Are we doing the right thing?

We all recognise the world is changing and we in Orbit have done a great deal of work to understand and prepare for our future. But there are two questions in here – firstly do we we know what the right things are that we should be doing in the future, and secondly are we preparing to do the right thing to get there?

Do we know the right things? In my view yes. 2020 work has helped us to understand the world we are moving into and how we need to respond, and it has enabled us to refresh what Orbit is and address a debate in our sector (which is becoming more frequent) about what should a housing association be for and be doing in the future. I believe we have been through that process and we have set a course to be at the forefront of our sector. Orbit will provide services and put a roof over people’s heads, but also work to to tackle the housing crisis, be part of the civic infrastructure in our communities and enable people to have choices to lead fruitful lives. A wider role than before but one we see as essential – “building communities by improving social economic and environmental prospects”

So, to get there are we doing the right thing to deliver our future? The Leadership Team, Executives and Directors, met last week to consider this matter, it’s no point having great plans and not ensuring you know how you will get there, so we looked at three things;
Managing todays issues
Our current actions and approach are enabling us to tackle the day to day pressures on residents notably welfare reform and supply of homes, and colleagues as they go through necessary changes within Orbit. Our work is focused on addressing a number of the concerns raised by residents and colleagues in the 2020 consultation particularly that we are delivering current services well and providing the tools to do the job.

Delivering changes in Orbit to 2015
Our plans to March 2015 are underpinned by the transformation programme and key streams of work which will focus on projects around simplification, use of technology and development of colleagues. These plans are now in place and have been prioritised to ensure we know what, by whom, and by when; we are working on a constant momentum of changes to ensure we do transform Orbit in the way we have all described.　

Preparing to meet our Vision
We produced some radical objectives but have now planned and broken these down into bite size chunks for action over the coming years so we are clear again of what we will deliver, by when and through whom. This will be our route map giving us a clear direction but enabling us to flex and respond to the world, and ensure we have the skills, capacity and resources to deliver the plans we decide.

We chose to plan our future not just respond to it, and we have done this not just by producing a vision and ensuring it is rooted in our values and our beliefs, and now we are making sure we have plans that deal with the now, the medium term to 2015, and the long term to 2020.

Are we doing the right thing and is Leadership focused on getting there – a resounding yes to both!

Paul Tennant, Chief Executive

Adapt and change

Tony Williams – Group Director of Organisational Development

At this moment, like you, I am just recovering from the snow and the cold…..but with the prospect of arctic winds to come! But I suppose we adapt and change to meet the different challenges the British weather throws at us whether that is in the depths of winter, where out transport system grinds to a halt, or in our ‘blazing’ summers, where out transport system grinds to a halt!

Organisations must also adapt and change to meet the different pressures and priorities that the external environment throws at us. The key is not letting our equivalent of the transport system ‘grind to a halt’! I wrote last time about recognising change is always with us and that organisations must respond flexibly to these challenges.

In Orbit we have developed our 2020 vision of what the housing world will look like and Orbit’s future role in delivering that vision. Creating an organisation that has at its heart a culture driven by a more commercial approach but with a social purpose is a big challenge, but one we must achieve if we are to deliver our vision of ‘Building Communities’. This will entail all of our people thinking differently and innovatively to make the changes happen to ensure we have the right people, systems and structures in place to match our ambitions for the future.

Orbit has a great opportunity to make a real difference to the wider community and we are going to make that a reality!

Milestone for residents of Larner Road, Bexley

A CGI mock up of the final Larner Road development

Last week marked a major milestone for Orbit and residents living on the Larner Road estate in Bexley – after two years of hard work a hugely complicated process of decanting hundreds of residents was finally completed.

Crucially, this means that demolition of the first 4 tower blocks can start – the first stage in what will be a huge construction project to replace high-rise with streets and open space for people and families in the area. Over the past 2 years we have moved 336 households, including 10 leaseholders, out of the area. But these numbers only tell half of the story – it’s not just about shifting people out as quickly as possible.

