We must balance the needs of customers and the future

The principle that people who are housed in our sector should have choice and that organisations need to respond to their views is all positive. There is a clear tension between wanting to listen to customers and genuinely delivering what customers want and a needs-based, rationing-based agenda often driven by lack of supply or financial constraints.

What is really interesting is the degree to which we will need to be even more customer driven in the future. Reconciling customer choice with finite resources is difficult and can lead to organisations becoming apologists rather than creatively trying to respond to customers. The other major difficulty for us, in a strategic sense, is to establish how far a desire to respond to customer agendas goes.

Does it only apply to the improvement of what we have traditionally done, such as repairs, housing management and housing standards, or does it go beyond to genuinely seek to listen to customers and design creative solutions to what they perceive as their needs?

Taking it one step further, a marketing-based approach to service delivery would be to identify what customers aspire to, so the strategy would develop to design new products and approaches. The difficulty is to keep on improving direct and immediate services, while at the same time having an eye on where the future is leading us. This is particularly important in terms of housing development, where we are constructing and acquiring property that we hope will have a long-term life.

However, social changes are so rapid that a failure to visualise housing products that will be in demand in two to 10 years will store up trouble. One can argue that this has already happened in some sheltered housing. Such changes demand both flexibility in tangible products and flexibility in tenure.

A programme focused on the experience of the consumer may lead us to consider looking at combining approved development programme capital and housing benefit revenue to provide support packages to help the individual stay in their own home using flexible tenure approach as appropriate.

The difficulty is to keep on improving direct and immediate services, while at the same time having an eye on where the future is leading us

Detailed research must also be done on key-worker housing. The Halifax House Price Index last week showed that the average house price paid for a first home had broken the £100,000 barrier. A year ago it was £82,968. The average house price in the UK

is now six times the average salary for both nurses and firefighters. Housing affordability problems have spread beyond London and the South-east, with key workers in half the UK's major towns now struggling to buy homes.

The impact of this is now greater than the South-east problem and, as the Barker review recognises, is a major problem on the mobility of labour and the future economic prosperity of our country. A customer-driven analysis may show that a combination of matched saving schemes and grant paid to individuals would perhaps be a more proactive and positive way of providing effective gap funding to help people buy their first home.

Calls for greater choice are widely supported and obviously desirable – without expanding the capacity of services to provide customer choice, the whole concept could be weakened and increase dissatisfaction with services as a whole.