Four Long years

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Well, the Christmas party is over, the tinsel and the top of tree angel are boxed for another December. time to get out teeth into the next four years of austerity.

For everyone in housing it’s going to be a busy year. Fortunately most have been planning for it over the last 18 months. So what’s coming peeps? Here is a quick crib sheet if you think you may be behind the curve. As ever, my belief is that you IT and system scan be helping you with a lot of this stuff. If its not, ask "Why Not"?

Jan 2013 – If you are with a local authority, you will no-doubt be well ahead with publishing your ‘Tenancy Strategy’. This lays out all the things that social landlords in your area need to ‘have regard to’ (in the terminology) when dealing with fixed term tenancies. The old policy expires at the end of January.

Apr 2013 – The Housing Ombudsman Service takes on responsibility for all social housing complaints in England. Your complainants need to be referred to it by a designated individual (this could be an MP or local councillor) or can contact it after eight weeks after they have exhausted your own internal complaints procedures.

Several areas of the welfare Reform Act start to kick in too. Many landlords I am aware of are already putting substantial resource into informing residents of what is coming down the line. The (total) benefit cap of £350 or £500 per week for couples was planned to come into force. This has been delayed now until the summer. Details are vague, but this will be while four trial programmes in London are trialled. (Thanks Joe Halewood for flagging that one up!). 

Bedroom tax starts. Working age households under-occupying stand to lose 14% for one room and 25% for two+ rooms.

Residents you may have receiving DLA (Disability Living Allowances) will now move over to PIP (personal independence payments). This will affect new claimants first with others migrated over from autumn 2013

May 2012 – The Prevention of Social Housing Fraud Bill is expected to be  passed. This attaches maximum penalties of two years in prison and unlimited fines for tenancy fraud. How wel do you vet your tenants on sign up? Do you take a photograph or photo ID, recording that on your systems? Are your residents encouraged to report suspected fraud? Dedicated fraud investigation staff may also be useful.

Oct 2012 – UC (Universal Credit) kicks in for new claimants. It is estimated that existing claimants will be migrated over between then and December 2017.

So, quite a lot of change coming. Information distilled from your data (as there is a substantial difference!) should be assisting with identifying and informing your under-occupiers and others likely to be hit by the benefit cap. Depending if residents already use a bank account or not, these groups will need different types of assistance.

Vulnerable tenants should be prioritised. Your housing management system will probably provide the means of recording this information, although if it is up to date and can be relied on is a different matter. To equip front line staff, training may be needed in dealing with tenant questions and anxieties. This may include helping them budget.

Where bank accounts are a viable option, residents should be able to move to direct debit. You may be able to introduce extra DD cycles to support UC payment cycles. For some, the move to monthly budgeting will be a struggle. As will the occasional 5 rather than 4 week month, in which to pay their rent.  I would not be surprised if some landlords resort back to rent collectors in some areas. A return to the ‘Gilbert strip’ might be imminent. By that I do not mean Arizona’s best gentleman’s club either!


Four long years left (so far).


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS If there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Universal Credit

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Well, no doubt about it, if I had £50 for every passionate person in housing I have talked about this subject with, I would certainly have over a grand in my jeans back pocket by now! If you have been working under a stone for the last two years, Universal Credit will centrally replace six of the main means-tested benefits and tax credits in the UK into one single monthly credit. Many prominent figures including John Seddon (he of the ‘systems thinking’ approach), have already questioned the initiative. His open letter to IDS is here  I have more faith in John than "Iain Duncan Cough" (as Lord Gnome called him).

As you might have read in this month’s Housing Technology magazines article, "Welfare reform - Taking Credit where its due", which I was invited to take part in, I have strong feelings about it.  Download it here  it starts on page sixteen.

I don’t think it’s all bad however. I believe that the benefits system is a safety net provided by a fair and just society, it should not become a way of life. All my life I have been in employment and paid eye-watering amounts of taxes to support this and still do. Having seen systems in a number of countries around the world, imperfect as it is, this one is relatively good on the whole. A simplification should be a good thing. People like ‘simple’ don’t they?

Many of the changes that will have most effect on residents are the new way benefits will be received. Monthly not weekly rings alarm bells straight away. What percentage of poorer or aged residents now can navigate even through a week without the temptation of a ‘payday’ or loadshark loan? Many moons back I remember my teenage experience on suddenly moving from weekly to monthly pay. Even being money savvy, that s a big change. Even bigger is the way HB will be rolled up in that payment and will go straight to the claimant. I find it unlikely that the proportion that keeps the roof ever their head will be ring fenced in the family budget somehow.

Spookily enough so do thirty low-income households interviewed by Ipsos Mori this last week 17th September 2012, as reported in Inside Housing magazine. See this link to read the Inside Housing article.

‘This laissez-faire approach will create real problems not only for families themselves, but also for public service organisations, such as social landlords and childcare providers, that families will end up owing money to,’ he said.

The report notes the changes to housing benefit payments are also likely create ‘significant problems’ for social landlords, and could damage their credit ratings as their income would be seen as less stable.
It states: ‘The result would be that housing associations would have to pay more to borrow money, with knock-on implications for the building of affordable housing and new dwellings.’
A further angle on it from the Spectator Blog this week too here.

So what should RSL’s and Housing Groups be doing to prepare before October 2013 for this? Can IT and housing systems help? Most certainly your existing systems can help. I am sure there are few silver bullets to assist in this, however, don’t put faith in a great dashboard that for £20K can ‘drive insight into your resident arrears...’ or similar.