The Larner Road project team have actually enabled people to fulfil their dreams to move to the seaside, to move to another part of the country to be near family, or simply to move to better homes within the area.  Along the way we also kept void costs to a minimum by providing temporary lets and leases to Bexley council to house homeless households.So when the demolition teams move in next month and we focus very much on the future, it’s also worth bearing in mind the huge amount of hard work which had to happen behind the scenes to make this possible.

For now though, the Larner Road project team are entitled I think to reflect back on a job well done.

Maggie McCann
Development Director, East & South
Orbit Homes

Orbit CEO Paul Tennant’s immediate response to the Autumn Statement

It’s good to see that housing is increasingly regarded by the Government as key to jobs and growth in this country, as well as playing a vital wider role in society. There’s obviously lots more detail we need to see, but the announcement around funding for Local Enterprise Partnerships, including housing, looked interesting, and if the capital funding and/or Government guarantees for housing are ‘new money’, that is obviously very welcome. But we have a real and worsening housing shortage, our customers and communities are struggling and Welfare Reform – including the new 1per cent future benefits cap – is making things even more challenging. So this does not look like the game-changing budget for housing we hoped for. We really need a housing and investment strategy for the long-term.

Bigger than Business – community investment in an age of austerity

Christop Sinn, Research and Policy Manager, Orbit Group.

After nearly a year in the making with some ups and downs along the way, the long-awaited and much talked-about Big Society research has finally reached its conclusion with the publication of a final report in a weighty three volumes.

So what have we learned? Talking to 170 individuals, including 120 residents on their views of current and more importantly future potential community investment activities by a team of researchers at LSE Housing and Communities led by Professor Anne Power, provides us with a solid foundation to build and work on.

For instance, the top priorities of residents in three typical areas of our operations align, regardless of geography, namely youth advice, job access and activities; employment  and job training; tackling crime and anti-social behaviour; welfare and money advice; and support and provision for older people. Our current community investment activities whilst successful in their own right are marked by an ad hoc approach and aligning our offer with other strategic priorities could have an even greater impact and payback. The development of a framework for community investment by the LSE research team will help us greatly in this respect. And finally, in our residents we have an untapped resource, which with the right training and support, can be of great asset and benefit to housing organisations, as the ‘peer research’ aspect of this research has demonstrated so convincingly. Six residents were trained to conduct some of the interviews with their peers. In the end they carried out 60, which not only led to some considerable savings, but equipped them with new skills and a better knowledge and appreciation of their neighbourhood. This approach could lend itself particularly well to areas such as basic advice on welfare reform; encouraging energy saving; elderly care and family support; and financial advice. We are currently finalising a project whereby some of the peer researchers will help us to gain a better understanding of our customers’ energy use, so we can provide better energy reduction advice’ by conducting face-to-face interviews.

Housing associations are at a critical juncture. Depleting grant funding, the impact of welfare reform on our residents and businesses, a weak economy marred by high unemployment and a looming environmental crisis are a reality which we can’t escape. This is why Orbit has embarked on ‘2020’, an ambitious business planning and review exercise which aims to answer two ‘simple’ questions, namely what are we about;  and what do we want to look like as an organisation by 2020 and beyond. The findings from the present research will form a critical part of this work and guide our future community investment offer in the light of resident expectations and external drivers, such as localism and the Big Society. Housing associations are ideally placed to take a lead role in making our communities more resilient as we are entering an increasingly uncertain future and colder social climate.

As demonstrated, housing associations are indeed Bigger than Business and society needs organisations such as us to build a better future. Most of all we owe it to our residents and communities!

Christop Sinn, Research and Policy Manager

The complete set of reports, including a short summary can be found on the Orbit Group or LSE’s website from the 28 November.

A clear, compelling and consistent voice

Paul Tennant – Orbit Group Chief Executive

A general consensus, and a clear frustration, is that in the past year or two we as a sector haven’t always delivered a completely clear, compelling and consistent voice to Government, stakeholders and the wider public about the key role of affordable housing in this country. Not getting your message across effectively is not just a matter of reputation, profile or common sense – it really does matter.

