2011 was a good year because...

• We delivered another year of our Decent Homes programme on time and in budget. Having got one of the highest allocations of money from the Government, we are now tackling some of the city's biggest housing problems - including Wednesfield tower blocks. And it has an added benefit: our work has trained more than l20 apprentices with National Skills Academy for Construction saying that we have achieved more employment and training outcomes than the Olympics. Have a look at some pictures of our wonderful apprentices on facebook.
• We decided to make our staff as much of a priority as our tenants. Major new projects were delegated to managers to lead cross service groups to tackle emerging issues with a joined up approach. We applied to be a Sunday Times Top 100 company and gave decision-making on reward and recognition to our staff. I walked the job with some 200 staff because "from behind a desk is a dangerous place to view the world" (John le Carre). I learnt loads.
• We heard about new government policy to reduce benefits and to encourage people into smaller accommodation. We started informing tenants many of whom reacted with fear and apprehension, and not a little anger. We were pleased when the Council said it would not be using flexible tenancies which could lead to reassessments every few years. We agree better use needs to be made of the housing stock so we started a system of assisted exchanges - helping the overcrowded swap with the under occupying, with amazingly good results.   
• We represented all ALMOs with senior politicians and housing experts when our chair Sue Roberts was elected the chair of the National Federation of ALMOs, feeling proud to showcase the ALMO movement from around the country. We also basked in Sue's glory when she collected her MBE for services to social housing from the Queen in the summer.
• We took an appropriate and proportionate approach to Wolverhampton tenants involved in this summer's disturbances which primarily resulted in tough warnings.
• We became more confident in the detailed information we hold about the housing stock...so we can help the Council and tenants make decisions about how to use the self financed housing revenue account. We also improved our data on health and safety particularly asbestos and confirmed through audits that our fire safety and other regimes are as good as they can be. 
• We celebrated our journey towards greater value for money. When the ALMO was born, most services cost more than average and were poorer than average quality. After five years of hard work, independently verified data now shows almost every services is lower cost than average and were better quality than average. Don't it make you feel good!
• At last, we are able to use some of the £2m a year value for money savings on the frontline services that people want - new fences, bringing empty homes back into use, minor works that tenants chose for themselves and garage improvements. That's been the most satisfying thing of all!

What have been your highlights of 2011?

Equality and Diversity - just about meeting people's needs

This week Wolverhampton Homes has invited five peer experts to assess whether our work on equality and diversity is achieving results. It's an entirely voluntary process, but I think that unless what we do is achieving more equality and fairness in housing, then we are wasting our time and should go back to the drawing board.

Looking back at the (new) legislation and our own strategies, policies and targets, its easy to get bogged down in this subject and I can see why some housing professionals can't see the wood for the trees. It's easy to make tools like equality impact assessments, even though they are no longer a formal requirement, a tick box exercise and a lesson in maximum bureaucracy. Similarly endless training and E&D awareness raising for tenant leaders, staff and contractors can run the risk of patronising or boring people to the extent that they just turn off. Statistics are also difficult: do lower satisfaction rates for Black Minority Ethnic (BME) tenants reflect a poorer service or the fact that most BME tenants are younger with higher expectations?

So in preparation for our assessment, I spent a bit of time looking at the effect of all this activity on the community and trying to judge whether we are really making a difference. I am genuinely moved by some of the real life examples:

• Two colleagues from our in-house repairs team were mending a chimney.  They realised the tenant was anxious about mess and spotted she had breathing difficulties - so made extra effort to avoid anything coming down the chimney. They ended up hoovering the house and collecting her prescription!
• Linda Evans, one of our Priority Management Officers, some years back learnt British Sign Language to better support tenants. On a recent secondment to lettings, she signed up a couple who are both hearing impaired. They have six children and had been successful in their bid for a larger family home. Lo and behold, this couple turned out to be Linda's BSL teachers.
• Tenants at our recent Get Togethers were moved by a brief three act "play" which portrayed how hate crime can affect people. At the start of the events, only a handful of people would report harassment or hate crime - by the end over 70% felt they would have the confidence to tell us.

I think in future I will encourage and support equality and diversity more by showing how it might just be about meeting ordinary peoples' needs and going the extra mile to meet individual circumstances! I will let you know the results of our assessment.

Hate Crime - would you report it?

We are fortunate/unfortunate to have a very small number of hate crimes reported to us. Fortunate because we genuinely do appear to live in a fairly cohesive city with a lot of tolerance and mutual respect for differences. Unfortunate because we suspect that a small but significant number of cases go unreported for a whole host of reasons and that means that our tenants could be living in fear and desperation.