In my experience I have recently done work with a number of organisations who are only just tightening up the way their arrears procedures are married up with rent accounting and financial systems. Many are only just implementing workflow and (what I might term ‘smart’) arrears processing, including initial signup inductions. If your organisation does not use automated arrears or workflow in your systems, or maybe just in a cursory manner, it needs to be analysed and smartened up sharpish.

Auto arrears and particularly workflow is often left to phase 99 in a new HMS project. This is because its generally tricky, needs much involvement from the rents and management in a project team or capabilities were perhaps oversold in the first instance. Often too, solutions should span more than on system and supplier, so your prime provider will struggle to provide the best for you. In an internal project with one or more module ‘champions’, possibly utilising an outside consultant to inject new ideas and techniques and also engaging your suppliers too, you will stand a chance to drive improvements.

Signup and also annual tenant reviews are an ideal time to educate residents, link them with local credit unions, basic bank accounts and drive the move to a higher proportion of payments, in order to access HB via direct debit. If you are not already on AUDDIS, get on it either via your housing management system (if it supports it) or a supplier such as Bottomline . Closer relationships with residents will be needed, so your CRM module needs to be up to scratch, detailing all intercourse back and forth with your organisation. Consider opening up access to all your staff to CRM. Costs can be high, be sure to explore licensing models, often a ‘lite’ user licence can be available at reduced cost.Check you are leveraging all your communication options too, email, SMS TXT, autodailers, preferred languages, twitter, facebook etc.

Keep an eye too on how well your asset management system integrates. With the bedroom tax coming, that needs a serious consideration on bedroom / permitted person data. One for a future blogpost methinks!

Also don’t forget the economic times we are currently in.  Apart from whoever has got the gig to write the core system for the DWP, possibly usual suspects; Accenture and IBM, most suppliers keen for a deal can these days be more flexible on price. Don’t forget to ask for yours!


Many things are already universal.


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk

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Calling All Nations

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Earlier this week I was in an interesting meeting with a housing association in the South West of England. A quite exceptional lady in the meeting (you know who you are), had already asked me to answer a few questions about where I thought the marketplace is at the moment. In particular ‘What the future looks like for Housing IT – what are the great innovations?’

Well wow, what a question? Aside from the usual things (depending on where you are now, integrated housing systems, mobiles or tablets, scheduling, better reporting...), one area I highlighted was one I think will become more and more prominent.

That area if you asked me today is automated calling. This is a technology already fully utilised within the automotive industry. If you own or lease a BMW, Lexus or Merc, or similar quality car and use an authorised dealer, you may have already encountered some of this Voicescape technology before. As my associates, friends and family will know I am not a petrol-head, preferring comfort over speed. These systems are tuned to get a response quickly, helping to make retention of customers a reality. The silent auto-dialler experience coming out of call centres from Mumbai to Cleethorpes does not wear well with these petrol-heads. That proven experience also should work with hard headed customers and residents of Housing organisations too.

As this computer telephony technology is automatic it could be set to make any number of calls a day, fully recorded and audited for a whole week and beyond. This could be to chase your arrears, ask a question about the repair that has only been performed 30 minutes ago, or help with annual survey of family size, essential now the so called ‘bedroom’ tax is coming.

Increasingly too, particularly in bigger UK cities, ‘ambulance chasers’ finding the squeeze on PPI and accident claims are now targeting social housing tenants to open ‘disrepair’ cases. “Has your landlord failed to repair...call us now, no claim no fee.....” yadda yadda yadda.. This technology could issue an automated call every three months, just to ask “Have you any repair issues to log, press one for no or if satisfied with condition of your home, two for yes”. Proof of response or even attempting to survey has been shown to assist in court.

The changes to HB payment, are probably the ones on your mind though. To chase arrears a simple call could be set up: “This is a call from the Ideal HA, your landlord. We would like to discuss your increasing arrears debt. Press one to speak to us to assist (creating a priority inbound call), or two to make a debit or credit card payment now....”
Where language preferences are held for the resident, this could easily be carried out in Urdu, Bengali, Spanish, Mandarin etc. Of course, the better your contact profile data, the more effective this could be. Stats are all easily available from the process, to see the effect on arrears collection improvements etc over time.

I, like many other well informed housing professionals consider the current policies, as squeezing RSL’s and Housing Providers too much. The emergence of universal credit in the hands of residents, not split into HB paid direct to housing providers causes problems in my opinion for RSL’s and Residents. I grew up in social housing. If I were there now on the breadline, like many of your residents, I know that if I had money in my hand, maybe I would pay my menacing loan shark (or PoundsToPocket etc) first, before my caring HA. Still, we need to work within this idealology, I take my pointers from David Orr on that one, when you cannot fight it, work with it.

So the logical outcome is that HA’s will spend more money either with housing officer visits and/or CRM outgoing calls, unless IT technology can further assist. Traditionally, the HMS would be generating plenty of arrears letters. I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to open my letters very fast, unless they are in a red envelope. I always tend to answer the home phone though, or mobile or read texts sent to me.

It’s no surprise that in court, letters are assuming a lesser significance. To be able to document that numerous calls or texts a day for many weeks were sent to a resident, (together with traditional activities) and what responses came back, can be a more compelling argument. Even more compelling are the possible costs. At only £3 a tenant per year from someone like The Housing Contact Company, Call-2-Collect represents pretty good value, when the cost of a letter is about £12+ or a single call centre conversation about £4+ every time.

That’s why I think that this is one of housings current and future innovations, an untapped technology. Look out; it’s probably coming down your road, sometime soon. While it’s not ‘The’ Silver Bullet, it’s certainly one I would like in my Universal Credit & Housing reform Bill holster.

More on the Housing Contact Company at http://www.housingcontact.co.uk/


Maybe this is what INXS meant back in the 80s.



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