Creating a brand new image

It would not be melodramatic to say that the housing Green Paper and the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy have redefined the core purpose of social or community housing. Whether tenants know of, or approve of, these changes is still to be found out. Equally hazy is our knowledge of what tenants actually want as consumers of social or community housing. What is certain is that every housing association will in the next five years have to choose one or more of the four business development scenarios set out below if they are to take advantage of a challenging new environment.

In order to plan for these scenarios housing associations will have to collect more detailed and different kinds of information about their tenants. Traditional tenant satisfaction surveys are narrowly focused tools, often closely mirroring regulatory requirements. They tend not to ask unstructured questions about customer desires or lifestyles.

Meeting housing need
In the south there is still pent-up demand for subsidised rented housing. Some housing associations will be able to carry on building their stock through the steady accretion of social housing for rent and manage that stock into the distant future. But they will have to ensure that standards of customer service rise at least as fast as customer expectations. Assuming that social housing tenants have lower expectations than other customers is a dangerous fallacy. Assuming also that they will put up with lower standards of service from their landlords, while becoming ever more exacting of commercial companies is a similar elephant trap awaiting the unwary.

As well as tenant satisfaction surveys housing associations will also need information on compliance with regulatory and benchmarking standards. As well as all that, Lemos & Crane is about to embark on mystery shopping with real tenants for a large RSL - Circle 33 Housing Trust. We shall be seeking to ensure that customer expectations (not employer's policies or regulatory standards) are being met, and identifying areas where standards need to rise to reflect rising expectations.

A recent mystery shopping exercise with banks has resulted in the Treasury setting up a review committee to decide whether banks should be subject to statutory regulation. Customer dissatisfaction has dangerous ramifications.

Stock transfer and neighbourhood management
Housing associations that want to access funds to do up, own and manage former council estates will need to take on some of the tougher challenges of these neighbourhoods. The communities need to work, not just the housing. Lemos&Crane's mutual aid surveys of Aylesbury estate in Southwark and the new housing that has replaced the Limehouse Fields estate in Tower Hamlets showed that tenants of both old and new housing had a range of local contacts of family, neighbours and friends, which they place great value on. These can be profoundly disrupted in the regeneration process, perhaps even broken up altogether. The new housing can then be filled with people who are disproportionately poor, unemployed or vulnerable and, worst of all, have no social networks in the neighbourhood to support them.

In our study of Homelessness and Loneliness for Crisis we found that new residents may like their new home, but they are lonely and isolated, with no friends to help them when they get sick, when they need help in the home or with looking after children, or with finding a job.

The history of social housing should be a caution against once more proceeding without detailed information about social networks. All regeneration agencies, especially social landlords, need information about social networks in the neighbourhood. Without this information, communities will casually and unwittingly be dismembered and the new estates will not be communities at all.

Lemos & Crane has also recently completed a community mapping survey for the Southall Regeneration Partnership. In one small neighbourhood of West London we have identified more than 50 community groups, working with more than 10,000 people. Social landlords will need a detailed picture of formal and informal community groups if they are to be effective neighbourhood managers.

Social exclusion
Housing associations may have provided buildings for community or health service use, but when it comes to the delivery of health services, educational services or employment and training, mostly they have left it to others. When thinking about how to deliver services into poorer communities Government departments will consider the local authority, the health authority, the larger voluntary organisations, but do not generally think of housing associations as potential delivery agents of say, the New Deal for young people or single parents, or ICT learning centres. This is curious as many of the intended beneficiaries of these new programmes are tenants of social housing. Landlords already have offices, staff, governance and infrastructure in poorer neighbourhoods. There is little point in setting up endless new organisations, with diseconomies of their small scale, which live under a permanent financial cloud. Joined-up government may be about to knock on the door of housing associations. If it does, housing associations will need information about the varied needs of their tenants, not just their housing needs.

Lemos & Crane is about to embark on a survey of Bethnal Green & Victoria Park housing association's tenants to gather this wider information. In order to get it, we will not rely on the traditional postal questionnaire, we will also be using telephone interviews, door to door surveys, focus groups and one to one unstructured narrative interviews. Without this range of qualitative techniques, surveys will produce thin and predictable results.

Joined-up selling
Social landlords have something that businesses crave - a database of customers with information about their lifestyles and spending power. If people can buy electricity from gas companies, unit trusts from clothes shops and bank accounts from supermarkets, why do social landlords not seek to sell tenants financial services, cable TV, or more prosaically, gardening, window cleaning or lottery tickets? Small incursions have been made with home contents insurance, but an opportunity of great mutual benefit to landlords and tenants is going begging. But tenants would have to start to see their landlords differently - beyond repairs and rent arrears.

Recent research that Lemos & Crane has done with tenants of Circle 33 housing trust showed that, while most tenants were very satisfied with the housing service, as far as virtually all tenants are concerned, the job of housing associations is repairs and housing management. Growth of all kinds, including housing homeless people and meeting housing need, comes second. If expectations were to be changed a careful repositioning process would be needed to stretch the brand, not so dramatically, but akin to Richard Branson's Virgin.