Calum Macaulay from Albyn Housing Society flies the flag for housing associations in Scotland

The Scottish housing association movement has, for many, years felt misunderstood. Often it is reported that the general public don’t know who we are and what we do. Politicians appear to have struggled over the years to decide if we are public bodies or private businesses. Yet, we keep moving forward with a strong commitment to our tenants, their communities and our capacity to address social inequality and poor quality housing through investment, innovation and engagement.

Engagement with communities and individual households, for decades, has been a key feature of housing associations’ work. The impression I get is that we are much more likely (than other developers) to choose to do this in a positive manner when putting forward planning proposals.

Since its inception, Albyn has worked alongside communities to help them gain a clearer understanding of how our housing plays in meeting their wider concerns, interests and needs. In doing so, we have found that those communities often have a better understanding of what will help sustain and support them to succeed, and even how to make best use of their own resources. Now, communities have much greater access to funding and can use this to build their own homes through bodies such as development trusts. Housing associations can therefore offer skills, expertise and resources to complement communities in the successful delivery of their own projects.

Over the years we have also worked in very close partnership with large scale public bodies, such as the NHS and social work, in creating homes for residents with long-term disabilities. And through often tortuous negotiations, we have managed to make shared homes for some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

This work has now begun to find a new form that reflects the changing pressure points in our health and social care systems. Like many innovative ideas, our journey into this field was triggered by crisis. Our crisis was a tenant who died in their home and lain undiscovered for over a year. In trying to learn the valuable lessons available in such trauma we began to develop primary market research, with academic institutions. This helped us to develop an understanding of people’s desire to remain in their own communities, rather than have to be hospitalised or placed in a care-home, when illness, accident or old age catches them out. Further research told us how people relate to IT and what forms of IT would help people to remain in their own communities.

This came to a head when one of my colleagues attended an entrepreneurial development programme at MIT in Boston, supported by our local enterprise agency, and met the Managing Director of a volumetric house builder with a factory close to our head office.

From this starting point we are now working together to address such issues as the growing societal challenge of an ageing population as well as increasing pressure on NHS budgets to free-up hospital beds occupied by people needing social care rather than medical services.

The result is our ‘Fit Homes’ project, a ground-breaking joint venture of Albyn Housing, Carbon Dynamic and NHS Highland Which is looking to develop a sustainable solution using digital technology, Big Data and IoT infrastructure.

Where previously, the RSL’s role was simply to provide affordable rented housing, we now play a leading role in developing new models and services that can support community cohesion, sustainability and growth. This takes resources and talent as well as the highest levels of innovation and collaboration across public, private and third sectors.

Housing associations in Scotland now play an irreplaceable role in supporting a fairer, wealthier and healthier society and leading the fight against poverty, inequality and social exclusion.

This role ought to be acknowledged and celebrated.