Housing Futures 4

There is no widely accepted definition of ‘food poverty’. However, a household can broadly be defined as experiencing food poverty or household food insecurity if they cannot acquire “an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways.” (House of Commons)

According to the Department of Works and Pensions (DWP) Households Below Average Income survey, in 2021/22, 4.7m people (7%) in the UK were in food insecure households. Among the 11m people found to be in relative poverty, 15% were in food insecure households, including 21% of children.

We understand food poverty has multiple impacts on individuals’ health and wellbeing, including a higher risk of dietary related illnesses and diseases. These figures are magnified when relating to social housing demographics.

The need to develop sustainable solutions has become more pressing as supplies to food banks reduce, driven by general cost-of-living pressures and fuel price increases. Demand happens to be understated because some people will not use food banks for reasons of self-dignity. The Trussell Trust alone supplied 2.99m three-day emergency food parcels in 2022/23.

While we are no longer surprised people cannot afford basic things in life, it has become too easy to scrabble together a minimal solution to get through the next period. Consequently, it leaves us in a situation that relies on a sticky tape infrastructure piecing together emergency help for people to get through each week.

Too often we can fall into the ‘system is broken’ analysis mode when confronting challenges, and yes, it is broken on many levels, but too few are prepared to explore ways around things. It also partly explains why genuine transformation in the sector is so rare with leaders preferring to approach change systematically in search of a silver bullet, thinking change can be driven top-down, unwilling to persevere over 3-4 years, and recognizing that a successful search is a never-ending journey. This is best achieved through community development.

The classic customer engagement approach is wedded to hierarchy, unequal power, paternalism and achieve an organisation-driven outcome. It’s an anachronism, and a disservice to customers.

It means learning from the work of people like Hilary Cottam and Cormac Russell on asset-based community development. The premise of their argument is services should work with people, not do things to them, and should draw on a wide range of assets in improving outcomes. Their insights are especially relevant at a time when long-term conditions represent a growing proportion of need and demand, and where there is evidence of the benefits that result when people with these conditions are supported to take greater responsibility for managing them.

Classically instinct and practice can sometimes view regulation as a disabler, where we should be working in tandem with regulators to build, for example, place-based regulatory sandboxes to enable prototyping, speed, and flexibility of innovation.

From a regulatory compliance perspective, I believe the community development approach could simultaneously enhance customer engagement through a strengthened culture of listening, engage voices least satisfied/not heard, create mechanisms to capture those outside the regulatory norms, co-production, more robust self-assessment with input from the frontline and for board to see the same picture as told by officers/reports.

Neighbourhoods require a reappraisal of housing, asset management and development strategies so that they are aligned to a world where scarcity of resources is forcing a rethink about how we interact with and use spaces, how we live and work and how we design our built environment. It includes reusing vacant spaces, retrofitting, lightweight rooftop extensions, etc.

Hafod should aspire to be at the vanguard of the ‘Streets of the Future’: multi-dimensional, simultaneously adapting to food scarcities, isolation, ness, caring responsibilities through communal kitchens, co-working landscape, community shared energy zones, etc. Much of this thinking was referenced in the Hafod Caring for the Future vision and remains even truer today.

It requires creative utilisation of green spaces so that they can be deployed to grow vegetation, biodiversity, become places of fun etc. The beneficial impact on physical and mental health is well-documented. How many such spaces do we own that are under-utilised?

We need ways to collaborate with local communities, public health, and primary care agencies to make this happen. The community and voluntary sector are natural allies bringing enormous range of knowledge, skills and experience but often lacking resources, however they remain under-utilized. We need to be smarter including being prepared to invest in the same way we think little of spending huge sums of money engaging professional advisors.

The indirect cost of adult and childcare is borne out of social and economic circumstances that means we now live further apart than we once did and away from kinship of small close-knit communities and extended families. In this respect, older homes are more capable of inventive adaptation, infilling, and extension, and can be cost-effective, but not exclusively. New housebuilding (social housing exclusively) results in conventional housing typologies. Understandably funders prefer this certainty, but it does not allow for changing circumstances.

From a European perspective, Germany has 450+ purpose-built multi-generation projects, forming a key part of the national housing strategy. The Netherlands via the Social Housing Experimentation Unit has a policy goal of 500k units by 2040. Spain’s ‘Vive y Vive’, La Caixa, subsidies the cost of the elderly who act as home sharing hosts. Denmark has a strategic alliance between the city of Aarhaus and Braband Housing Association.