In an effort to widen knowledge about how Wolverhampton Homes can help if tenants are the subject of abuse or violence because they are perceived as different, we engaged actors from the Gazebo Theatre Group in Bilston who staged a frighteningly real set of scenarios about hate crime at our Get Togethers this month.    

The Get Togethers, which are attended by more than 200 tenants each quarter, are an excellent way of generating debate among tenants who are not otherwise involved and getting instant feedback on why the hate crime numbers are relatively low.

The actors played a single mother whose gay son was the victim of abuse and her friend. The mother is understandably distressed by the abuse of her son. She has a go at the perpetrator's parents but then finds the situation becomes a lot worse, with excrement pushed through the letter box, abusive graffiti daubed on the walls and threats of violence. With help from her friend, our terrified single mother is eventually persuaded that telling Wolverhampton Homes and allowing us to investigate was the only way forward.

We discussed with tenants afterwards whether they were aware of what social landlords could do in this situation and whether they would report hate crime if it happened to them. Very few people believed that landlords would get involved in cases like this - a real lesson to us that our leaflets and poster campaigns don't really get taken on board.

The sessions did a lot of a good by reassuring people that they would get a sympathetic hearing and that any action taken would be agreed with them first but many remained doubtful that they would report hate crime to either us or the Police.

On the way home from one of the sessions last week, I thought, what would I do?  Would I ever be brave enough to report someone who was targeting me personally or members of my family for abuse and hatred? I like to think I would but I can't be certain. Would I if my child was at risk? Not so easy is it? 

As usual, tenants came up with the best ideas for encouraging people to come forward. Let everyone know about successful evictions and prosecutions. Reinforce all the time that race and other hate crime are viewed with contempt and will not be tolerated. Above all, demonstrate to tenants who do report hate crime that we are on your side and will protect and support you to the best of our ability.  

The picture above shows the two actors from Gazebo Theatre mid-performance.

Harnessing the power of the 711

Over the last month I have been listening to staff about the ways in which Wolverhampton Homes can further improve its services to tenants. Everyone of our 711 colleagues has joined me in debating key issues facing us as a social landlord - ranging from how we avoid complaints to how we and our tenants can become greener.  Throughout the sessions I tried to talk a lot less and listen a lot more - not easy for me.

But thank goodness I did! I have never come across a better way to get real staff engagement. We used to think that a staff survey every year or two would take the collective temperature of the workforce and we would get happier teams from making one or two minor changes about working life. Actually, the things that frustrate staff are the same things that frustrate tenants!  

It's when one section won't talk to another, when a policy is grey rather than crystal clear, when there is corporate inconsistency or when a process is carried out that is a complete waste of time. I have now got over a thousand comments or suggestions from the people who really know what's going on - the feasibility of which I am already considering. Almost none of the suggestions had anything to do with traditional terms and conditions but everything to do with the quality of life for tenants and taking the business forward.

To be honest, I couldn't have got a better set of proposals if I had got the most senior and high powered housing professionals in a room for a whole weekend! I am very pleased I have harnessed the power of the 711.

A friendship to last a lifetime

On an uncharacteristically muggy evening last Thursday, nearly 30 of our youngest tenants met my colleagues and I to begin what I hope will be a long friendship. 

As anyone who works in housing knows, it is mightily difficult to encourage our younger residents to have their voice heard on housing issues. We are all too familiar with the usual suspects of tenant involvement - immensely valuable though they are, but they tend to be white, 60 or 70 something and have been a tenant for some 30 years. We wanted to make a special effort to get views from newer, younger people who may have a perspective we are missing. This is not about replacing one set of tenant views with another but about getting a range of views.

Two of our Future Jobs Fund employees put an enormous amount of energy and creativity into recruiting them and I was pleased to see the room so busy.  I met some people who I immediately thought of as tenant board members of tomorrow, brimming with ideas and the enthusiasm of youth. One young woman, Kelly, particularly impressed me. She had thought up some really challenging questions for me and had some innovative ideas of her own. 

It turned out we had both only been in Wolverhampton a few years but had immediately fallen in love with the people and the general laid back feel of the city. As a single parent with a baby (but engaged to her son's father, getting married next year), Kelly felt older people on her estate looked down on her and made quite wrong assumptions about her behaviour and lifestyle. In fact, she and a girl friend spend a lot of time chewing the fat about what makes a good community and what they might do to help.

She asked me if Wolverhampton Homes would perhaps train up people like her to work with younger people as she already wanted to put something back into the community. I have already put it on my list as something to explore and discussed it with the head of our Local Neighbourhood Partnership which also wants to harness the potential of volunteers. 

