Divide and Rule

While this is obviously not the headline I would have chosen, it is true that we will be replacing our seven regional director posts with four directors of regulation and four directors of investment across four new regions.

The change is not a criticism of our current regional directors - they are doing a very good job, but their portfolio was becoming increasingly large and it was obvious that the day of the generic regional director who could be a top-class regulator in the morning and brilliant investment strategist in the afternoon was becoming a thing of the past.

The result will be to provide separate management and focused leadership for both investment and regulation in four new regions. We will retain our eight regional offices and we plan to establish new sub-offices in the eastern and north east government regions.

The proposed changes are driven by aim to constantly improve the services we and registered social landlords deliver to our consumers and to ensure that we make informed and sustainable investment decisions in increasingly complex and divergent housing markets.

As well as rethinking the regional structure, increased use of information technology will be a key factor in the development of the new-style corporation as we carry out our "regulation revolution", meet the demands of large-scale stock transfer and oversee the spending of a £1.2 billion approved development programme by 2003/4.

We will soon be handling £1 billion of business on the internet. On-line bidding is already underway - to date more than 300 RSLs have submitted their bids via the new on-line facilities - with grant transactions to follow.

But it's not just about introducing on-line transaction facilities. It's also about opening up access to the corporation's systems to enable RSLs to service their own information needs. Modernising and streamlining our processes through the use of the internet will increase our efficiency and accountability to stakeholders.

Our new inspection service, currently being piloted in co-operation with Anglia Housing Group, will ensure Best Value and continuous improvement for consumers, while our proposals for streamlining performance standards will give associations the opportunity to tell us how they meet the grade.

The collective effort needed to introduce these changes is immense but we are convinced that we are right to refocus and strengthen our organisation in this way at this time. The registered social landlord sector is growing in size and diversity at an unprecedented rate; RSLs are under real pressure to improve their service to tenants; demand for social housing is increasingly fragmented; funding decisions are increasingly complex, and internet technology is offering us a unique opportunity to transform our service delivery.

Our own strategic review - coinciding with the DETR's five-yearly review of our work - showed that we needed to make far-reaching changes if we were to become a forward looking organisation with the skills, capacity and culture to deliver high quality social housing and create sustainable communities.

We need to build up our skills in both financial and business regulation to cope with the complexities of diversity and viability, to tailor our regulation of RSLs, based on judgement and outcomes, rather than prescription and process, and place greater focus on consumers and on improving RSL performance in service outcomes for tenants. We also need to dedicate more resources to - and build up our skills in - strategic investment management.

The aim of the reorganisation is to ensure that the corporation continues to be effective in regulating the RSL sector and investing in social housing within an increasingly complex and changing environment.

As part of becoming a more skilled organisation, able to deal with increasingly complex issues, we will be creating a number of new jobs at the senior and middle levels of the organisation. But this radical reorganisation also means that some jobs will be lost. With internet technology revolutionising communications and the government's determination that public services keep pace, we have known that the time would come when we would want to offer RSLs on-line transaction facilities and that this would mean significantly fewer programme staff.

For some time, we have been taking steps to minimise the impact of staff reductions on individuals- restricting external recruitment, filling vacancies on a temporary basis, creating development opportunities to equip staff to compete for new jobs and developing contacts with othe rorgainsations to create secondment opportunities.

We will continue to make every effort to integrate current staff into the new structure - there will be direct assimilation where posts are substantially similar, with preferential ringfenced opportunities to apply for new jobs at the same grade.

We have also widely consulted and listened to the views of staff about the timing and sequence of the changes so that we don’t move too fast on implementation. We are aiming to appoint the new directors of investment and regulation by Christmas and the full reorganisation will be in place by October 2001.

New working arrangements will be thoroughly pilot-tested before they go live and new organisational arrangements will only be introduced once associated technology has been implemented successfully and staff have been trained.

You will notice that until now I have made no reference to Corporation headquarters. That is because we have put on hold our review of central service functions until the corporation's new chief executive Norman Perry, who joined us this week, was in post and able to play a leading part.

Although change has been signalled for some time now, the announcement last week has inevitably brought home to staff here the scale of the change.

At this stage, the focus of many staff is of course on the job losses rather than on what the "new" corporation wants to achieve or the opportunities it can offer for people working here.

The modernisation of the corporation is not a criticism of what has gone before. The corporation has a track record that is second to none. In great part that is due to our ability to continue to change, to keep pace with a changing environment and to keep the Housing Corporation at the nucleus of social housing.