Community kitchens can create hybrid capital systems where food is cooked and shared equally, economising spends, supporting local food supply chains, reducing food waste, heating and cooking costs, improving nutrition, building community and individual resilience, developing mutual support networks, facilitating informal care arrangements and improving general health and wellbeing.

Future capital investment must be sufficiently flexible to enable new developments alongside the repurposing of existing spaces and dwellings, as must our approach to decarbonisation which needs to be developed from a neighbourhood or district level rather than individual/street dwelling.

We underestimate the intangible contributions that housing associations bring to place, neighbourhood, and communities – community cohesion, social capital, tackling isolation and loneliness, preventative health care upstream interventions, supporting local supply chains etc. It’s significant, and we miss a trick by focusing on balance sheets and ignoring value flows.

Finally, it invites consideration about finite resources. New Bauhaus argues that timber building harvested from old growth forest generates similar, if not higher, carbon emissions than a typical concrete structure. Whether its sustainability or the circular economy we need a higher regard for a planet where resources are diminishing and there is a dawning realisation, they are also finite and precious.

There are several important equality implications, especially given that women have a higher representation across social housing and are the primary care takers in most households.

•    67% of people accepted as statutory homelessness are women.
•    60% of adults in households claiming benefit are women.
•    57% of adults in social housing are women.

(UK Women’s Budget Group)

The above reflecting the fact women have lower incomes and lower capital. A recent Senedd report by the Bevan Foundation on food poverty also described women’s role as ‘shock absorbers’ in the system.

Food poverty/security increased fourfold post pandemic (Trussell Trust)

Other studies have shown improvements in household welfare depend not only on level of income, but also who earns it. Even if people can afford and access needs are met, the ability and opportunity to prepare food is important to food security. The many factors include lack of infrastructure to store and prepare food, energy costs of cooking, lack of skills and time to cook.

Whilst most adversely impacted it is not only women but also other groups such as adults limited by severe disability are three times more affected, as are ethnic minority households disproportionately. (Food Foundation)

(Annual Social Housing Surveys highlight households contain at least one or more person with a registered disability or life limiting illness.)

Food poverty/security has a huge impact on the work and role of housing associations.

The paper paves the way for a wider strategic discussion of future options and direction and comes at a time when the sector discourse about filling unmet public service gaps is moving rapidly from the why and what to the how and when. Also, coincides with the media spotlight on housing associations where customer service has been declining since 2015 and at their lowest for a decade (Jo Causon, CEO, Institute of Customer Service), and a general perception of being distant, insensitive, to customers.

Whilst there is considerable room for improvement, we have been shown not to be afraid to look into the mirror to acknowledge shortcomings and a culture that is receptive to learning lessons. I make this point because despite shortcomings we also do a lot of things well. From a community perspective I have listed some of those improvements, but equally see them as part of an ongoing journey of continuous improvement.

•    Understand the importance of mobilising assets from places, communities, and organisations to tackle big challenges.
•    Better versed with understanding social capital (the relationships within and between groups that form trust, relatedness, and collective capacity).
•    Building common purpose.
•    Lending voice to those who have a significant contribution to make but might not get heard because of disparities.
•    Building on the existing strengths, capabilities, and methods for improvement. And, to capture and share data, learn, adapt, and innovate so that we improve.

There are other good ingredients in place:
We have a culture that has created an ethos and energy where people and teams feel supported, greater sense of agency, to contribute, develop new insights, and adapt their ways of working and make improvements towards collective goals. (Great Place to Work Survey Results, 2021, 2022, 2023)

Determined people function leadership has helped to uphold a strong sense of compassion for customers and colleagues, recognizing their individual personal stories through an assortment of support measures.

Through intensity of effort, and application of resources, and investment, we have strengthened infrastructure, enhanced financial capacity, and injected a renewed sense of ambition among colleagues, leadership, and the board.

Skillful finance leadership to reducing limitations of historic legacy funding has massively increased opportunities to create better futures for the people we serve.

And an assortment of good controls to ensure the organization regulatory, legislative and compliance obligations and responsibilities are met with high levels of diligence and integrity.

• New European Bauhaus – successors to the original movement of industrial transformation of design and manufacturing in the 20th Century.
• Radical Housing – Designing multi-generational and co-living housing for all – Caroline Dove, 2020
• North Wales Anti-Poverty Alliance – Well Fed Project
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – systematic approach to engaging communities to shape health. USA.
• Caring for the Future – Hafod, 2018