Research

This is being led by Sheffield Hallam University and focuses on tenancy sustainment and the main drivers of rent arrears. The research is taking place throughout 2023 and comprises:

• a face-to-face resident survey
• in-depth interviews with residents and colleagues
• a resident diary-keeping exercise
• conversation analysis of landlord/resident communications
• documentary/secondary data analysis
• rent account analysis

Sheffield Hallam will publish an interim report presenting the key findings from the tenant survey in August 2023. They’ll publish the final output - a good practice guide on tenancy sustainment - in February 2024. You can read Paul Hackett’s blog on the research here.

We’ve been working with the Centre for Responsible Credit since 2016 to trial a new approach to rent payments. Called Flex My Rent, it lets residents create their own personalised rent payment schedule rather than paying their rent in identical 52-week instalments. They can reduce their rent payments when they know their spending’s likely to be high (for example during the Christmas and summer holidays). And pay higher amounts when there are likely to be lower demands on their income.

To test whether Rent Flex worked, we ran an initial pilot from January 2017 to March 2019.

The initial evidence was encouraging with just over half of our rent-flexing households improving their rent account balances by £110 on average over the course of the year. But, being based on only a small sample size, it was also but inconclusive. So, we’ve embarked upon a bigger and better trial again in conjunction with the Centre for Responsible Credit, which started in 2021.

Details of our retrofitting roadmap feature in the Centre for Social Justice’s report on exploiting the opportunities arising from decarbonising the nation’s social housing stock. The report argues the transition to a low carbon economy could create over 700,000 net new jobs by 2030. Roles in building construction and retrofit are likely to grow especially rapidly.

With social landlords expected to bring all homes up to EPC Band C by 2030 and then net zero status by 2050, many of these jobs will be created by investment in social housing.

Our contribution explains how we’ll upskill our existing workforce, while also creating employment opportunities for our residents by inserting social value clauses into our supplier contracts.

Between 2021 and 2023 we collaborated with Sage Homes and the UCL Bartlett school on a piece of research into shared ownership. We were one of several registered providers (collectively owning over 10% of total shared ownership stock) to provide primary data.

The paper provides an overview of the shared ownership product over the last 10 years. The main findings are:

• Shared ownership is the main gateway to ownership for households on incomes between £30,000 and £40,000
• It contributes between six and eleven percent of the total supply of new housing per year depending on region
• Risks for institutional investors are low
• There are no substantial differences for lenders in the performance of the shared ownership market from the mainstream market and the first-time buyer market in particular
• Lenders are covered by the Mortgage Protection Clause in the shared ownership lease reducing their exposure to credit risk
• Arrears are mostly small and technical and often mitigated by co-operation between lenders and registered providers
• Staircasing rates have remained constant over the last 10 years. Partial staircasing rates average below one percent per year and staircasing to 100% averages around two percent per year.