As it seeks a new boss, the Housing Forum is well-placed to become a powerful voice for change, writes Ben Derbyshire
There is a great job coming up if you care about the future of housing – chief executive of the Housing Forum. Let me explain. The Housing Forum was born in the wake of the Latham Report when the word on everyone’s lips was ‘partnering’. The Department of the Environment told everyone to go forth and learn how to do it and the Housing Forum was born in the zeal of reform based on ‘Constructing the Team’.
Well, partnering turned out not to be quite the panacea it was cracked up to be. For a while, in the nineties, we were apt to find ourselves sitting in circles as members of the project team searched for a shared vision. I’ll never forget such an occasion in a hotel on the A1 when, coming last and with penetrating wisdom, the resident representatives declared never having heard so much nonsense!
Sadly, Latham’s concepts of teamwork between supplier and client, continuous improvement, openness between the parties, ready acceptance of new ideas, trust and perceived mutual benefit never really overcame competitive instincts in the construction industry. Despite this, the Housing Forum lives on and goes from strength to strength – why?
Well, that’s due in great part to the solid leadership over two decades of the retiring Chief Executive, Shelagh Grant. Governance is good, too with a board elected from among members and currently chaired by Stephen Teagle, CEO Partnerships and Regeneration, Vistry Group – a major housebuilder with significant growth ambitions.
But don’t run away with the idea that the Forum is merely an apologist for housebuilders. In the recent past several architects, including me, have chaired the board. As well as housing providers, its current membership has representation from construction companies, the supply chain, specialist consultants drawn from amongst its 120+ member organisations and is attended by NHBC, MHCLG, GLA and Homes England.
The forum retains a primary purpose of encouraging collaborative solutions to increase the delivery of quality homes through partnership – and this is what sets it apart for me. No single discipline membership organisation can hope to get close to grasping the multi-faced issues that impinge on the housing question. And I speak as past President of the RIBA which does have a Housing Expert Group – but made up entirely of architects!
The forum retains a primary purpose of encouraging collaborative solutions to increase the delivery of quality homes through partnership – and this is what sets it apart for me
Back to my purpose in writing this piece, which is to encourage candidates of the right calibre to apply for the role that Shelagh Grant will be vacating this autumn. Thanks to her, there’s a rich network of members benefitting from each other in all kinds of useful ways; networking, mentoring, information sharing and influencing. There’s also a great tradition of research.
While I was there, we worked on the possibilities that might arise from better performance labelling of homes, the opportunities for cutting out overlap and conflict between too many bureaucracies of compliance and the appalling waste of energy and resources from ill-considered and labyrinthine procurement procedures. In one case, the resource cost to tendering organisations exceeded the total value of work on offer! Reports on these studies remain available on the Forum website.
And as if to prove it’s en pointe, The Forum has just published ‘A Roadmap to 1.5 million new homes: One year in.’ pointing out that the target is now even more stretching, at 325,000 homes for the next four years. The report has a useful RAG rating against the changes necessary and calls for cross party commitment to a long-term grant settlement for building affordable homes.
The Housing Forum needs to grow from the reliable source of good sense which it has become, to a powerful voice for change in all the areas
Never has there been a greater need for government to learn from practitioners right across the industry who must come together with one clear voice with solutions to the crises of supply, affordability and quality. Whitehall is all too susceptible to special pleading of single interest groups. I have previously warned in this column against the empty blandishments of purveyors of snake-oil solutions to which previous ministers have fallen victim.
Now, the Housing Forum needs to grow from the reliable source of good sense which it has become, to a powerful voice for change in all the areas that will enable the government’s ambitions for the most significant housing programme since the 1960s. Anyone out there with the entrepreneurial talent, communication skills, high level network needed for this task will, I hope, keep an eye out for this opportunity. Let’s not leave the field to organisation with political axes to grind, or with single issue obsessions. Let’s create a voice for real knowledge, experience and skill!
Postscript
Ben Derbyshire is chair at HTA Design
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