Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ON
In this report
David Done of RHP on innovative cultures
–––––
Darrin Gamble of Bromford
on neighbourhood coaching
––––– OFF
5 innovations that will transform housing
THE FUTURE
OF HOUSING
CONTENTS.
Welcome 3
The Opportunity: Plugging Social Housing In To A Brighter Future 4
The Catalyst: Future Housing Lab 6
Q&A: David Done, Chief Executive, RHP 13
The Future Housing Lab approach to social housing & assisted living 32
Q&A: Fuad Mahamed, ACH 17
Switch up the future of homes and communities 21
Q&A: Darrin Gamble, Bromford 27
Sparking people-centred innovation: The Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensing 33
Our story 36
That’s why we’ve created this special report. We wanted to showcase the amazing work
being done by housing associations like RHP, who put innovation first and foremost. Like
Bromford, who are investing in creating neighbourhoods, not just houses. Like ACH, who
have become experts in getting their tenants, including resettled refugees, into real
careers. And most of all, to show how delivering impact in the right way can and will
make social landlords more sustainable.
We are proud to act as Future Housing Lab’s lead partner, and would love to talk to you
about how we could help your business.
State of play:
Today, over 1 million families are currently looking for a place to live.
This is just one of the many pressures and problems facing the social
housing sector:
At the same time, the world is changing. Growing social need, shrinking public spend and
the development of alternative institutional infrastructures for driving impact , e.g. impact
investing and social impact bonds, will redesign the architecture of social change.
This creates a fresh opportunity for housing associations to re-align their culture and
organisation from a commercial real-estate management approach to a societal impact,
profit-for-purpose approach – and thus reconnect with their original mission. We aim
to support this transformation, working alongside other innovators (because no-one is
smarter than everyone) and directly with housing associations to deliver change at pace.
• Create new ideas, build partnerships, develop strategies and build the team capability
to deliver them.
• Engage in consultation, curation and implementation to explore future ideas, scenarios
and new use cases.
• Develop technology solutions that bridge the information and technology gap between
people and places, creating better user experiences and increased operational efficiency
• Connect people to place – through information, accessibility, inclusion, safeguarding and culture.
Technology Outcomes
• Hardware, software and cloud-based • Deliver social and commercial impact
partners • Make operational cost savings
• IOT, AI, health tech and connected devices • Utilise design thinking principles
• Ever-growing need for extended • Measure and adapt
healthcare in the home, including
monitoring.
This leaves you with a business that is focused and future-fit, ready to solve the big
problems in housing.
How can today’s social housing providers make sense of the opportunities and challenges
of the present, and build the innovative cultures of the future?
That’s where Future Housing Lab comes in. We help you to:
Future House Lab puts people first. Our human-centred approach allows us to work with a
range of tech, software, health tech and hardware providers to build customised solutions
around the needs of our clients and their customers. For us, it’s not about creating
expensive, speculative tech design concepts, but about doing more for less and creating
practical solutions to problems faced today. Less “what if?” and more “what now?”
By putting people at the centre of innovation and tech strategy, housing associations
can seize opportunities to increase social impact while making their businesses more
commercially sustainable.
This powers growth and creates dynamic cultures of curiosity, innovation and problem
solving.
How RHP has built an innovative culture that leads the social housing sector
Providing safe and sustainable housing for all is one of the world’s biggest challenges.
To achieve this goal, housing providers of all kinds need to tap into innovation and
fresh thinking.
This is especially true in the social housing sector, made up of companies with social missions
who are under increasing pressure to do more with less. By embracing new technologies
and rethinking old ways of working, future-focused social landlords are transforming their
commercial capabilities and thus enhancing their ability to deliver social good.
RHP is one such organisation. Whether it’s prototyping modular homes or pioneering an
all-digital service, RHP’s 256 employees are leading the way in creating innovative solutions
to housing challenges. That’s why the social landlord, which manages over 10,000 homes in
London, regularly tops innovation rankings within the housing association sector.
Purpose spoke to chief executive David Done about how RHP has managed to build and
maintain a culture of innovation, and how the housing association is tackling the 21st
century’s most critical housing challenges.
The challenge for housing, and indeed for any business, is to deliver higher and higher
quality services while reducing costs. That requires innovation. Innovation allows us to
deliver a more efficient, value-for-money service for customers, and it allows us to release
savings and resources to build more homes.
