Kieran Findlay

Welcome again to the Scottish Housing News Podcast with me, Kieran Findlay and Jimmy Black. As we record, in February 2025, the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government Housing and Planning Committee is deliberating over the evidence it has received as part of its scrutiny of the Scottish Housing Regulator. And today, we are able to speak to someone who has witnessed the Regulator’s intervention first hand.

Jimmy Black

Indeed, when Martin Wilkie-McFarlane joined Wellhouse Housing Association in early 2016, the RSL was the first such Association to be subject to these statutory powers. Six months later, the intervention ended and Wellhouse has since become a successful, financially secure organisation with a strong governing body.

Kieran Findlay

Now having left Wellhouse for past years now, we’re delighted to welcome Martin onto the podcast to share his experiences.

Martin, hello. We’ll touch on other subjects later, but first give us a quick overview of the situation that Wellhouse found itself in that led to the Regulator’s intervention.

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Hi, Kieran. Hi, Jimmy. Yeah, that kind of reminded myself today by having a little look at the Regulator’s report on Wellhouse that was published in 2017. I suppose, generally speaking, Wellhouse was subject to what I would call the catch-all expression the SHR was using for a wee while, which was governance and financial issues. In a nutshell, that summarises the issues about how they recorded their decisions as a governing body and how they were able to support those decisions with documentation and so on. It got itself into a bit of a pickle, for those of us who have read that report will remember, which ultimately resulted in, to my memory, there was a whistleblower contacted the Regulator about the organisation and that then led to them contacting Wellhouse and the intervention starting there after 2014, late 2014.

Kieran Findlay

You joined in around May 2016. How aware of these issues were you before you joined?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Reasonably aware. I could say there was quite a lot of press coverage, I’m sure lots of folk will remember that. Not just in the housing press, in the mainstream press, you want to call it that. So it was, yeah, there were lots of kind of what you might call negative news stories with the kind of more mainstream press, I suppose, focusing on the stuff that’s a bit more kind of negative or newsworthy as they would have seen it. So yeah, I was kind of aware of it.

I’ve had some experience in the past working in a community controlled association in London where we had to speak to the regulator, so it didn’t faze me at that point.

Jimmy Black

One of the things which they were accused of and which the regulator puts in the report was there was a six-figure sum which seemed to be made available to a local community organisation and a number of directors were serving on both Wellhouse and on the community association. There were other things like a car which was bought rather than leased and that’s not what the Management Committee had wanted.

There was a number of other issues and one of the things that the Regulators seemed most concerned about was that the committee and the organisation didn’t seem to realise that it was actually breaking the rules. It didn’t seem to know the rules, so therefore they were happy enough to break them because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Given that there are so many rules, we are so heavily regulated in the housing association sector, it’s actually hard to keep up with what you’re meant to do?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

It could be, I guess. I’ve never found it hard to keep up with them personally, because I believe my role is to know this information as best as possible and ensure that the governing body are fully informed so that they can make informed decisions. Obviously, you can’t know what you don’t know, and if people didn’t know things, they perhaps didn’t realise that they were breaching rules. I think that the environment has changed quite a bit since then, because there’s a lot more training and a lot more reminders. We have moved into the world of self-assurance and so on, that’s kind of jumped ahead a wee bit, but I think if your governing body and your senior staff are fully informed, that is the way to ensure that you are following the rules that you have to work by in a regulated environment.

Kieran Findlay

We’re talking here in the aftermath of the Scottish Parliament’s evidence session into the Scottish Housing Regulators and some of evidence is pointed to a culture of bullying, fear and intimidation. Even now, people are providing evidence to MSPs anonymously out of fear of recrimination. In your experience with dealing with the Regulator at Wellhouse or any other time, have you seen any this? Were you ever been in fear of recrimination?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

No. I’m quite firm about that — not at all. My two experiences with the regulator were a long time ago. Early on, when I worked in London, it wasn’t called the regulator at that time, its a slightly different animal in England anyway. And then this involvement in Wellhouse, I personally never felt threatened, intimidated or bullied or any of those things. Not at all.

