“Follow the keys”. This was the exceedingly practical advice given to me in my hour of need by Martin Wilkie McFarlane, the latest subject of the Scottish Housing News Podcast.

Martin recently emerged from a stint as CEO at Wellhouse Housing Association, guiding them out of a period of regulatory intervention, the kind of thing that gives housing professionals palpitations.

Going by the evidence submitted by others to the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, engagement with the Regulator can be tough.

There is a notion that the Regulator has a hidden agenda to make small community-based organisations merge with great big UK organisations, and then there’s the cost of regulation. If some highly paid consultants are required to stiffen up the board of a struggling community-based RSL, the tenants are obliged to pay their fees.

So we asked Martin about his experience of regulation at Wellhouse Housing Association, where he was CEO from 2016 until recently, taking the small community based landlord through a period of rigorous regulation occasioned by concerns dating from 2014 over finance and governance.

How was it for him? The experience seems to have been difficult, but ultimately positive, with committee members putting in a real shift to bring their processes up to date and meet the Regulator’s requests.

I mentioned that the Regulator had said that Wellhouse had not understood the rules by which it was meant to operate, and that was a particular concern. Was the burden of regulation just too much for smaller landlords to cope with?

Not at all, said Martin. He said that it’s a CEO’s job to ensure management committee members understand the regulatory framework. But he does have things to say about how regulation could be done better. He’d like to see RSLs supporting each other through difficult times, with experienced staff and committee members sitting on boards, avoiding the need for highly paid appointees.

Once we finished talking about the Regulator, we asked Martin about his 40 years in housing. He’s certainly been round the block, starting out as a housing trainee, working for local authorities in the West of Scotland and huge landlords in London, moving to France and getting his hands dirty on renovation projects, along with some self-employed property management.

I met him during his time at Shelter in Dundee, where he was an admirably calm and effective advocate for people in housing need. As housing convener, I was trying to find a way of discovering why we took so long to let voids. Houses seemed to disappear for long periods and our performance was poor. “Follow the keys”, said Martin. If you know where the keys are, you know what’s holding things up. And so it proved.

The Scottish Housing News Podcast is co-hosted by Kieran Findlay and Jimmy Black. All episodes are available here as well as on the following platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Spotify for Podcasters