Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News podcast with me, Kieran Findlay, the editor of Scottish Housing News and former Dundee housing convener, Jimmy Black.

In today’s episode, we’re discussing the value of effective communications in the social housing sector. Social landlords have great stories to tell and it’s important to raise the reputation of your association and your work to advance your corporate objectives and to help improve image and the standard of the sector as a whole.

Jimmy Black

But what about when things aren’t going so well? The increased expectations of social landlords today bring ever-heightened scrutiny. If you couple that with the cost of living crisis and the housing emergency, being able to communicate the right message to the right people is crucial.

So sharing their insights into this key topic are Sally Thomas, the chief executive at the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, and Chris Fairburn, an associate director at public relations consultancy Holyrood PR.

Kieran Findlay

Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Sally, we’ll start with yourself. Social landlords use communication techniques all the time to share information with tenants, to ask their opinion, to reach out to external partners and so on. They know their audience. And in this digital age, you can argue they’re more reachable than they ever have been and have more means of communication to get their message across.

Although I’m sure all that is easier said than done at times. Are there current challenges raised by your members regarding communication strategies and techniques?

Sally Thomas

Yeah, I mean, I think there are, for me, as a starting point, there are probably two issues in this question. One is the communication that housing associations have with their tenants. And the other is communication more broadly, whether it’s with the general public or politicians or stakeholders.

I think in terms of their tenants of their customers, their communities, whatever term you want to use, they’re very well practised. They’re very well rehearsed at what they do, tried and tested. And community engagement, community involvement, the tenant voice is built in to what they do. So it’s an embedded and integral part of everything they do. That’s not to say it’s not without its problems. It’s not without its failures. It’s not without the potential to get a lot better. And I think nowadays housing associations are thinking more than ever about how they can improve it, not only to increase engagement and hear more of the tenant voice, but to do that through new means and ways.

So formally it was all done by kind of paper, you know, door knocking, much more traditional and old fashioned means. Nowadays it’s much more likely to be digital. It’s much more likely to be through social media. And the sort of processes are changing and the platforms are changing and also expectations are changing. I think both the expectations of tenants, of communities as to how they’re communicated with and what the channels are, and also the increasing need for housing associations themselves to become much more efficient and cost and time effective in how they communicate. And all those things are absolutely appropriate and relevant and helpful now and what we should be thinking about, but they can also bring their own challenges, which we can go into in more detail if that’s helpful. But I think that’s probably where I’d start.

Kieran Findlay

Chris, Sally talked there about the requirement for social landlords to be effective in their communications, to be cost effective in their communications. Is there a tendency for some to see that as one of the things not to invest in?

Chris Fairburn

I think if you’d asked me that 10 years ago, I would have been more concerned in the sense that when budgets are tightened, when things are under a lot of scrutiny, PR was almost the first thing that would be jettisoned. It would be, marketing budgets would be looked at and PR would fall within that. I think over the last 10 years and the pandemic’s probably a big part of this, clients in the housing sector have effectively moved that budget slightly outwith marketing, I would say on the whole, and recognise that communications is a different, it belongs, it kind of straddles a few different disciplines, if not a discipline in itself.

Jimmy Black

Let’s talk about communication with MSPs and MPs. That’s one of the things that Sally mentioned. How hard is it to get through to… I’ve worked in Holyrood and I know that you, everything that you send to an MSP is going to be filtered by, it could be an intern who’s just arrived from Canada, it could be somebody who’s really, really good, you just don’t know. So how do you get to MSPs and get the message across?

Sally Thomas

Yeah, I think, I mean, that’s one of the questions we grapple with all the time and we’re never ever complacent about it. However well we think we think we’re doing with some MSPs, with some ministers, with some cabinet secretaries, first minister, deputy, deputy first minister, there’s always the potential for it to be short term, limited, and it’s not to get the recognition, the understanding, the awareness that we need at a political level.