There is a huge shortage of housing for people in this country, including young people
who now have no chance to get on the housing ladder. As a sector, we have to stay super-
innovative to respond. That includes changing our mindset about what people want and
need from a home.
It’s vitally important that people at all levels of the organisation can speak openly about
the challenges we face and what we’re trying to achieve. So we create lots of opportunities
for people to talk, and great ideas come out of that.
Crucially, we back up promising new ideas with real resources. We put real budgets behind
them, give our people a proper amount of time to invest in developing them, as well as
providing them with coaching and support to take the ideas forward.
We take a balanced and sensible approach. While we are involved in a lot of amazing
creativity and innovation, our starting point is always to make sure that we do the simple
things really well. We are very careful about risk - we’re not gung-ho about doing things
and not worrying about the consequences. We’re constantly trying things out, taking
measured risks.
That said, we’ve fostered a culture where it’s OK to fail. It’s understood that not every
innovation will work.
Q. In your view, should housing associations be seeking more inspiration from outside
of the sector?
Definitely. We are constantly coming across all kinds of interesting companies doing work
around reimagining housing, and we want to position ourselves to partner with them. Tech
companies are doing extraordinary things to make homes better places to live and easier
places to manage. Take modular housing: you can build components in a factory, deliver
The way people live We are tapping into this by deliberately recruiting
people from a range of different sectors outside
is changing, and their
of housing, including tech. This has really
housing needs are impacted our culture and our way of thinking, to
changing along with the point where it’s become a defining feature.
that. This means that People from these sectors are used to working
the range of houses creatively – in fact, they expect it.
we need to provide
is becoming more We’ve also taken part in a housing startup
diverse all of the time. incubator, which gave startups a chance to
work closely with us, get access to our data, and
develop projects. We worked with seven different
startups, all of which were based in our office for
several months. This meant that our employees
got to mix with people who have a totally
different way of thinking.
Perhaps our main challenge is attract and retain the best people. We are trying to find
people who want to change the world in big and small ways, but those are the same people
that all leading companies want! So we have to position ourselves as one of the best
employers in the UK, even though housing has not always been seen as the most attractive
place to work, despite the increasing creativity in the sector.
Q. Which changes and trends require the most innovation on the part of social landlords?
The way people live is changing, and their housing needs are changing along with that.
This means that the range of houses we need to provide is becoming more diverse all of
the time. That’s what’s great about modular tech: it allows us to build more cheaply and
quickly, but also more flexibly.
We are experimenting with much smaller homes for single young people, many of whom
are currently living in shared houses or bedsits. Take our LaunchPod house, designed for
single young people in West London. That’s a really good example of how we are rethinking
what a home looks like, in order to serve an emerging market’s needs. This is already a
massive trend all over the world, not just in the UK.
That’s why we became the first housing association to deliver a fully digital housing service.
75% of our customer service business is now done online, compared to a standing start 7
years ago. It’s a massive shift, and people were unsure if this was a right way to go, including
some customers. But we realised that if we didn’t invest in it now, it will likely create
challenges in the future. We are now also looking at applications for Alexa-type voice control.
Absolutely. Technology is changing everything, and can change the way we deliver housing
services in ways we never would have thought of five or ten years ago.
We basically innovate in two main ways: we deliver the traditional housing model digitally,
and then we try to imagine and design ahead of the future. That means both thinking about
how you build the house in the first place, i.e. modular housing, and then thinking about
what you put in those homes to make them brilliant places to live. You want them to be a
real joy to live in, as well as being easy to manage, because that frees up more resources to
build more houses.
For example, we are speaking to companies about new battery tech that allows residents
to store energy for use at peak times and drive down fuel bills. There are also devices that
can help to monitor the activity of vulnerable people, and let loved ones know that they are
OK. And finally, there is now tech that allows us to predict when appliances and things in
homes break down, which both saves us money by reducing service costs and improves life
for the customer.
Housing is healthcare
It’s a common refrain among leaders working on public health issues, ranging from
substance abuse, ageism, community fracture, education inequality, loneliness
and safeguarding to obesity and food insecurity.
In fact, we believe that it’s impossible to separate the future of social housing from
the wider challenges around how our society will care for emerging healthcare needs.
