2nd opinion: What did you call me?

I returned from Birmingham last week feeling both elated and depressed. Elated because it was one of the best National Housing Federation conferences and my association won an In Biz Award. Depressed because I find so many of my friends and colleagues in merger talks – the rationale being access to social housing grant and the efficiency agenda.

The sector is changing rapidly. Soon, instead of a solar system with many different-size planets, there will be only Jupiters and asteroids left.

The Jupiters will have many moons, which will be held in orbit by enormous gravitational pull from the centre. The asteroids are the small and specialist associations that the Jupiters quite frankly can’t be bothered with. So if you are an asteroid, you may be left alone to get on with it but you will be increasingly marginalised and you will never be able to grow again.

For those of us who feel we are the size of Earth or Ganymede, these are also anxious times. Is big necessarily beautiful?

Well, it has to be said a group structure can be useful if you want to hide costs.

As most of us know, the recent publication of the efficiency – sorry, the operating cost – indices favoured those organisations that had taken out their labour-intensive supported housing activities and put them into a separate company within the group.

But group structures are not necessarily the most efficient. Administering the separate companies and having a number of boards can be expensive in terms of management time and it can lead to compartmentalisation and duplication.

In fact, some of the earliest creators of group structures are now consolidating and, as the Housing Corporation relaxes its rules on diversification, this becomes easier. So if you are entering a group structure and hold dear your unique identity, bear this in mind.

But my biggest fear is not absorption per se. It is about whether these giants are able to devolve power and be responsive, creative and flexible at a local level. I think increasing remoteness from the customer is expressed by some of the names adopted by a number of group structures.

To expand, they feel a need to get away from their geographical and historical roots. So they call themselves something like Infinity, Cubist, Amiable. Names that are far away from the neighbourhoods where they work. When you hear these names you have no idea where these organisations are based and, if you are outside the sector, there is no clue to their purpose. They could be IT companies or management consultants.

One of the speakers at the conference, Dame Gill Morgan, was talking from a health service perspective. She was clear that people do not identify with their local primary care trust or health authority but they do identify with their local doctor’s surgery and hospital. I think the same applies to our sector.

We say we are In Business for Neighbourhoods but some of us don’t want our tenants to know that the decisions that affect their neighbourhood (in particular, where resources go) are being taken many miles away, so we hide our location and historical roots in a concept name.

So, hats off to London & Quadrant and East Thames, which have re-branded recently but managed to hold onto their roots in their group names. For my part, I want West Kent to grow and do more but I also want to remain real, accessible and able to be influenced by our customers.