is accurately recorded as a golden thread of compliance. A low-rise care home setting can have a similar or greater risk profile than a multi-storey tenant block because eagles take a resident-centric approach to risk categorisation.
It’s of course a blunt analogy, but Hackitt is passionately impatient with both the speed and application of change across the sector – especially when she knows that this genuinely poses a risk to people’s lives. As housing leaders juggle an increasing workload and remit, the highly dynamic regulatory safety environment, that at times seems to work against itself, is impacting focus and application.
In this context, hamsters may feel at least they’re doing something to hold back the tide of FRA infringements, while ostriches are waiting for more clarity before they commit their limited resources. But it’s the eagles that we really need to focus on and nurture, to hold them up as exemplars and encourage them to collaborate and share their knowledge, approach, mistakes and wins to benefit the entire sector and create many more eagles.
Hackitt’s frustrations are understandable with an overall response to resident safety that, seven and a half years after the single largest loss of life in the UK since the Second World War, she sees as inadequate and slow. This isn’t a quick fix, but it can and should be guided by real expertise, pragmatism and a resident-centric approach to risk prioritisation. So my advice, take your head out of the sand, step off the hamster wheel and go find and speak with an eagle – it may just be one of the most important conversations you have this year.
A version of this article was published in Housing Executive