Kieran Findlay

Another criticism that has come out of the investigations is that there is an apparent culture of favouring larger organisations and leading smaller organisations such as Wellhouse into a partnership or a merger or takeover from a larger organisation. Again, is that something that you’ve ever come across or is it something that you felt that Wellhouse was being pushed into?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

I know I never felt the wellhouse was pushed into that. mean, I recognise that observation. Obviously, I think everyone does in the sector, but no, never at any time, even prior to me starting. So, prior to me starting, there had been an appointed manager there for probably about a year and an interim director. And from my perspective, it was never on their agenda at all, actually. I mean, quite the opposite, I think those folk put in substantial work to improve Wellhouse as an organisation. I think that was their primary motivation. Obviously, options were presented to the governing body and they were quite clear in their decision that they wanted to remain an independent RSL operating in their area of Easterhouse in Glasgow because that in effect is their USP and why they were even kind of created in the first place. So it was it was never a serious consideration for the governing body, but options were presented to them before I joined the organisation.

They are not options that were presented by the regulator, I’ll add, it was other people that had just presented a range of options to them. Sorry I should have made that clear it wasn’t the Regulator.

Jimmy Black

It’s interesting that local authorities seem to actually quite like the Regulator. They don’t seem to have the same fear of the regulator as some housing associations. Tony Cain when he’s giving evidence to the local government committee. I think was trying his best not to sound cynical when he was talking about the way that some housing associations feel about the Regulator.

But equally, you’ve got people who are well respected like David Bookbinder and others saying that there is this a bit of a culture that people are worried about speaking up, or feel a bit intimidated. We had the Regulator on the podcast and he was very nice to us, or they were in general very nice to us. But we’re not a housing association or a landlord.

Is there anything about the Regulators’ approach that you don’t like? I mean, there was the fact that if you have statutory appointees, you have to pay for them and they come very expensive. Apparently the cost of intervention can be £350,000, maybe even more. But the time you’ve paid consultants to come on. What could be done better, Martin?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

I certainly take real exception ethically to the cost that intervention can lead to for organisations. That is a real concern. On the first point, I would never deem to disagree with such esteemed fellows as David and Tony, but it is a wee bit different. Local authorities and really big organisations feel less exposed. I worked for both local authorities and really a large housing association group structures as well. And you can feel a little bit less exposed.

When you’re a small community controlled association run by volunteers, then interaction with any sort of regulator person of power can be a wee bit intimidating, I guess. Again, I think the Regulator has moved on a wee bit from outside observation, but I think in the earlier days of intervention and managers who are appointed are quite expensive. The use of ancillary consultants who are also quite expensive is a bit of a concern, particularly for the smaller organisations, where every penny counts.

You are already going through a period of great concern and trying to really closely look at your own controls, not just your financial controls, but spending a lot of money to, in quotes, “put things right”, if you like. So I have real concerns about the cost of it to organisations. That’s money that should be directed at residents and reinvestment in the stock, in my opinion. So I think the more that can be avoided, the better.

Maybe it’s easy to say, look from within the sector and look for people that could assist you know a fellow chief officer in another organisation that’s assuming they have the time because you know running an organisation is quite busy it keeps you quite busy but there you know there could be some element of that and more experienced governing body members sharing their experience with governing body members and other organisations and you know maybe kind of even job swaps and that sort of thing might be a more appropriate way of doing it.

Kieran Findlay

As part of the Parliament Committee session, we heard that the Regulator has used statutory powers to intervene 12 times, with only six of those RSLs losing their independence as a result. Some might say that is six too many, but the first three — Wellhouse, Muirhouse and Ferguslie Park — are still in operation. Does this dispel the myth that there is an agenda at play? Is the Wellhouse story one of triumph for intervention?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Yeah, I would say it is a story of triumph. It’s a good story. It’s a very positive story. I mean, I don’t think the Regulator has any particular agenda. That’s my personal opinion. I don’t. But I think for Wellhouse, yes, it is a story of triumph. If you read the report, the organisation was in a bad way, in lots of ways. And it really needed a serious looking at, or do over, as the Americans would say.