And that’s especially true when it comes to the needs of our ageing population.
The good news is that forward-thinking housing associations are well placed to
tackle these problems and deliver more social impact in the process.
In the UK alone, there are now over 15.3 million people aged 60 and above – a figure that
is expected to double by 2030. By 2020, elderly people will outnumber children for the
first time in history.
What’s more, the elderly are staying at home longer. Nine of every 10 older adults
tell us they plan to stay in their current homes until someone drags them out.
At the same time, health and social care models are changing in response to three
major trends:
• Health needs are shifting globally towards “lifestyle disease”. In the future, healthcare
will be less about recovery from acute illness and more about prevention and
rejuvenation: a shift from reactive to pro-active care.
• Poor mental wellbeing and isolation are on the increase – and people living in low
quality housing also suffer disproportionately poor health outcomes.
• Social care infrastructure is under pressure, with a £25 billion funding gap facing
adult social care in 2019/20.
Put simply, more elderly people and earlier diagnosis of health conditions is creating an
ever-growing need for healthcare outside the home. However, with healthcare budgets
being slashed across Europe, there is not enough space for patients to spend time in hospital.
The question is then: how can we use technology to provide the same healthcare within
the home?
People need community, activity and mobility as key components for a higher quality
of life. The research shows staying in your own home provides safety, mental health
benefits and helps community integration.
Elderly don’t want to feel excluded. They want to enjoy their life in their home,
to feel safe, and to have control over it.
For this very reason, any tech-enabled assisted living solution must strike a balance
between monitoring for safety and respecting privacy, and be built on a foundation
of trust and communication.
There are a number of ways that social landlords can weave in light-touch, unobtrusive
smart sensors that will support tenants’ healthcare needs:
• Presence detection sensors: A device that monitors movement e.g. has someone
who usually sits in the living room, moved into that room? If not, a family member
or neighbour could be alerted to check that they are okay.
• Door sensors: If a patient with Alzheimer’s or dementia doesn’t usually leave the house
on their own, you can use a door sensor to monitor whether the door has been opened
(and closed). This sensor would also work as a window sensor to check if it is open or
closed and used as an extra layer of security in the home.
• Vibration sensors: How often is someone moving? Has an individual got out of bed
in a morning or do they have a problem and need some assistance?
• Temperature and humidity sensors: As people get older, they often become creatures
of habit e.g. having a coffee at 8am every morning. By adding a humidity sensor near
the kettle, you can monitor whether the kettle has been used and therefore make an
assumption that the individual has had their usual cup of coffee.
• Water leak sensors: These can alert you if a bath has overflowed.
• “Current clamps”: These allow you to check which appliances are being used.
This builds a culture of innovation and high performance that lets you deliver smarter
and better.
ACH is not your typical housing association, but it’s one from which other
social landlords can certainly learn a lot.
The story starts in 2008, when a young engineering graduate, Fuad Mahamed, a refugee
himself, saw an opportunity to use his past experiences to offer appropriate help and
support to newly arrived refugees. ACH was born: a social enterprise that specialises in
integrating refugees through accommodation, support and community-based training.
Since then, unprecedented political instability and conflict has resulted in the biggest
movement of people across the globe since World War 2. There are now an estimated
68.5 million displaced people globally, and we are facing the most serious refugee
crisis for 20 years.
Purpose caught up with Fuad to find out what other housing associations can learn
about upskilling and social integration from ACH’s experience.
Q. ACH has now been helping refugees for 10 years. How has your mission and business
developed in that time?
The past ten years have seen a marked change in the work that we do. We’ve evolved
from a small-scale housing provider, located in inner city Bristol, to a leading provider
of resettlement and integration services for refugee and newly arrived communities
in the UK.
We specialise in helping refugees enter the labour market and integrate with society,
by designing various programmes and training opportunities to suit business needs. For
example, we are currently working in partnership with Starbucks to run bespoke courses
that will lead to barista jobs for refugees in Starbucks outlets in Birmingham and Bristol.
This came about following their global pledge to hire 10,000 refugees by 2022, which led
to them identifying four partner organisations to work with in the UK. Refugees are looking
for a chance to rebuild their lives and have a fresh start in the face of extraordinarily
difficult circumstances, and Starbucks believe their talent, experience and resilience will
enrich the communities they serve around the world.