With a housing emergency being declared nationally and by now seven local authorities, clearly it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s easier, but it’s more likely that we get that message across, we get that engagement, we get those relationships going. And clearly, that’s also helped by the fact that MSPs want to hear from us because they want to know what they should do about the housing emergency. How are they going to address it? How are they going to respond to it? And the other aspect of all of that clearly is not just the national picture. It’s the local picture and constituencies where housing is and more or less always has been top of the constituent or within the top three or five of their constituency issues.

We spend a lot of time, a lot of effort working with MSPs and thinking how we can do that better and more effectively. Housing emergency certainly helps, but as I say, we can’t be and we never will be complacent about it.

Chris Fairburn

Yeah, and to add to Sally’s points there, I totally can recognise that and can see that. I think when we are engaging with politicians, they are very keen to be seen to be engaging with clients in the sector. Likewise, we work quite a bit with private developers as well. And when they are looking at deals for affordable portions on their developments, local MSPs, the housing minister generally, they’re pretty good at getting out there, pressing the flesh. And they want to engage and share Sally’s sentiments on the hope that the declaration of the housing emergency will slightly shift the emphasis and sharpen the focus.

Jimmy Black

Well, the irony is, of course, that councils are being told that their affordable housing program is going to get slashed over the next two years. And, you know, so that hasn’t translated itself into action yet. I just wonder how that happens.

But anyway, let’s move on. In terms of stigma, social housing has always had a bit of a stigma attached to it. People still think it’s the tenure of last resort. How do you cope with the stigma, how do you try and get the positive message across about what social housing really can be?

Chris Fairburn

Yeah, I think one thing I could credit to Shelter, I think their campaigns recently have been really brilliant. I mean, being able to lean on celebrities to launch a very high profile campaign has been really impressive. And I think that’s great. And it’s great that they’re able to do that. And it got a lot of love on certainly on channels I see on the likes of LinkedIn. I hope that that means that it is getting love elsewhere. Who knows, but it certainly caught a lot of attention and was really, really well delivered.

But I think, clearly we can’t always lean on celebrities for these sorts of things. And I think putting people at the heart of the communications is obvious. It’s not always done though. And I see a lot of communication that does seem to forget about the people. And I recognise there’s sometimes issues around vulnerabilities and that sort of thing, and it’s not always possible, but where possible, you know, being able to celebrate, you know, the people, whether they are tenants, whether they’re staff, volunteers, whoever it may be, I think getting across the human impact stories is so powerful.

And Kieran, you’ll have had hundreds and hundreds of press releases from us over the years. And it’s essentially that, that’s what we’re coming to do. That’s what we’re helping housing associations to do. And I think that is central to the stigma, you know, people buy from people. And when we can get these stories across and show that there’s more to social housing than perhaps some of the crueller stereotypes, then that’s the best way for us to break down some of those preconceived notions.

Sally Thomas

I mean, I’d agree. I’d agree with all of that. I think human stories are absolutely imperative. I mean, what I would say to add to that is the issue of stigma goes way back. And it’s something that has been created as what it’s not just by chance that social housing is stigmatised. It is it has been created by actions and attitudes way back in the 70s and 80s. I’m thinking particularly of governments at that time, which addressed, or you could say broke, the post-war consensus around public housing and public funding being good and being necessary for governments to do and private being bad and that being flipped basically.

And we saw the right to buy of social housing. We saw the primacy of home ownership being elevated and as a result of that we began to see the situation that we’ve got now where home is a commodity an investment rather than you know a place to live which is very different from large parts of Europe so it’s not something that that is the natural order of things, it is a choice.

So for those and plenty of other reasons we’ve got to a point where social housing is seen as something may be undesirable to by a lot of people or even bad. And that is clearly not helpful to anybody. It’s not helpful to the people who live in social housing. It’s not helpful to the people who don’t because it just causes more division, more fear, more misunderstanding. So stigma, I think, is really, really critical to our sense of what social housing is and what it can do and how it can contribute on an equal basis to an effective housing market, housing system, rather than being the kind of poor outlier that represents and houses poor people who can never do any better. And that doesn’t help anybody. It’s no good for any of us to live in a society where those kind of prejudices prevail.