Not satisfied with asking me difficult stuff like which person living or dead would I most like to meet (!) - I said Mr Blair on the basis that I still want to know why we went to war - Kelly particularly wanted to know what we are doing to engage 7-16 year olds in council housing. Like many ALMOs we have a range of really exciting projects that we support for example the Timken social enterprise or Goalz (a project with Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club) but is this really engagement? If I am honest, it’s about trying to prevent antisocial behaviour and control the kids during the holidays! 

We have been struck by the lack of basic life skills amongst our youngsters - managing money, dealing with applications/benefits, cooking, managing a home or garden, dealing pleasantly with neighbours and so on. So for our first young tenants get together we focussed on managing money, particularly how to borrow money sensibly and avoid loan sharks.

Shock tactics worked well here. We showed a video of a young man talking about his l6 years (yes!) of indebtedness to an unauthorised lender who drove him almost to the point of suicide.

I was hugely impressed by how keen the young tenants were to make a difference in their area and learn new skills which they will take with them for life. We can learn so much from them and I look forward to seeing our friendship develop over the years to come.

You can see some more photos of our young Get Together on our facebook page (and we'd love it if you liked us while you were there too!).

NFA Conference: What a difference!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the annual CIH conference at Harrogate was a bit depressing: all very negative about the prospects for building and a general feeling of despondence.

What a difference the National Federation of ALMOs conference in Manchester was. Two days of real positive thinking and loads of examples of where ALMOs are making a real difference. I was most taken by the experiences of Barnet Homes (north London) and CityWest Homes (central London) who are branching out into the most exciting new areas of business. And I don’t say that just because I am an ex-Londoner!

CityWest Homes is providing a range of non-core services including new build development, stock acquisition including l50 ex-Right to Buy homes, a lettings agency and an estate agency. The latter is particularly valuable because of the very high number of leaseholders in Westminster.  

The most radical development is being planned in Barnet where the ALMO is planning to manage the Council’s adult social care services. The Council will create a trading company to which the existing ALMO and a new social care board will report.    

Both organisations are quick to point out that the ALMO needs a good degree of business acumen before it can embark on developing new services. There needs to be an excellent working relationship with the Council and a commitment to succeed.

Here in Wolverhampton, I don’t think taking on completely unconnected new functions is the answer. From managing over 23,000 homes we already have economies of scale and can already more than justify our overheads, which are top quartile value for money according to Housemark benchmarking.

What I think we need to do here is to take on additional services which would compliment and add value to our core tenant services. Not only would this minimise any risk to the day job but would also ensure that we don’t step outside our comfort zone and, more importantly, would allow us to enhance and improve existing services.

For example, to run tenancy support alongside housing management could reduce management costs and better target the service where it is needed most; or to run disabled adaptations for the private as well as the public sector could save costs. Another option would be extending our private sector leasing scheme to become a lettings agency could give local private landlords more choice and encourage more of them to let their homes through Homes in the City, helping to reduce the council housing waiting list.

Well done to all at the NFA – the conference certainly got the grey cells whirring!

Wolverhampton emotions run high over flexible tenancies

A recent debate wonderfully organised by the Wolverhampton Federation of Tenants Associations showed what Wolverhampton tenants think about the idea of flexible tenancies.  

At the end, all but a couple of tenants taking part voted in favour of keeping a council home for life. There were moving contributions about how a council tenancy had enabled people to feel safe and secure and to begin to put whatever trauma had taken them on the route to homelessness, behind them. 

Everyone agreed that the strain of being reassessed as still in need of council home every two or even five years was bound to increase anxiety and tension. I know this for a fact because some worried tenants I have met at our Get Togethers have (literally) begged me not to evict them - and the proposals are not even law yet.   

Being a coward of the highest order, I asked the Federation if I could present the case in favour of a council home for life. Seriously, I was worried that if I presented the case for the other side, more Wolverhampton tenants would think they could risk losing their home. 

We looked in quite a lot of detail at the impact on local communities of the increased turnover on estates should shorter tenancies come in. People understood that if you make it clear at the start of a tenancy that your home will not be for life, new tenants are less inclined to make improvements to their homes, care for their garden and get involved with their community. We discussed how difficult it would be for staff to accurately judge peoples' circumstances and how there were bound to be increased challenges in the courts.  

In Wolverhampton a guaranteed stable home is essential because the job market can be volatile, with people going in and out of work, from part-time to full-time and from benefits to wages. We do need to work hard to support people who haven't worked for some time but are capable of doing so - we need to offer training and support, job experience and help with finding jobs. 

