Season 5 episode 2 – May 2024

Spotlight report on attitudes, respect and rights with Angela Gascoigne, Chief Executive of Shal Housing

Victoria King
Hello and welcome to this podcast with the Housing Ombudsman service. My name is Victoria King. I am a Sector Learning and Development Lead here at Housing Ombudsman, and I have the pleasure of being joined today by Angela Gascoyne, Chief Executive at SHAL Housing. Thank you for joining. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Angela Gascoyne
Thanks, Victoria. I have been in the housing sector for a long time, and I have worked in local authorities and housing associations across the southwestern Wales, in fact, the southeast and the East Midlands as well. I am not somebody who fell into housing. I am somebody who chose housing. I love housing. I am passionate about it. And I have been chief executive here at SHAL for just over 10 years, and it has been a pleasure.

Victoria King
Amazing, great. We met earlier this year at the National Housing Federation Customer Experience, Experience and Resident Engagement Conference back in February, where we were both talking about in a breakout session supporting vulnerable customers. Following on from our Spotlight Report on attitudes, respects and rights- relationships of equals we released back in January 2024, I'm interested to understand what is your approach at shell to vulnerability?

Angela Gascoyne
Well, because we provide homes for people who are in housing need or have been homeless. And we need to remember that some of the people that we provide homes to may have had really difficult times, and that could make them vulnerable or less resilient in the present, even though their difficulties have maybe stopped now. We also try and remember that the circumstances of somebody's life at home or in their neighbourhood or even in society can mean that they are more vulnerable than most people. And that might be because they're living in poverty, they have a disability which isn't being catered for. Or it might be about their age, being young or old, or their family circumstances or not having a family, or it might be about their health, lots of things. And someone might be getting along just fine and then something happens, and they find themselves in a place where the risk and uncertainty and emotional impacts that they are facing are really difficult.

Angela Gascoyne
So everyone at SHAL go through training on trauma awareness. And for our housing team, they have more in-depth training, and we also train everyone in restorative practices. And we're looking at how we embed this throughout the organisation into everything what we do. We use these lenses to look at the work we do, and we are learning about it. We are learning about what works and what does not work every day.

Victoria King

I really like that. How you're trying to check you've got that real good culture and in everybody that works at shall and it really does tie in with our individual circumstances approach that, how you've described your approach there. So, a lot of the approach to vulnerability is about fairness and how it needs to apply to all, not just those who are deemed to be vulnerable. And I this human centric approach, how do you ensure this approach happens at shell?

Angela Gascoyne
I would say that's a shell. We try and remember that every single one of us can be vulnerable and that every single one of us can be strong. Vulnerability is sometimes easy to see, but often it's hidden. And it makes sense to hide your vulnerability. It's how we all survive.

Angela Gascoyne
So we try hard not to make assumptions that people are okay or not okay. And fairness is at the heart of restorative practices, and we're using these practices with everyone. We might not get the outcome we hope for, but we can acknowledge that the process was fair. And a big part of this is asking people the same set of questions. For example, how is this impacting you? What do you need from is? What do you think needs to happen next? So, the questions are the same to everybody, but the answers are personal to each individual.

Angela Gascoyne
And at our survey that we did last year, 85% of our tenants told us that they feel that we treat them fairly and with respect. 5% said that we didn't, and 10% aren't sure. And we know that this metric, this being treated fairly and with respect is a key driver of overall satisfaction, along with having satisfaction with our repairs and maintenance service.

Angela Gascoyne
So we want to make sure that we continue to build on this. We clearly don't get it right the whole time, but I hope that we are sensitive when we get it wrong. And I love what Brenny Brown says when she says, I'm here to get it right. It's not to be right. That's the approach that we try and take.

Victoria King
That's a really powerful sentence there from Freddie Brown. So yeah, and it also links back. So, what we're saying in our report is, which is what does the person need? So, in our call for evidence on the spotlight on Attitude, Respect and rights report, 58% of residents said that they consider themselves to have a disability. Of those, only 19% said their landlord had made reasonable adjustments for them. How do you deal with requests of this nature, and do you have a specific reasonable adjustments policy?