Kieran Findlay

So we’ve talked there about how to defend against unfair criticism. And that’s one thing. But some criticism for the social housing sector has been justified. Take the recent damp scandal, for instance, in the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale as a result of prolonged exposure to mould. Chris, how does the sector even begin to regain trust in these kinds of circumstances?

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, they’re obviously horrendous, horrendous circumstances and it is something that the sector just has to face head on. And it’s really, really difficult. Everything, I’ve spoke to a few clients in the sector prior to coming on here and everything comes back to funding at the moment. It’s, which is not going to be news to most of your listeners at all here, but it does show just how difficult it is to address these things when we can’t invest in the existing housing stock. There is the potential for problems to arise. I think.

One positive is that sector is heavily audited. It has to be transparent in that sense. And broadly speaking, I do get the feeling that we are in a slightly better position across the board than perhaps in England, although that’s maybe cold comfort for some people. But the sector has to, when we’re dealing with any clients on a crisis communications briefing, it’s made a lot easier in the first instance if there has been a legacy of positive communications in the first instance. If you’re a housing association that isn’t out there doing good things or celebrating good things in a public way and you’re hit with a story like this, journalists have a healthy scepticism. They don’t know much about you. They don’t know, they haven’t heard from you. They’re not familiar with you. And now they’re seeing evidence of accommodation that is not appropriate and not anywhere that anybody would want to live. So you’re automatically on the back foot. So there’s that element to it. I think, get in front of things.

And then the second one is be upfront, be open, transparent. We have had situations in the past where we’ve been dealing with people on this sort of issue and being told and an element of blame shifting, kind of covering backs, making sure that things aren’t as bad as they perhaps are only to be confronted with the reality, which is actually pretty shocking and a situation where, fingers being pointed in various directions, but ultimately, it’s not great. It’s not how it should be. So I think being upfront, being open and transparent and then doing the best you possibly can to rectify it again, sounds really simple, but I appreciate it is difficult given the current constraints.

Sally Thomas

You know, there’s the saying, reputations are hard won and easily lost and quickly lost. Events like Grenfell, like Awaab Ishak in Rochdale who died as a result of damp and mould. Issues in his home are tragedies that we’ve got to own as a sector and understand and recognise and take action on. The situation in Scotland is somewhat better. Our quality standards, our building standards are better. Maybe, our reactions, our responses have been better to date, but again, we can never ever be complacent.

And as Chris says, at the moment, I hear from many housing associations in Scotland, they’re having to make really difficult choices between building new homes, which are desperately needed, but maintaining their existing ones to best effect, the costs of that rising, getting the labour, the materials to make sure they are maintained really well into a high standard, increasingly difficult.

So that’s not to say any of that by way of excuses, but it is to say it by way of the difficulties involved in making sure that maintenance and management is of the highest order and that damp and mould, fire safety, health and safety is at the forefront of everyone’s minds all the time, while at the same time thinking ahead and thinking we’ve got to protect and support our existing tenants, our existing homes. We’ve also got to think about those people on waiting lists and in temporary accommodation and building and acquiring new homes for them. But I think overall, I’d say that the quality of homes, in the social housing sector is fantastic. It’s far better than in the private rented sector overall, and it’s better overall than much of the home-owned sector. So, again, I think it’s looking at the bigger picture while acknowledging there are failings in the social housing sector, which we have to own, and we have to own by listening, acknowledging, and acting, and apologizing when necessary.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, absolutely.

Jimmy Black

Well, this is what I want to ask you because it’s a matter of consistent messages. You can get that open transparency. You can say that the quality is fantastic. And actually, I agree with you. It generally is. But if you have a situation where tenants are complaining about damp and mould, the housing association says, yes, we take the problem seriously. We’re going to deal with it. But, actually, in the house, the housing officer is saying to the tenant, well, you know, this is really your fault and you’re having too many showers or you’re not putting lids on your pans or these are all things I’ve heard people actually say. How do you get a consistent message between what your PR company is telling MSPs in the newspapers and what your housing officers are telling tenants?