We know the value for this at Wolverhampton Homes where we have created more than 700 jobs in the building industry, through the Decent Homes programme, the vast majority for local people. How will we interest new tenants in these opportunities when to better yourself could mean losing your home?  

I must say that the Federation's debate was a superb way of involving tenants and other residents in important policy issues and I do hope they do more. They had managed to get a number of teenagers from a local school to take part; some of whom lived in council housing. One young woman said that a tenancy should be for life because the idea of not being able to return home after you had left was inconceivable.

I am really anxious to do more to get people into the right sized homes. In Wolverhampton, we have the usual pattern of mismatch - about 3,000 homes are under occupied (that is have two or more bedrooms than people living in them) and about 2,000 people on the housing register (out of l3,000 in total) because of overcrowding. 

We have been running a really successful house release scheme which provides a flexible-use cash incentive and have recently decided to extend it. Tenants at Get Togethers have come up with some tremendous ideas for encouraging people to move all of which I am keen to try. 

While in many cases only a modern bungalow near their existing home will encourage people to move, there is a massive amount that can be done with support, care and encouragement - without having to resort to fixed term tenancies. 

A word with the Housing Minister

Our Chair Sue Roberts was on particularly fine form in Harrogate.  Spotting the Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, out of the corner of her eye, she managed to collar him ahead of some 200 other housing delegates at a reception put on by the Chartered Institute of Housing.  

After the introductions, Mr Shapps said he was a strong supporter of ALMOs and believed that ALMOs should be given the ability to build new homes (but was still fighting with the Treasury on that one). 

He also stated loud and clear that ALMO tenants should be given a vote should their local authority want to bring the ALMO back in house or make some – not that this is an issue in any way in Wolverhampton. It was great to hear him continue to back tenant involvement so robustly – such a key element of the ALMO movement.

As vice chair of the National Federation of ALMOs, Sue now has lots of experience of meeting Ministers and other decision makers. She left Mr Shapps in no doubt as to her views on how ALMOs have improved services with tenant involvement.

I’d like to extend an open invitation to Mr Shapps to visit us at Wolverhampton Homes and hear about how tenant involvement has been critical in our success. My door is open, Minister!

Enough of the glass half-empty

I’m just back from the annual CIH conference at Harrogate and feeling rather depressed, not just because I am half a stone heavier. The tone of most of the sessions that my Chair, Sue Roberts MBE, and I attended was negative and flat, and the people I spoke to agreed.    

While I know there are worries ahead with benefit cuts and so on, surely we go to these annual get togethers to come away inspired and reinvigorated, better equipped and more enthusiastic to improve homes and lives locally?   

Most of the depression stemmed from the fact that building new council and other social homes is now much more difficult with less funding for building new homes. The cuts have hit housing harder than any other service. 

Houisng is suffering some of the deepest cuts of all Government services. The government sees new social housing being funded by increasing the rent on some new homes in the housing association sector to 80% of market rent. Councils can also borrow money for new building, if they have the headroom in their business plans, and pay it off using the rental income over the next 30-40 years. Whether or not they have the capacity to borrow, councils may be called on to contribute in kind by giving away land and allowing private homes to be built to subsidise the social ones.  

As an Arms Length Management Organisation, we don’t own homes or land and at the moment, we cannot access funding to build new homes in our own right. The challenge we face is to work out how can we contribute to getting more social homes in Wolverhampton where we now have more than l3,000 people on the waiting list. Many of these are our own tenants who desperately need larger or more suitable housing.  

One way is to work with investors – large insurance companies, pension funds and the like – who could buy or build homes and then lease them to Wolverhampton Homes to manage for the next 10, 20 or 30 years – or even longer. We already manage nearly 23,000 homes, so it would be both easy and cheap for us to manage several hundred more.  

As a three star housing organisation, the investor could be safe in thinking that their investment was in good hands and they would get a small but steady return on their investment. When the homes are eventually paid for, depending on whether or not the council contributed the land free of charge or not, the homes could be sold and profits split, or they would pass to the council forever.

Much of the talk at conference was about now being the time of management not building so I for one, feel cheered by the prospect of capitalising on our strength in managing homes while creating more Council housing for the people of Wolverhampton.

A foray into the world of blogging

This is my first blog post - I’m hugely excited to be able to communicate directly with Wolverhampton Homes’ tenants and the wider world. Blogging offers a great opportunity to spark discussion, hear what people think and explain my views.

This is a critical time for housing and for the City of Wolverhampton, and I’m looking forward to contributing my thoughts on the issues of the day. I hope you’ll humour me by commenting and responding, and above all, letting me know what you really think!

Thank you for reading it.