Angela Gascoyne
We do have a policy, and we definitely deal with the need for adjustments because of disability. And again, when we ask tenants for their priorities as part of our survey last year, do more to help people with disabilities get the support they need was in the top six. In fact, it was in the top four out of 14 priorities that, and people had put together.

Angela Gascoyne
So we have an adaptations policy. And through that policy, we aim to meet the needs of all of the residents and to ensure that they're independent, that they have privacy, that they have dignity and that they can be comfortable in their home with the minimum of intervention and intrusion, which is what we all want, I think, from our homes.

Angela Gascoyne
And in practice, this means that, for example, we design kitchens and bathrooms when we're doing refurbishments with the tenants to meet the needs of the household. And that could be about taking into account, for example, recently a grandchild's ADHD and autism. So, when we were designing the kitchen to make it good for that family, we had to make sure that the cupboards were locked and that the cupboards were locking. And that we were very careful about the layout of where the cooker was in relation to everything else when we are replacing our bathrooms, again, we work with the household to make sure that they get what they want. And quite often, what's happening at the moment is that we're replacing a batch with a walking shower.

Angela Gascoyne
We try and maximize ground where we can because we want to make our fins go as far as possible. But thresholds have been raised, and that isn't always available to us. So sometimes this costs a little bit more, but we think it's the right thing to do. And we'll also make obviously ma minor changes like grab rails pathways, changes to the garden if that's what people need in order so that they can actually get out into their garden. We have a small number of fully adapted homes, and we're very proactive about making sure that households who need them get them by working with adult social services. But this is only a really small portion of the homes that we have. And so that, and the adaptations are crucial.

Angela Gascoyne
But it isn't only about physical disability. We'll also look at the support around some tenants who may have a longstanding mental illness, which can mean that it becomes problematic from time to time. And this might be about making sure we know mum, a friend, or a neighbour who we can check in with or who can advocate for them to is when perhaps they are not feeling particularly well. And I think that someone who has a serious illness can, with the right support from their landlord, they can really thrive. And it's about being there when we're needed, but then getting out of the way when they don't need us anymore and just letting people get on with their lives. And the, the other side of the other time, when I think there is a need sometimes for us to make reasonable adjustments is when we might need to do some work on the home, which could be really triggering for somebody in the household. So, we design the working times with the household, with the tenant and plan the most intrusive work with the family in a way which is most helpful to them. And that means that, you know, the discomfort of having to have significant work done on the home is for some people, that can be really difficult to deal with. So, we try to minimize that and make sure that the discomfort is as little as we can help it to be. I think sometimes as well, there are issues around caring for the home because of mental or physical illness or emotional difficulties. And when we are responding to that, our first thing is to build the relationship. And then we plan with the family how they can tackle the issues a little bit at a time so that they're not overwhelmed. And we will also support this by perhaps doing some of the work ourselves, maybe helping the garden. We have a rainbow fund, which the housing officers can access to put a little bit of extra work in, or we might do some of the decorating. I think that's a reasonable adjustment. It's acknowledging that the home has got away from them, as someone described it to me, but it's planning the work that's needed with the tenants in the household and then taking time to support them in the progress they've made in the face over the struggles that they might also have.

Angela Gascoyne
We're currently doing a review of our approach to Equality, diversity and inclusion. And that's giving us the opportunity to review what we do and how we can communicate it more effectively and improve our responses to people. And each time we work with someone, we learn and holding that learning and communicating it is something that we want to get better at.

Victoria King
I like the examples that you've given there, you know, working with way you when you're having a new bathroom, new kitchen, it is a really big fit. I mean, it's just everywhere, isn't there? Yeah, it's, and just making them aware that the of the upheaval that will cause. Do you normally decamp residential.