Sally Thomas

I would really hope now, and I hear what you’re saying, Jimmy, but I would really hope now, given the kind of post-Rochdale understanding and appreciation of how critical damp and mould is more than ever, that we don’t have housing officers, maintenance workers, people on the front line in people’s homes, referring to tenant lifestyles as being a problem. That is absolutely where we don’t want to be.

I would be hoping now, and from what I hear, it’s more likely than ever, that we have housing officers and people in, workers in people’s homes, helping people understand what causes damp and mould in their home, but not blaming their lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, it’d be interesting to hear what Chris has got to say about this, but I really feel now that we’ve turned a corner on that.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah. That comes back to what we say to all clients in these crisis situations is that, don’t try and save face in front of us. Tell us the warts and all. Tell us the reality of the situation here. If we’re going in with kind of one hand tied behind our back then it isn’t going to end well. So yeah, I agree with, again, I need to stop agreeing with Sally so much, but totally, totally agree with what she’s saying. And, and it does come to that. You have to be open, transparent./

It’s unlikely that when it’s that sort of situation, it is going to be purely the result of lifestyle and tenant behaviors. Although there is always an element of needing to communicate and educate when you’re responsible for tenants. There is always a small part of that. But when you’re seeing some of the conditions, it’s so far beyond that. And I can only speak from my own experience in terrible student housing. It was where we had really bad mould problems. And that wasn’t a result of any lifestyle on our part, that was that was the Aberdeen climate and an inappropriate house. So yeah, I think it’s a tricky one for sure. But we just have to be open, transparent and do our best.

And I think the other thing that was coming to mind here was recent stories, I think last week around expensive cavity wall retrofitting and the impact that was having in not allowing buildings to breathe. So even in those situations where housing associations have invested significant amounts of money in trying to improve the environmental performance of homes, it’s then come back with, and resulted in terrible damp conditions.

Jimmy Black

Just a question though, how do you communicate with those frontline staff? Is that all just done through line managers? Yeah, in our experience, we very much have, I suppose, fairly clear points of contact where it’s with senior people in the communication side of our clients up to director level. And then it is really, that the expectation is on that messaging to be relayed throughout the organisation.

Sally Thomas

Yes, I mean, to kind of follow on from that, SFHA, part of our role is to support housing associations through guidance, advice, networking opportunities, sharing, learning, training. So we provide for every opportunity we can for those frontline workers to come together, to learn from others, to learn from us, to learn from sector experts and commercial organisations in this space so that they get first-hand access to the guidance, the material they need and as well as that we do produce guidance manuals and toolkits to help specifically with issues like damp and mould.

Jimmy Black

Can I ask, if you were to try and characterise the registered social landlord sector, what kind of person would you have in mind? Would it be a community activist? Not somebody who’s technical, not an accountant, not a lawyer, but sort of community activist sharing a committee in a local hall? Or would it be somebody in a business suit sitting in London? Or would it be, I don’t know, something else? What kind of, how would you characterise landlords, registered social landlords in Scotland? Because it’s important that people feel comfortable and feel happy about them, particularly councillors and MSPs.

Sally Thomas

Chris, I’d be keen to listen to your thoughts on that.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, you caught me all out on Jimmy, to be honest. Again, deal with all manner of clients. Put it this way, it’s a very different character in the private market for sure. But again, it’s a fairly broad church. I mean, most of the people we deal with are, yeah, you’re probably getting left of centre, activists, see it as much more of a vocation rather than purely as a career. Fiercely loyal to it as well.

I think some of the conversations that I’ve had recently, I was getting painted a pretty bleak picture and I was asking questions along lines of are people now jumping ship? Are people moving into other sectors? Are they looking at where their transferable skills can be used elsewhere? And, obviously redundancies and restructuring aside, the answer was categorically no, they’re not seeing, this is on a fairly small sample and Sally may have different evidence to the contrary, but using that small sample it was no, you know, the staff want to enjoy their work, they do it for a reason and they want to be here. So yeah, I think more along the lines of the community activist than your London sharp-suited business person.