And I think it achieved that by the governing body ultimately realising that there was a problem that they had to take it seriously, that they were committed to taking it seriously. People who’d spent a long, long time being community activists for whom my admiration has no end. What these people have done is phenomenal. The story of community control associations and people taking control of housing and you’ll find that same people also were involved in so many other things. Their story is incredible, it should never be forgotten, it should never be lost.

I think the fact that they had a really, let’s just say a pebble in their shoe along the way in the journey and it was quite painful for them and they had to step back but they took it seriously. They didn’t seriously at all consider the option of merging and they knuckled down on what they needed to do and it was really, really hard work for them.

We’re talking about organisations that would meet monthly, suddenly meeting two or three times a week every week in the evening when they’ve got full-time jobs and learning a whole new load of skills. As the regulators develop themselves, they continue to learn those skills and really keep focused on the task at hand as volunteers. It was really, really hard work for a lot of them and I think it’s a real triumph for them, for these volunteers, absolutely.

Jimmy Black

Question about members. How much weight did the views of the members get as opposed to the views of the tenants or of the management committee in the whole Wellhouse thing? I’m thinking about Reidvale Housing Association, which was rescued from a merger, if you like, by the members standing up and demanding a different way. Was that a dynamic in the Wellhouse situation?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Yeah. It’s quite an interesting dynamic because members are very active, certainly at the AGM or any SGM that was run. Certainly expressed their opinion that way. But also when you’re a smaller organisation and geographically really constrained because your Wellhouse is only within what would have been a particular local authority neighbourhood back in the time before stock transfer.

So geographically very small and only about 800 tenancies and 50 factored owners. So the tenants’ voice, members or not, is quite strong and tenants, if they weren’t members, of course with loads of crossover lots of tenants were members as well, will always find a way of expressing their opinion, particularly in areas where the great background of community activism and people saying things the way that they want to say them and maybe ways that we wouldn’t, you know, if you’re in a certain environment, folk could just tell it like it is. I think there was a lot of dynamics, you know, between tenants, members and committee members. And obviously there was turnover in the committee as well. And when intervention happened and so on and a wee bit of change in the membership and so on as well. Yeah, there was there was no shortage of voices and views and opinions, I guess.

Kieran Findlay

Currently, there seems to be a move towards, you talked about the Regulator being slightly different now as to when it was in 2016 or even 2014, and there seems to be a move towards peer support, where Associations that are in difficulties are offered support and information advice from other Associations who are perhaps stronger in that area, rather than appointees to the boards and statutory intervention. Is that something you would be in favour of?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Yes, absolutely and I think the Regulator in that case has listened to what we have been saying, in that 10 11-year period is that that is a more appropriate way ahead. One, because it is less expensive, which is crucial. People who are any volunteers on a committee or charity have got a very strong role as custodians of the organisation’s income. Therefore, anything that reduces expenditure is to be fully supported.

An I think using maybe peer support can be less intimidating for people. And whilst there might be a bit of a dynamic between smaller organisations and larger organisations, let’s make an assumption that a larger housing association may have more of an ability to allow people to move across as peer supports or go to smaller organisations on a kind of secondment or something to support them. And I personally think that’s a more appropriate way to support organisations.

Jimmy Black

Martin, you’ve had a long and interesting career in housing. Where did it start? How did you get into this?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Where did it start? Okay. Yeah. Long and interesting. I think, we’ve all heard this expression that those of us in social housing kind of fell into it. So 40 years ago, despite appearances to the contrary, yes, I’m that age. I was a full-time student in late 84 and I saw this advert in the press for a job in the local authority as a thing called a housing management trainee. I kind of thought, you know, I’m from Coatbridge originally, kind of industrial belt, if you like, for Scotland, sky-high and everything back in 1984. As I said, I was a student, but then I saw this thing that was a job that not only paid me a wage, but then said, you have to go to university one day a week for three years. And I thought, well, that sounds great. So I applied for it, got the job, kind of knew nothing about social housing, although I still don’t 40 years later.