Q. It’s interesting that your services combine housing and jobs. Why is that important?
Providing a roof over somebody’s head is a vital first step in their journey away from
homelessness into independent living. Getting sustainable employment is the final step
on that journey. To achieve this we provide safe, secure and comfortable housing combined
with culturally sensitive support and employability skills training.
Our approach focuses on building individuals’ resilience in the labour market, upskilling and
supporting refugees into sustainable, higher level employment in order to develop their
independence and ease their integration into UK life.
This means working directly with employers. Every year 2500 people across three cities
come to us to access the skills and careers they need, and employers like Starbucks come
to us to recruit work-ready talent.
Q. Are there special challenges in terms of cultural sensitivity when working with refugees?
Yes, certainly. A number of staff and board members are first or second-generation
refugees themselves, and staff members speak over 30 languages between them, enabling
us to provide services in multiple languages. This diversity and our understanding of local
communities enables us to put the needs of our BAME tenants and learners at the centre
of our work, and tailor our services accordingly.
Q. Do you think it makes sense for other housing associations to invest in improving
their tenants’ employability?
Absolutely. Not only is it financially prudent for them to do so, but as housing associations
we have a duty to our tenants to support and enable them to lead quality lives. Helping
them progress in work or education is key to this.
Q. You’ve grown to over 60 staff now. How do you keep them aligned to your mission,
and sensitive to your customers’ needs?
At the beginning, we faced challenges around tenants being able to sustain jobs, around
repeat homelessness, and around the lack of a move-on strategy. We found that we were
good at providing supportive accommodation, including mental health support, and at
securing entry-level jobs for our tenants. The problem was simply that this isn’t enough.
We want to build careers, not just fill jobs.
Three quarters of people who take up entry-level jobs remain at that level. We believe that
the communities we serve deserve access to quality jobs. So, over the next ten years, we
will be working with 25,000 more individuals, not simply helping them into entry-level
jobs, but aiming for progression to median-salary positions.
Q. What are the main lessons other housing associations could learn from your
decade of experience?
Well we are certainly happy to work with other housing associations to devise programmes
that will best support and integrate socially-excluded tenants, including refugees.
It’s important for housing associations to recognise that an individually tailored approach
works best in getting the socially-excluded into jobs — that’s why we run bespoke pre-
employment training and selection programmes, offer vocation-specific accredited
training and support pre-selection internships.
More widely, I think that housing associations have a role to play in changing perceptions
of social housing tenants, just as we challenged community and employer misconceptions
about refugees through the #rethinkingrefugee campaign.
These pioneers are rethinking how and where we live, and proving
that bricks and mortar can be infused with vision, imagination and
innovation.
Here are five trends and projects giving us hope that businesses will
play their part in cracking the global challenge of decent housing for all.
What if designing and building a new home could be as simple as tinkering on your laptop
and then pressing “print”? Even better, what if a new home cost less than a new car?
Non-profit New Story has taken us one step closer to making this dream a reality.
Frustrated by slow progress in its mission of delivering decent housing in the developing
world, it searched for an exponential solution. It partnered with construction technology
firm ICON to create a world first: a home that can be 3D printed in just 24 hours at the cost
of $4000.
The 350 square foot prototype was unveiled in Austin, Texas this year,
becoming the first 3D printed house in the US to meet local housing
regulations. New Story now plans to build the first community of 3D
printed homes in El Salvador in 2019. Communities are able to use
ICON’s software to customise their homes to meet specific needs.
Communities
This proves once again that tech innovation doesn’t have to start are able to
with the elite and then trickle down. As WIRED put it: “If New Story use ICON’s
succeeds, the first people to live in a 3D-printed town won’t be the software to
technologists or the futurists of Silicon Valley. They’ll be people in the customise
world’s poorest regions, who most need a roof over their heads”. their homes
New Story’s printed homes might not yet be suitable for UK
to meet
housing. But the non-profit recognised that we need a quantum
specific
leap in affordability, speed, and quality to reach families in need needs.
exponentially faster. With more innovation and risk-taking, we hope
that our own house builders will be able to get to the point where
3D printing can produce homes that suit UK lifestyles and needs.
This gives social landlords a huge opportunity to use IoT to get closer to the heartbeat
of the houses they provide and the people they serve.