That’s why I was really pleased to see the success of the Homes for Britain initiative aimed at creating a common voice for everyone involved in housing at the recent round of political party conferences. Orbit hosted one of the more than 50 events under the Homes for Britain banner aimed at driving our message to the heart of the political agenda. We had an excellent debate hosted by Planning and Development Minister Nick Boles MP alongside Wates Living Space and Bexley Council. Collaboration was a powerful theme.

Indeed, it’s crucial that we bring together people from across the affordable housing sector, the private sector and local authority colleagues to work together. After all, solutions were never just sector specific, and I think more than ever we need to work across traditional boundaries and markets to make things happen.

At Orbit, although we are determined to shape our own destiny through our own Orbit 2020 programme, we also recognise that collaboration is the key to delivering the homes this country needs now and in the future. I also suspect that connecting with people, communities and organisations across new networks will be as important as traditional organisational structures in the future. During tough times, the value of developing existing relationships and creating new networks of people pulling in broadly the same direction is critical.

Paul

‘Nudge’ theory and Orbit

Paul Tennant – Orbit Group Chief Executive

You may have read that the government is thinking about changing the rules on organ donations so people have to ‘opt out’ of the system rather than ‘opt in’ by signing up for and carrying a kidney donor card.

And that it is thinking about pushing internet service providers so people have to ‘opt in’ to being able to receive ’adult content’ rather than managing a system of filters on their computers to ‘opt out’ and prevent children seeing obscene images.

All very interesting, I hear you say. But what’s that got to do with Orbit?

Well, these are examples of something called ‘Nudge’ theory. It’s a way of changing consumer behaviour and choices to create beneficial effects for society, for individuals or for organisations. I think it might have big potential for Orbit and for improving the lives of our customers.

The type of Nudge shown above is called a ‘default’ Nudge, where you change the way a whole system operates (the ‘choice architecture’) to make it much easier for people to adopt a preferred behaviour. But there are lots of other forms of Nudge.

For example, which of us hasn’t bought something in the supermarket because it will give us extra ‘reward points’ rather than because we actually needed the item? A ‘reward’ Nudge.

And what about those new motorway signs, like ‘Bin your litter or take it home – others do’ or ‘Don’t hog the middle lane’? These are a type of ‘peer pressure’ Nudge. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but if more people did it, it would improve everyone’s experience of the motorway.

Nudge is catching on fast as a generally cheap, quick and effective way of changing services, processes, forms and language to encourage ways of behaving without actually compelling people to do something through new laws or rules.

It’s big in America and our own government has set up a Behavioural Insights team in the Cabinet Office whose main job is to develop and implement new Nudges that can be applied in public policy. They reckon it’s already saved taxpayers millions of pounds.

They’ve had successes through really simple things like changing the way they phrase letters to people due to pay tax, by sending personalised text messages to get people to pay court fines, and including photos of the untaxed car in letters to people demanding it’s taxed. In fact, the unit has been so successful, the government is thinking of expanding it.

It’s not just about saving money. There are lots of examples around healthy eating, health awareness, improving people’s pension schemes and mortgages, and more. Nudge can be applied in virtually any field, including housing.

In fact, we’ve already started to apply it in Orbit. A good example is the Heart of England ‘pro-points’ reward scheme for people who pay their rent on time. But there are surely many, many more ways Nudge could help us.

One of the ideas that has come out of 2020, for example, is around supplying customers with Smart meters to monitor their electricity use. Where this has happened, the evidence suggests people cut their fuel usage – and bills – by more than 10%.

Areas like anti-social behaviour, rephrasing our rent arrears communications, tenancy support are all open to potential Nudges. A bit of out-of-the-box thinking could very simply change the way we do things to the benefit of both our customers and Orbit as a business.

Why not use part of a team meeting to brainstorm how Nudge might improve the way your part of the organisation works?

As Orbit 2020 is showing, our world has changed and we need to adapt and operate in a more flexible, smarter way. As we think through our strategy for the coming years, Nudge shows how quite small actions can have quite big effects.

If you’re interested in finding out more, the original book is called ‘Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness’ by a couple of Amercian professors, Richard Thaler and Carl Sunstein. You’ll also find a whole host of interesting articles if you Google ‘Nudge theory’.