Sally Thomas

I’d kind of go along with that. And so I moved to Scotland to work seven years ago to this job because I was absolutely frustrated and at my wit’s end about the English sector and condition of it and potential of it. And that’s not because it was in a poor place as an of itself. It was because of government policies and the direction of travel that was being forced, that was creating a sector that I couldn’t relate to anymore. Not enough money for social homes, professionalisation to the nth degree, a gradual withering away of smaller community-based housing associations, etc. Scotland seemed to me to have got more of that right or to be retaining more of that as it moves forward. And I think that’s still true.

I still like, I now have other frustrations about Scotland that we can maybe get into if we’ve got time. But the professionalisation of the sector, particularly at board levels has been both a good thing and a worrying thing to be honest. Housing associations, most of them 50 years ago, were set up by community activists, by people from the local community who needed solutions to the local housing problems. And that was a really valuable and admirable starting point for the sector. That’s changed.

And my answer to your question is we now need both. We need professionals, accountants, lawyers, HR specialists on housing association boards and involved with housing associations. But we have to retain the tenants, the local people who are at the core of what that housing association is about. And particularly with the community-based housing associations we’ve got in Scotland, of which there are still many, thank goodness. In a way, there aren’t in England now. And they’re precious, and we need them, they’re really important. So, yeah, so that’s where I stand in it, which maybe sounds a bit of a cop-out, i.e. it’s a compromise, you know, all are welcome. But given the world we live in, which we’re not going to change anytime soon, then we do need that mix.

Chris Fairbairn

No, I think something that is hopefully quite promising is that from the communication side of things, we’ve had some of our clients recently, we’ve had people coming over from different industries. We’ve had people come over from tech and people coming from finance into marketing and communications roles, which I think is a good sign. And I think people are seeing the positive and attractive elements of this line of work.

Jimmy Black

What I was going to say there was that maybe you can draw credibility from both sides, professional people and also the community activists that are still there. And I guess that’s quite a strong message actually to take out politicians. It’s an advantage that you have both. So, you know, let’s be positive about it.

Sally Thomas

Yeah, absolutely. I’d absolutely agree with that.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah, so in my time, I’ve received lots of press releases and I can, if there’s a negative kind of news story out there about particularly large companies, private ones, that the strategy, from what I can see seems to be, short statement, wait it out and then replace that, hopefully, replace the headlines with some charity initiative in the days afterwards. As I said, I can almost set my watch by this local charity initiative press release coming out two days after the bad news. Surely there’s more to the strategy than that.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, absolutely. There should be. You’re right, that is quite cynical even for sure.

It is somewhat horses for courses. I mean, it really is. We have a, we’re not like all PR agencies, I don’t think, in the sense that when we are dealing with our clients, we do try and get things head on. We’re quite firm in terms of saying, you have to acknowledge, you have to show empathy, you have to communicate in a human way. It pains me no end when I see horrible, brutal corporate jargon when companies, organisations, charities are responding to crises.

And something that you may find interesting, but I mean, the Bonnington Bond development in Edinburgh here, which was subject to the big fire, which was somewhat linked to combustible cladding. And the statements that came out of factors and house builders who built it 10, 11, 12 years ago were horrendous. And it was a bit of a wake up call for me because however much we tried to get integrated with our clients, we are always somewhat external. So when you’re on the other side of it, and you’re affected, I’d olleagues it colleagues that lived in the block that weren’t allowed to, who are still out of their homes and have had to find other accommodation, we weren’t able to get into our office, a fairly small thing, nothing, you know, compared to people’s homes being destroyed.

But the statements were terrible. They were written by lawyers clearly or certainly been heavily vetted by lawyers and they were absolutely terrible. So in the first instance, people have to be empathetic. I think people do recognise, and I think something will come onto the housing bill, there’s a lot in there that’s well-meaning and positive, but it exposes that it creates more human touch points between housing associations and people. It creates more opportunities for things to go wrong. People make mistakes. People, sometimes people act inappropriately, sometimes people behave terribly, sometimes you have bad actors, whatever it may be. But people will accept it broadly most of the time if the organisation takes responsibility and shows meaningful ways that they’re going to rectify it and improve it and resolve it. I don’t know if that demystifies anything from the world.