Angela Gascoyne
Circumstance? We don't normally, our in-house team do our bathrooms and our kitchens for the most part. But and they are really quick and very tidy, and they do take account of the circumstances of the family. And we've had feedback from people. And there was one lady who contacted us to say thank you. Quite often we get thank you from people. I would say pretty much every time we get thank you. And I remember one lady who said that her child had autism. And the, our, my colleague had just been really amazing with them and had kind of been really kind and just taken them into account. They hadn't just ignored them; they had properly interacted with them. And it's that because you're in the home for a week or, you know, two weeks and everything else is going on in that family. There are loads of noise. And as you say, there's dust everywhere. And just making sure that at the end of the day, it's clean, it's neat, it's as good as it can be and is as, it's as quick as it can be. I think, I just think that makes a massive difference. And also, just the way that my colleagues are with people. They're lovely. They're really lovely with people.

Victoria King
Fantastic. And some landlords that we were talking to in the week, they were saying that when they're replacing a bathroom or a kitchen in, they used to decamp people, but now they started working with a firm, they put these like pop up kitchens and pop up bathrooms in the garden. And they said it is quite pricey, but actually, the upheaval of the families is less so than if they were to go and stay in a hotel. So, it's really good.

Angela Gascoyne
If we haven't done that, I will, then I'll definitely look into that. We, we haven't, we haven't, what we do is just make sure that there is a space for them to be able to, you know, go to the toilet or whatever. And we do get it in really quickly. We can get a full bathroom refurbished in 4 days.

Victoria King
Amazing. Who are they? I need the number.

Angela Gascoyne
I mean, any of them. They are all amazing. Ruby, Stacy, Eric, they're all fun. Plastic.

Victoria King
Yeah, amazing. So back to the script, back to the report then. So, a strong theme in our spotlight on attitudes, respects and rights in the resident responses with digital exclusion and unequal access to or capacity to use digital technology. And many residents said that landlords have like a one size fits all approach to communication, particularly with digital communication, and it not reaching all of the intended audience. And that this form of communication often fails to consider individual personal circumstances. So how are you communicating with residents to ensure that you are reaching your residence?

Angela Gascoyne
So we know again from the survey that nine out of 10 residents are digitally active. And since 2019, the number of tenants who want to communicate with shell digitally has doubled. And that means it brings us to 61%. That's still a fair number that don't want to and that's not their preference.

Angela Gascoyne
Interestingly, fewer people prefer the phone now just over half people prefer the phone and 21% want face to face contact. And more people want to write, want us to write to them by letter. About 31% of us, of people want us to write to them by letter. Overall, about 82% of tenants are satisfied that we are easy to deal with, 5% are dissatisfied. And while we know that 89% of our tenants use at least one online service like banking, shopping, health services. Only half of our retirement aged tenants are digitally active, and 74% of those elders like the phone for contact, and a third are happy with email.

Angela Gascoyne
So we know who likes to be communicated in what way and we use this. So, for example, when we're sending out our newsletter, we print a number, about hundred actually, and send the rest via email. Because we know that hundred households want them through the post and the rest are, the rest would prefer to get them by email. So that's what we do. We keep that under review, and we will change it if people change their preference as they, as for whatever reason. We also use texts after repairs and also after complaints when we're closing a complaint, we also text people about both the outcome and the way we handled it. And when we're closing a case on ASP, we text people to ask about their setting, if they're satisfied. If people say that they weren't satisfied with any aspect of those things, then we use the phone. And if we can't get hold of them on the phone, then we'd use their preferred method of contact to follow up on that dissatisfaction and find out why.

Angela Gascoyne
We also take part in walkabouts in some areas, and we attend community hopes once a month or so. And we have our community chats, which are hybrids in the main, and they take place in our offices. So, people can come into our offices and they're also online. So, if they don't want to, they can dial in.

Angela Gascoyne
And we're also looking at the impact of the removal of the analogy phone lines because obviously, we just want to make sure that people are okay with this. Cuz we've got a small number of people who we don't have a mobile phone number for, so we're just going to make sure that they're going to be okay when the analogy phones go.

Angela Gascoyne
We've also noticed that since we moved offices, which was about three years ago, while probably two years ago, the number of people who visit our office has reduced because we've moved out of the town centre. But what has increased is the fact that we're going much more now to people's homes. And I think, this is probably a better way of doing it. So, we're looking at how we can improve our digital infrastructure, but that's much more about making sure that by doing that, we have more time for face-to-face contact. We know that some people will want to just contact us digitally 247 when they've got time to do it. Other people value the fact that they can have a chat with us at home. So, we're trying to do both.

