Coproduction, residents and staff working collaboratively to design, evaluate and deliver public services, has been in vogue for many years. However, there is a new urgency to achieve genuine coproduction that produces a tangible benefit for residents. In their report, Stigma and Social Housing in England, Denedo and Ejiogu argue that having tenants on the board of directors is a way to end stigma, and to focus the organisation on the needs of tenants. However, Kensington and Chelsea, where the Grenfell Fire happened, had tenants on the board and described themselves as a tenant managed organisation. Rochdale Boroughwide Housing Association, where Awaad Ishak tragically died from the effect of mould, describes itself as England’s first tenant and employee owned mutual.
Those of us working in council housing know how chronically underfunded we are and how risky the current situation is. In common with most experienced housing managers, there is an element of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ when I read the press reports. Tragedies and appalling services have happened across the social housing sector. Having tenants on the board certainly does not make the housing service riskier, but the question for Kensington and Chelsea and Rochdale is why didn’t it make it safer? Why didn’t having tenants on the board affect the culture of the organisation?
The Building Safety Act requires housing providers to meaningfully engage with our residents about building safety. Tenants need to be able to affect the priorities of the organisation and its everyday practices, but they also need good quality advice from their paid professionals.
Genuine coproduction that produces a positive impact for residents is tough to achieve. I know, I’ve been manager of Leathermarket JMB for 25 years, which is a tenant managed organisation (TMO), with a board comprising of ten resident directors, elected by fellow residents. We manage 1,550 homes under a Right to Management Agreement with Southwark Council. This partnership with Southwark Council represents that greatest devolution of control and responsibility to council estate residents anywhere in England. The JMB is self- financing in that we keep the rents and service charges our residents pay, we then pay Southwark our proportion of the borough-wide debt and for the services that council continues to provide. We then use the rest of the pay to provide services and deliver major works.
We seek to maintain estates that include blocks that are a hundred years old, with no cavity walls to insulate, and a factory built tower block, which now seems to be part of the late 1950’s experiment to see how cheaply council housing could be built. Unfortunately, democracy does not wash away damp. It needs money to eradicate damp. As I explained in my Red Brick blog, The Secret of Council Housing Self-Financing, council housing across the country is underfunded. Paul Watt in his book Estate Regeneration and its Discontents makes a compelling case that Southwark has the most underfunded housing stock in England. As a TMO with fully devolved financial and repair responsibility we grapple with the consequences of this underfunding every day; but at least we have greater control than any other tenants’ group in England.
Democracy does not produce the technical expertise required to solve complex cases. However, democracy does clarify priorities. When disrepair cases started to pop up on the regional news, our resident chair phoned me up to demand a list of our complex disrepair cases. As soon as the lockdown restrictions ended the Board told me to get our staff visiting tenants’ homes to find out what had happened to the well-being of our tenants and the condition of their homes during lockdown. It is our residents who face the greatest challenges who are least likely to be persistent in demanding a response from us if there is damp in their homes.
Another advantage that the JMB has is that we are a local organisation, rooted in our community. We are very open to our residents, which means that families who have damp in their homes are less likely to get lost in the bureaucracy. Also, even when we have had overspends I’ve never been asked to limit expenditure on damp eradication. Our resident board members would not stand for this.
As highlighted by the Ombudsman, damp is not a life-style issue; however, if the cause is not penetrating/ rising damp or overcrowding, sometimes the family can work with us to manage the consequence, to argue otherwise takes away agency from residents. A family can’t reduce the size of its household or pay for heating it can’t afford, but it can run a mechanical ventilator or open a window for half an hour after bathing and wipe away minor signs of damp. I wrote a damp policy that included a contract, which sets out what works we will do and the realistic action that families can take to help. When I distributed it to our directors I got told to re-write it, because I’d trodden too close to the life-style line. Good damp management requires intensive work and good coordination within the office, especially between the repairs, major works and housing management teams. I have the address of every home where we know damp is present written on a whiteboard in my office. We have a student on placement from London Metropolitan University to chase up action on all of our homes affected by damp. We have set up a project team, with a resident director, to ensure that our approach becomes more effective.
Given the current underfunding of council housing and the cost of living crisis faced by residents, coproduction has to move beyond ‘the added value of customer insight’. It arguably has a life and death importance. Social Housing Regulator please take note.
For more information about Leathermarket JMB:
In the Shadow of the Shard – A film by John Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrsDCU2qUc
The Caring City-Juliet Davis. Bristol University Press. 2022
Coproduction: A paradigm shift. An MA dissertation by Andy Bates: Available London South Bank University Library
One reply on “The urgency of moving beyond coproduction”
I still work in housing and long, long, before this was the case, was a member of the Southwark Council Neighbourhood Forum, probably long since gone. We were members of our local estates tenant’s associations and fed into issues / works and has some ‘small’ power as to tiny budgets spent on issues such as lighting, so which estate took priority. As we were volunteers first, then sent as reps to this group, the council did not have control of us and we were very much the reps the group needed and not the reps the council wanted. Is this not the issue with tenants on boards? Are they the tenants and voices that the board should have, willing to fight for change, or the tenants the organisations prefer to have? Just my thoughts and perhaps my observations from how housing organisations engaged and fill their tenant representation groups!