Kieran Findlay

No, it is interesting. It is horses for courses, as you said. I mean, Ronan Keaton said, you say it best when you say nothing at all. Sally, do you reckon it could be an effective strategy at times?

Sally Thomas

Yeah, yes. There is no one way, one way fits all. There is no one single way forward here. There’s no template for any of this really, particularly on those issues that are more sensitive, that are more difficult, that are more, where there are more questions than answers in the first instance. But I think taking a step back, taking an objective view, getting all your facts right and talking to the people involved is much more important than reacting quickly very often. Not always, not always. Sometimes you have to react quickly. But as I say, in the first instance, if you have to react quickly, but you really don’t know what’s happening, or you need to know more, then you acknowledge that in how you react first of all.

Kieran Findlay

Why do you think it is that some in the sector still appear to be reluctant to shout about the positive job that they’re doing?

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, I don’t think that’s something that’s certainly unique to RSLs for sure, because, you know, we see it all the time. I think a lot of it is down to it being there every day, it being they’re doing a job, they maybe don’t have a comms team, they maybe don’t have somebody, a former journalist or a story spotter, for want of a better term, in the ranks there, or that person’s maybe not enabled and they are just doing their day job. They don’t see what they are doing as particularly communications worthy. They’re not seeing it as being anything special. And again, that is ultimately what we are doing as external consultants half the time. It’s taking what is every day to people in that sector.

And again, come back to, I had a quick look for one of our housing association clients before and I think we’ve sent over 700 press releases out over the last 10 years and Kieran you’ll have probably received every single one of those and the vast majority are not about new developments, new initiatives, big capital investment, whatever it might be, they’re not about that, they are about people, they’re about and that could be you know senior appointments to the board, people on the board getting some new recognition or accreditations or it could be the new cook whose old Chinese restaurant was visited by Gordon Ramsay. I mean, it really is.

And these aren’t, again, a little bit those insights from how the dynamic often works for us for a PR agency. We just ask clients to empty their heads. We’re not expecting them to feed us with 10, here’s the 10 press releases for the, it is really just tell us as much as you can about what’s going on at your organisation or give us the means to be able to find out and dig around and find out all of that stuff. So I think going back to that point, Kieran, I don’t think it’s necessarily a, you know, if someone’s put in £7 million or has just had Scottish Government funding, you know, I know that these stories aren’t as common, but they’ve just had funding that’s enabled them to take on 25% of a new housing development. That’s probably been initiated. The stories maybe been initiated by a private developer, by the local authority, whatever it might be. Whereas they don’t all have the ability to celebrate the human stories at the heart of their businesses.

Jimmy Black

What about the black arts I think the black arts of PR, we have to give them some attention. I mean, is it ever acceptable to phone up a journalist and say that tenant who’s complaining, he’s completely off his head. You know, you don’t want to listen to him. It’s just all nonsense. Ever do that, Chris?

Chris Fairbairn

I could hand on heart say, no, we don’t. It’s, yeah, we are very much abided by our Chartered Institute Code of Conduct. So it would be a hugely risky game to play. I mean, Jimmy, you’ll know yourself, the media has changed a lot. And while it’s great having all these old relationships and everything like that, especially when you’re dealing with regional media across Scotland, quite often they’ll have been in the door two minutes. And if you’re launching into off-record briefings and whatever else, it’s not worth the potential pain that might come down the line. So broadly speaking, I, not from our perspective, I can say with a quite open heart.

Jimmy Black

Good, I’m delighted to hear that. Massively risky, as you say, and not very moral. Because the PR profession is a moral profession. At least it tries to be. It does try to be.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Sally Thomas

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we don’t do it. And our members, our housing association members don’t do it, says she cavalierly. Yeah, I would very much hope that it’s not something we engage in, that I think you’ll find that more in other areas of activity rather than the social rented sector, which to be serious has got a set of values around social purpose, social justice, helping people and not for profit, which really is really at the core and the heart of everything they do.