Flagship Group, for example, has partnered with a number of local firms in Ipswich to
create a pilot IoT scheme that featured an innovative thermostat designed with social
landlords in mind. Already, its humidity sensors have identified flats with abnormal
moisture levels, allowing Flagship to dispatch surveyors and tackle damp and mould
problems before they arise.
To get tenants on board, the IoT element was bundled with more traditional digital
services such as free wifi, smart locks and open-access CCTV of communal areas. This had
the added benefit of enhancing security, increasing the use of digital customer service
channels from 15% to 70% and reducing arrears by making it easier for tenants to access
housing benefit online.
Whether it’s dealing with noise and anti-social behaviour complaints more quickly,
or alerting the relatives or carers of elderly or vulnerable tenants when their routines
unexpectedly change, the internet of things can and should be as much about tenants
as it is about buildings.
It’s a pity, then, that less than 50% of housing associations rate IoT as important to their
overall strategies, and only 6% have a clear IoT strategy in place. It’s easy to get lost in
the hype of smart cities and seemingly endless possibilities of IoT, but it’s ultimately
about finding an innovation strategy that will get you closer to customers and what
they want and need.
The end result is an uplift in team morale, more trusting relationships and a robust platform
for innovation.
Best of all, modular homes can create local jobs. That’s because they don’t rely on
highly-skilled labour — which is in short supply — and can instead be built by local
people with no prior construction experience.
What do you do with more people and less space? Learn to share better.
Co-living sees neighbours share facilities like living rooms, kitchens and workspaces
under one roof, in order to cut the cost of living and enjoy more opportunities to socialise
with others. It’s an eye-catching trend, but so far only a brave few have embraced
full-time co-living as a lifestyle.
With this in mind, Copenhagen innovation lab SPACE10 and New York design studio Anton
& Irene created a playful project to pose the question: what would you be willing to share?
Over 7000 people took part in the project by filling out an online application form for a
hypothetical co-living space opening in 2030, indicating whether they would be willing
to share kitchens, workspaces, smart devices, childcare and self-driving cars.
The results have been shared on an open-source, anonymous basis, so that anyone
engaged in creating the future of co-living can dream and design better.
This invigorates the heart of your organisation by allowing you to lead robustly and
authentically.
Broadly speaking, achieving social sustainability is about putting the right conditions in
place to actively support people in creating healthy, liveable and resilient communities,
today and tomorrow. It’s what happens when houses become homes, streets become
neighbourhoods, and housing developments become communities.
Bromford is one of several housing associations that are taking social sustainability
seriously. It’s developed a pioneering approach to “neighbourhood coaching” that
helps a diverse range of customers to achieve their goals while also enhancing the
community as a whole.
Each “deal” is tailored to the individual’s own skills, talents, interests and aspirations.
They may need help getting back into employment, advice on home ownership, help with
managing money better or simply coaching on how to develop a particular skill or access a
specific service. The neighbourhood coach acts as the customer’s first point of contact for
accessing a range of services, and is responsible for getting to know their customers and
building a strong relationship with them.
In this way, the home that Bromford provides becomes a springboard for helping people
achieve what they want out of life.
There are three key innovations embedded in this approach, all of which redefine
and reimagine the traditional relationship between social landlord and tenant.
First, the approach seeks to shift the emphasis to the customer’s strengths and potential,
rather than defining their relationship with Bromford solely in terms of need and weakness.
The neighbourhood coaches are not there to dip in and out “fixing” problems: their role
is to focus on the positives in people, build trusting long-term relationships and equip
people for success. This requires effort from both sides, unlike a typical service provision
relationship.
Second, the neighbourhood coach is more than simply a customer service manager
who seeks to ensure that customers are happily using Bromford’s own services. Rather,
the coach seeks to connect customers to all local services and assets that might help
them thrive and grow: for example, making better use of parks, allotments, cycle paths,
community centres, gardening clubs or toddler groups, etc.
It’s up to the neighbourhood coach to identify these opportunities and make these
connections, which is what makes the role and programme so innovative.
At Purpose, we were intrigued to learn more about what it takes to get a programme
like this off the ground. We spoke to Darrin Gamble, localities leader at Bromford, about
how the housing association has developed and adapted this innovative approach to
neighbourhood social sustainability.
