In his latest opinion piece, CEO of Coastline Housing Allister Young talks about why sometimes having the confidence to make the unpopular choices can actually reap rewards.
Often, we have to make choices between two things, when we’d rather have both. Like having your cake, and eating it. Having to make choices is something the Prime Minister talked about in a speech at the Labour Party conference, when as well as setting out some other times when choices need to be made said “If we want home ownership to be a credible aspiration for our children, then every community has a duty to contribute to that purpose.”
Generally, Coastline does a good job of keeping people satisfied. We know what from our customer satisfaction surveys, which shows that our 83.3% satisfaction rate is improving, and in the top quarter of housing associations nationally.
But there are some things we do which aren’t popular with everyone. One of the those things is our strategy of selling some of our older properties when they become empty after a customer moves out.
So why do we do it if people don’t like it?
It’s not because we have to. Or because anyone is making us. Or because we have some sort of target that we set where we have to sell a certain number of homes, or to raise a certain amount of £money. It’s simply because it doesn’t always make sense to keep every single home that Coastline and its predecessors* have built. Some of Coastline’s predecessors were probably excellent. Some were less so. Some of the homes that those predecessors built were, and still are, excellent and fit for the future. Some less so.
(*Quick bit of history for those that are interested. Prior to becoming ‘Coastline Housing’ in 2006, we’ve had a lot of predecessors. Roughly in order: Kerrier Homes Trust, Kerrier District Council, the urban district of Camborne-Redruth, Kerrier Rural District, the separate urban districts of Camborne and Redruth, Redruth Rural District, Helston Rural District, East Kerrier Rural District, Falmouth Municipal Borough, Penryn Municipal Borough, Truro Rural District, and probably quite a few more… )
When we look at all of the 5,000 plus homes that we provide, there are a relatively small number of homes (less than 10% of our overall total) that we don’t think are ones we want to keep in the long term. It could be because of the material the home was built from (they didn’t always build things better in the old days…), if it’s on a flood plain, or if it is too expensive for us to get to a modern energy efficiency standard. While the customer lives in that home, we’ll continue to invest in it and make it as high quality as we can. But when the customer moves out, we’ll take the opportunity to sell it. We also sometimes sell homes that become empty, if we find that the cost of getting it ready for the next customer is excessive.
If that’s all we did, then that would probably be a bad thing. We’d just be selling valuable social homes, so there would be fewer and fewer social homes available, when there already aren’t enough (only 12% of homes in Cornwall are social homes, compared to about 19% nationally).
But that’s not all we do. We take every single £ that comes from those homes that we sell, and we invest it in building new homes. Over the last ten years, we’ve sold 394 of our older homes, but we’ve built 1,803 new homes. As well as providing opportunities for people to buy homes from us, that means we’ve created hundreds of new homes for people and families to live in. It also means that we’ve invested hundreds of millions of £s in building new homes, supporting local companies and creating and sustaining hundreds of local jobs.
So, it might not always be popular, but we’re pretty clear that overall it’s the right thing to do, both for us, and for Cornwall.