And I think that’s one of the, coming back to the question before the last one, I think that’s one of the reasons why people in the sector are more reluctant to come forward, to nominate themselves for awards or look at me and look at my business, look at my organisation. They’re much more inclined to focus on the needs of tenants and what they want and what’s going right or wrong for them. So I think there’s something about the principles and values of the sector which clearly affects how it relates in every way and not less so on communications.

Chris Fairbairn

I have a question for Sally if that’s okay. If that’s permitted.

Jimmy Black

Go ahead.

Chris Fairbairn

Yeah, no, Sally, just with all of the budgetary pressures on housing associations at the moment, do you worry that there’s going to be a bit of a, I guess, a race to the bottom or some of them are going to ultimately be losing a little bit of what makes them different and special and maybe some of these additional services that were funded by other elements of the business are becoming increasingly difficult to run. And is there a worry that we’re going to be in a position where housing associations are going to be quite ubiquitous? Or uniform, should I say?

Sally Thomas

Yeah, uniform. It’s a really good question because the pressures now are as much, if not more, as they’ve ever been, probably more than they’ve ever been, even given, you know, right to buy the financial crash in 2007-8, cost of living crisis, etc. Housing associations are incredibly resilient. So just about every housing association that was set up 50 years ago, where most of them were set up during the 1960s, are in Scotland anyway, are still in place. There have been some mergers, some kind of realignment, but nothing like the extent you would have seen in the private sector, for example, and absolutely no failures. There have been problems, but no absolute failures.

So there is a resilience there, and that’s probably, it’s because their model is countercyclical. So they are there for crises. They are there, that’s their purpose, is to help people in times of crises, i.e. homelessness. So that’s the model that they’re built around. So they’re able to survive downturns.

Now that’s not to say, I mean, again, using the word complacent a lot, that’s not to say that they can count on that model and that resilience, seeing them through the next period. I think the next period is going to be harder than ever to get through with the combination of reduced public funding, social housing, the requirements to respond to climate change. So energy efficiency, retrofit, new heating systems across the board, a cost of living crisis which is ongoing, public services which is declining, local authorities which are not being able to operate and deliver in the way they used to. So it’s all coming together to make the next period very, very difficult.

And I think my best guess, and who knows, I don’t have a kind of looking glass on this. My best guess is that the housing association movement will come out of it, will come out of it quite well, but there will be changes. I think there will be a resetting. I think there will be changes to the shape and scope and scale of the sector that we can’t yet, we don’t yet know and are difficult to anticipate in their detail. But I do think there will be changes.

And what I’m hoping is that those changes won’t affect the integrity and the credibility and the values of housing associations adversely.

Jimmy Black

I’m glad you mentioned the climate change and that seems to me to be the biggest communications challenge that we face because we’re trying to persuade tenants that gas boilers are out and these peculiar heat pumps that nobody understands are in.

And you know, you don’t just turn it on when you want it, you have to turn it on all the time and all this kind of stuff. And it is actually a difficult message to get across to tenants. And of course, the other message is maybe your rents are going to have to go up to pay for it. So yeah, that’s a big challenge for the sector. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out. But I think we should leave it on that note and then over to Kieran, I think.

Kieran Findlay

It would be quite remiss of me at this point for me not to say. If you’ve got a story to tell, please send it to newsdesk@scottishnews.com. We will be happily sharing them for years to come on Scottish Housing and News on the daily newsletter.

Glad to hear it, Kieran. Yeah, and I’ll tell you, or go through your first and the good people at Holyrood PR who I’m sure will be welcome to you. For previous episodes of this podcast, go to the Scottish Housing News homepage. You’ll see the podcast menu where you’ll find access to the podcasts on various platforms. You’ll be able to read the transcript of each episode and you’ll also be able to read the accompanying blogs by my colleague Jimmy Black.

For this episode, my thanks to Chris Fairbairn at Holyrood PR, Sally Thomas at the SFHA. Thanks to Jimmy Black, my co-host I’m Kieran Findlay. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.