40 years on

Liverpool Housing Trust

Pauline Robinson, Project officer

The most significant change Pauline Robinson has seen in the sector since she joined Liverpool Housing Trust in 1975 is the rise of antisocial behaviour.

“When I started, the tenants we worked for all knew each other. We’d work with the same families all the time and from a social point of view things were stable, even though the families were from all different types of backgrounds.

“Now, managing nuisance is part of our everyday job. It makes life very stressful.”

Nuisance isn’t the only thing that leads to extra work for Robinson: changes in the way housing benefit is distributed, with tenants having to claim from the government directly, have led to rent arrears problems.

“We had 200 rent arrears court cases last year,” she says. “People don’t always realise it’s up to them, not us, to make a benefit claim.”

Robinson joined LHT in 1975 when Hibernian Estates, the property company she worked for, sold its stock of some 500 terraced houses to the trust.

LHT, which already had 10 years’ experience in home renovation, began to renovate them and Robinson played a part in this.

Then, she administered just 100 homes; now she’s a project officer for 2800.

The trust was set up in 1965 after Bruce Kenrick, the founder of Notting Hill Housing Trust, and representatives of homelessness charity Shelter visited Liverpool and encouraged church leaders to help revive the city’s slums. A committee was formed on the back of a £2000 loan from Notting Hill, and LHT was born.

By the middle of the 1970s, LHT was getting grant from the Housing Corporation, and in 1983 it got its first transfer of 62 homes from Liverpool council.

“A lot of these properties were like bomb shelters with great thick concrete floors, walls and staircases,” recalls Robinson. “They’d been built during the war when there was no timber available, so we set about making improvements and put carpets into a lot of them. Soon after that we acquired 4000 properties from the local authority in Runcorn.”

Robinson sees the “golden days” of her career as the 1990s, when she worked with a close network of people at LHT’s city centre offices in Faulkner Square. “We went on team-building exercises and went out a lot together,” she says. “But in 1998 there was a core service review and we got moved to different offices. A shame, really.”

She says the trust has changed in almost every way since the early days: things were “less organised” then.

“Everyone mucked in and there were no specialist jobs,” she explains.

“But it was an exciting time and there was a huge amount of will for modernising the homes originally owned by Hibernian, some of which had outdoor bathrooms.”

The trust is now run more like a private company than it was 10 years ago, according to Robinson. But she thinks that means it has become a more efficient performer – just as well considering the group now runs a total of 16,000 properties after receiving 6000 from Liverpool council last year.

Another positive change for her is the community work the trust undertakes.

“We’re doing lots of work with children to encourage them to feel a sense of belonging to the area they live in. I think we’re moving along the right tracks.”