It started seven years ago as a direct result of us taking a fresh look at what we were about
as an organisation: what is our purpose, what are we in business to achieve? From that
came our purpose of “inspiring our customers to be their best”.
This was set against a backdrop of radical change in the country, with austerity and welfare
reform high on the agenda. We knew that our customers faced a much more challenging
future, and we wanted to play our part in helping them prepare for it. At the same time, we
were thinking about the 30,000 homes we own, and the billions of pounds we had invested
in them — was there a way to get more out of that investment, rather than just moving
people into homes and managing them afterwards?
That’s where the Bromford Deal came from. We wanted to create a different type of
relationship with our customers. Often, the journey into social housing is about focusing on
need, and what you can’t do. We wanted to tip that on its head. This meant reframing the
relationship to focus on skills and aspirations, while securing a promise from the customer
to make it a proper relationship between the two of us.
Q. How have you developed and innovated the project over time?
The first two or three years of the original Bromford Deal project really gave us a
restlessness to do things even better. We dreamt some new dreams and brought some new
thinking in about how to further reframe our relationship with customers. On the back
of that, we started a further two-year experiment to test a whole new way of delivering
services, centred around coaching and relationships.
We ran a research project alongside this to give it statistical validity, and to learn quickly
where things weren’t working. For example, we initially had different colleagues coaching
our customers in various different areas of their lives. But we quickly learned that people
don’t like telling the same story to three or four people. So we tried investing more training
resources into “multi-skilled coaches”, which became the genesis of the “neighbourhood
coach” concept.
Based on this experience, we completely remodelled our service delivery and launched the
neighbourhood coaching programme in August 2016. We now have 153 coaches, with the
last one brought on board a couple of months ago. They deal with customers directly and
provide help and support across the board, except for a few very specialist services.
Culturally, it lit the touchpaper for us as an organisation. It really feels that there is
a complete connection between the neighbourhood coach programme and our core
purpose of inspiring customers to be their best.
Of the 153 coaches, 90 are existing colleagues who have transitioned, while 63 are new
colleagues. The energy that came with the influx of new people, and the new challenges
taken on by those swapping over — it was incredible to watch. There was a real resurgence
in our belief in people and our desire to get better outcomes. And not just among those
153 coaches: it has affected the whole organisation.
That said, it was a big cultural change. A lot of people join the social housing sector because
they want to help people — and for many, that means doing things for people. We wanted
to move them away from that, and towards a situation where we are helping customers do
things for themselves. Moving from being a ‘rescuer’ to being an ‘enabler’ or ‘coach’ was a
big, big change for some of our colleagues.
Q. How did you find the right people to fill the neighbourhood coach role?
We really recruited for attitude. This meant that we could bring in people from all kinds
of different backgrounds: police officers, teachers, ex-DWP staff. All of them brought
different skills and experiences that their fellow neighbourhood coaches could learn
from. It brought a lot of fresh energy into the organisation.
It wasn’t always easy. We learned early on that some of the new coaches were less
comfortable with having more challenging conversations with customers, around things
like rent arrears or anti-social behaviour. These conversations can’t be avoided. In our early
By the same token, a handful of our existing housing managers have made the decision to
move on. These tended to be the ones whose natural style did not fit easily with our desire
to move to a coaching approach to our services.
It’s already providing a big benefit for our customers. Over the last six months, 91% of
our customers have said that they get what they need from their neighbourhood coach.
We’ve also met face-to-face with 65% of our customers over the last 18 months —
and not just to update records, to properly get to know them.
Very few organisations would invest the time and energy in doing this. Housing management
is traditionally very reactive. You only get to know customers when they are in some
kind of trouble, be it rent arrears or antisocial behaviour. We wanted to get proactive
so that we can understand them more and have a more planned approach to what they
want to achieve.
Within the next 12 months, we will have met all 30,000-plus residents, and talked to
them about what they want to achieve and what we can do to help them. It’s a long-term
investment, but we learned from our pilot stage that we have to give our coaches the
time and capacity to build relationships.
Q. This isn’t something that you can impose from the top down. How do you get
buy-in and build trust?
Ultimately, it’s a one-to-one relationship and you have to go at the customer’s pace.