So I kind of fell into it, housing management trainee, maybe you might call it a modern apprentice. I don’t know, but I was really, really lucky. I got a wage and I got sponsored to go to university. As part of being a trainee, it that I had to work in every section in the housing department and then have placements in related departments, maintenance and things that were called technical services back in the day. I don’t think there even exist anymore sort of architects, that sort of thing, and I finished my traineeship at the local authority, now North Lanarkshire, called Monklands back then. I went to, I was working in the city council in Glasgow, but yeah, just thinking of fancied moving to London and so on.

At that time, so I worked for an organisation which changed its name so many times, I no longer know what it’s called, but now it was one of the mega mergers in England. So one of these massive organisations, I don’t know which one it was. It was called Circle 33 at the time when I went there they were a big group structure. And I managed their office in the East End of London. So Hackney, Tower, Hamlets, all that sort of area, which was going through huge regeneration at that point in time. And the office that I went to manage was not without its challenges because the organisation had been in some trouble prior to me starting. So I had quite a lot of work to do to kind of bring back the tenants’ confidence in the organisation and so on and make sure that proper procedures and processes and everything else were followed.

And then I got quite heavily involved in, as I said, these large-scale kind of regeneration projects at the time, which was really interesting. I mean, ultimately though, I suppose I’m a wee bit cynical, it meant local authorities at that time in London selling, passing their estates to housing associations. So there was usually a beauty contest of the big associations going to bid to take over the estates. One was the Holly Street estate, which was really well known at the time. It was a major multi-billion pound project. The Westminster government at that time showed a lot of interest in. But that was a kind of consortium of five housing associations. It was an interesting thing to be involved in.

And then I did something similar in Tower Hamlets and then as a way of things after spending some time in a big organisation, I went and worked in a community controlled association which was called Soho Housing Association. They’re still on the go, still on the go as Soho, based predominantly in Soho, no surprise there. And Covent Garden is a sort of part of London where people actually don’t ever think that there’s social housing there and there’s a reasonable amount of it.

Soho was set up in the 1970s when the government at that time intended to bring a motorway connection right into the, I don’t know how well you know London, bring it right into Tottenham Court Road and have off ramps and everything there. A bit like what we see at Charing Cross and all that in Glasgow. But the local residents were not happy about it and they became a kind of group of activists, which then led onto them kind of winning that battle. And then they bought one Georgian townhouse, turned it into four flats and then before you know it by the early 00s were the same size as Wellhouse and remained as a community controlled association whereby social housing rents would sit next to new blocks.

At that time, 25 years ago, there flats were selling for up to £1 million, so was an interesting dynamic. The whole dynamic in their community was so interesting that it took me back to university at that point in time. I then moved back and did a master’s degree at the University of Westminster who ran housing courses then. I don’t think they do anymore. And I just kind of did a dissertation on what it was like for people to live in that part of a world city with a Conservative local authority. They were the jewel in the Conservative crown, if you’ll remember that, who believed that you don’t interfere in the market at all because, you know, the right level invisible hand and all that Adam Smith stuff we’ll find a way but that meant a huge proliferation predominantly of the night time economy so it was incredibly difficult for people that lived there that didn’t choose for their neighborhood it was kind of quite quiet at one point in time though there was that interest in it because was so low and it was run down and had lots of vice and all that sort of stuff then it became really trendy then there was nightclubs and bars and everything all over the place traffic all the time noise all the time so it was a very interesting dynamic.

I still got a copy of my thesis, if you’d fancy reading it. It’s not very interesting. And then after that, like a TV cliche, I went from London to rural South West France for a couple of years. Where I did a wee bit of kind of self-employed stuff, that type of thing. And everybody can boo now because I worked for a short while for an estate agency as well. For a very short time, just to support the income.