We’ve certainly had cases where residents would initially be anxious to get a knock on the
door from us, but by having a chat and getting to know them, a coach can start to build
trust. Part of it is scale. In the old model, we had housing managers each looking after 500
to 600 homes. At that scale, you can only really be reactive, not proactive. When we started
to pilot changes, we brought this down to 175 homes. This gave our coaches a lot more
capacity and time to develop relationships. You can make visits week after week, which
would have been impossible before.
Q. What’s the scale of the investment, and what do you hope to achieve?
We’ve made an additional investment of £3 million a year in the programme, and we expect
it to break even in five years’ time, with the financial outcomes ramping up along the way.
We expect rent arrears to decrease, with more customers being in credit on their rent
accounts. That’s good for us, and good for our customers.
So far, arrears have remained steady, against the expectation that external factors
like universal credit would cause them to rise. We’ve also seen an increase in the number
of customers in credit, a decrease in failed tenancies and a decrease in the number of
anti-social behaviour cases that we take to court.
Q. Couldn’t you just spend that money on building much-needed new homes?
Housing is very high on the political agenda at the moment, and with that always comes a
lot of pressure to focus on building new homes. We are doing that too, of course, with our
housebuilding programme increasing quite significantly through our five-year new homes
plan, but it all comes back to our core purpose.
We believe in people. We are not just a housing association; we are also a people
association. So we have to get the right balance between investing in new homes,
and investing in the people who will live in those homes.
The world is getting smarter. It’s cheaper and easier than ever to use
sensors, cloud computing and big data to build a rich and detailed picture of
how our cities and towns live, move and breathe. Harness this information in
the right way, and we can fix problems and drive behaviour change at scale.
But how can you make sure that the tech doesn’t get in the way of the human?
It’s a real problem. A 2015 report from UK innovation charity NESTA found that
“smart city” solutions often fail to address the issues that people really care
about. Technologists and futurists can easily slip into focusing more on the shiny
new gadget than on the behaviour, values and desires of real-life, awkward,
unpredictable human beings.
The “Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensing” aims to fix this. It puts people and
communities at the heart of innovation, in order to make sure that new
technologies address the needs and priorities of those who will use them.
It’s a mundane issue that is unlikely to get Silicon Valley pulses racing, but it’s also an issue
that poses real health risks to families, with low-income households particularly at risk.
If local people take it seriously, it deserves an innovative response.
Co-designing solutions
With the problem clear in everyone’s sights, the next stage was inviting the community
to roll their sleeves up and get stuck into participatory design workshops, maker sessions
and “hack days” in order to find a solution that everyone could get behind.
These fun, plastic “Frogboxes” contained a temperature and humidity sensor connected
to a basic computer, which collects and saves data every five minutes. Residents who
volunteered to invite the frogs into their homes for a trial period were also given “lily
pad” diaries to help them keep track of everyday activities such as showering or cooking.
Combined with the sensor data, these personal records helped people to better understand
and interpret the data collected and potentially take steps to manage damp conditions.
Subsequent workshops saw local families tinker with and adapt the Frogboxes using
electronics, further increasing engagement with the Damp Busters project.
At the same time, a volunteer team of community Damp-Busters was trained in diagnosing
and tackling damp, complementing the data-driven insights with on-the-ground action.
Experiences and learning from the Damp Busters pilot have enabled KWMC to apply
the Bristol Approach in other projects, such as an air quality programme as part of the
REPLICATE Project in Bristol.
“The success of The Bristol Approach is that it asks, ‘what kind of tech do people need
to reach their goals?’, rather than seeing the creation of new technologies as the main
goal in itself,” says KWMC’s Rachel Clarke.
How much more fun could we have if we used our skills to help businesses and brands
become a force for good?
It was an irresistible thought. Sure enough, we took the leap and decided to put purpose
at the heart of our company. This meant picking up the phone and kissing goodbye to
70% of our turnover (right at the start of a global recession!), transforming our business
model and taking a big leap into the dark.
Well, it was never going to be easy. But was it worth it? You bet.
Our hunch was right: the world has woken up to the massive business opportunity
that lies in tackling our biggest challenges.
Ten years on, and we are part of a global movement of creative and inspired business
leaders on a mission to solve big problems, make money, and have fun. We work with an
amazing band of passionate and talented associates, and wake up every day excited to
help businesses make more good things happen.
That’s why we set up Future Housing Lab, and why we are proud to serve as its lead partner.