Jimmy Black

Rural France, that mostly, it wasn’t housing related then, it was something else or? What were you actually doing in rural France?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

More kind of property, more management, sort of stuff. Kind of part-time mixing in with a lot of me time, I suppose, after full-time working in London. But yeah, just kind of, keeping an eye on renovation jobs, that sort of stuff and doing a bit of hands-on kind of renovation work myself. I learned how to do lime mortar quite well, became quite good at it actually, so that was a skill I never had before. Then I come back to Scotland sometime after that and spent a bit of time working in Shelter for a wee while and that was a good way of kind of using my skills from a different perspective and then, you know. Again I went full cycle for a short period of time in local authority in Stirling, and then went back to what I really wanted to was community-controlled association in Wellhouse. That is a condensed version of 40 years, but I fell into it, like most people.

Kieran Findlay

As a former national services manager in Scotland for Shelter, what do you make of the current situation on homelessness? There are more than 10,000 children currently living in temporary accommodation. The number of applications for homelessness is on the rise again. Where are we going wrong here?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

If I could answer that question, I would be doing something really high-flying. I don’t know, I mean I have been in housing as I said since ‘85, I first worked in what would have been called a homeless persons’ unit, quite a horrible expression, then in 1986 which as you know as a kind of young person under the age of 20 was such an eye-opener to the life experiences lots of people have you know quite kind of shocking and the challenges with people finding housing and kind of the attitude I suppose at that time as well for lots of local authorities and how they approached homelessness. It probably wasn’t that long after the actual legislation and there was still that kind of way of and maybe an attitude that we’re managing a limited resource or something like that. For 40 years we’ve never got it right. I think it’s always been an issue.

I mean, good luck with this one, but we could do with changing the narrative, I think, across the UK in general about what we mean by housing. We are singularly obsessed with home ownership as the be all and end all of housing provision in the UK in general, which certainly wasn’t the case when I was younger. I grew up like lots of people in Scotland in a council estate, a scheme as we called it, very happily. Everybody else did as well. I think Coatbridge is where I grew up, local authority’s stock it was 80% of all the housing stock or something like that. Everybody grew up in council housing.

Everybody worked, yeah they all worked in steelworks and all that sort of thing, but that’s the way it was and the narrative didn’t exist then that the only housing option that was available was home ownership. So there’s definitely something to think about how the dynamics work and maybe building really expensive houses for sale with lots of excess bedrooms people don’t need on greenfield sites maybe isn’t the best response to the current housing crisis.

But as for homelessness, if I could answer that one, you know, I’d be happy and maybe people would be paying me to respond to those questions. But yeah, I just think we’ve always struggled to keep up with it, to be honest.

Kieran Findlay

Martin, final question from us then. What’s kept you busy since leaving Wellhouse? What’s next for yourself?

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Well, it’s only mid February, so I actually kind of left at the end of December, so it’s only been what, about six weeks? So short of finding the time to go into the attic, that if you’ve got an attic you never go into it and it’s got scary stuff in there, short of tidying up the attic and so on, then I’m gonna have a wee break from working general and then when I’m kind of back to face real life, if you like, again in May, then I’ll be probably looking to maybe do a wee bit of work then.

I’ll certainly look to continue some volunteer work. currently on the board of the SFHA, have been for a couple of years, I want to keep that up. But I also think I’ll look to be on the board of a housing association. And then I’ll look to ideally pick up some short-term pieces of work for organisations that, particularly ones that may have a little wobble in their confidence that we spoke about earlier on and maybe need somebody to just kind of, you know, help them through a bumpy period. That would be an ideal thing for me to do.

But just kind of balance that with a bit more time that’s not just about the world of the work, that’s about other stuff and what that transpires to be. Beyond that, I don’t know, but I’ll be around and I’ll certainly be around at conferences and all that sort of thing where I’m sure our paths will cross.

Kieran Findlay

I’m sure they will and I’m glad that this 40 years plus of experiences won’t go to waste.

Thank you.

Martin Wilkie-McFarlane

Right, we’ll end it there and thanks to Martin Wilkie-McFarlane for taking part. Thanks again to Jimmy Black for his careful steadying of the ship. I’m Kieran Finlay and we’ll be back with another episode of the Scottish Housing News Podcast soon.