Victoria King
Yeah, and it sounds like you're mitigating sort of the impact of not having that city centre or town centre office by actually being more out and about in the community, having those community hubs, mates once a month and community chat. So brilliant. Thank you.

Victoria King
So in the report, the landlord respondents said that the internal culture and attitudes of their organizations hampered communication with residents. What are you doing at shell to foster that inclusive culture?

Angela Gascoyne
We, we are, our recruitment is very values based. So, when we were looking at recruiting housing officers last year, we asked for people who take responsibility, who learn, get out of their comfort zone. They're compassionate as well as honest. And they aim to be useful and kind to themselves, to others and to our world.

Angela Gascoyne
Isn't an easy thing to do all the time. And we admit that shall isn't an easy place to work all the time. And, but we do support colleagues, and we do try really hard to make sure that's, there is space for them to just decompress. Because I think sometimes, the stresses of what we do can be quite intense and those stresses can get in the way of us being kind. We need to ensure that we have that emotional resilience ourself so that we can be with people who might be struggling and who's a way of dealing with that struggle can sometimes be quite challenging to us.

Angela Gascoyne
So even our maintenance team have, as part of their performance review, their performance appraisal. It's not just about how skill they're at doing the amazing work that they do. It's also about the way that they're with customers, the way that they're with their teams, how supported they are to, with the people, how much they mentor their colleagues. So, all of that relationship stuff is really important to us.

Angela Gascoyne
And we have five commitments, which we make to our tenants and to each other, and those are creating a strong community, building strong relationships, providing quality homes and services, including listening and understanding and being transparent and accountable. And we're just looking at reviewing the behaviours that go with those commitments at the moment. So, people are working on how we're going to put that together next month. So, I'm looking forward to that, actually. But I think that the creation of the culture actually comes from our board. And as a board, they are very challenging, but they're also very compassionate. And they allow us as an organization to be agile with regards to decision making and responsiveness. I'm not a big fan of command and control. I prefer sense and respond, and I think it can be challenging for boards to enable strategy to emerge in response to what we're seeing and hearing from tenants and communities, but I think that's what we do with shell, and the outcomes around that are the most important thing.

Angela Gascoyne
So as a result of this way of working, we've increased our investment in homes to respond to the need for energy efficiency, and we did that quite early on. We see the child when we're working with families, and we don't overlook their needs and rights by focusing just on the adults. We've worked with partners on passive monitoring in homes, which has LED to improvements in heating systems and less interruptions for tenants. We've improved the specifications on the kitchens and the bathrooms but have kept the costs low. We're doing the stock condition surveys in house with the maintenance team so people are comfortable with them going into their home, and they don't mind them coming in and looking in every home as they do their, and do the re, the survey.

Angela Gascoyne
We say sorry when we get it wrong, and we welcome complaints. And the board doesn't worry about the numbers being high as long as the outcomes and the processes are good and that we're learning from the complaints that we're getting. And we do what we think is the right thing to do, even though it might be really scary, like we took a big developer to court back in the day, and that was very scary, but it was the right thing to do. So we are, we know we're not perfect, but we are a diverse team, and we are up for learning. And when we get it wrong, I think there is a bit of humility there, which goes along with the board being challenging but also supportive about his owning it and putting it right.

Victoria King
I love what you say there, the number of complaints isn't always necessarily a bad thing. It might be that you're actually just being really open about your complaints process and that, and residents know that they can use it. And yeah, you're open to complaints as well. Yeah, and there's a little bit of learning in every one of those complaints. So, it's good to hear that you're up for learning as well.

Angela Gascoyne
There is definitely learning in every single one of them, I would say.

Victoria King
And so looking now to the future, then, how are you looking to the future? So, we talk in the report about forecasting for the next 10 years. What are you doing to work out the demographics of your residents and identify by those gaps?

Angela Gascoyne
Well, the, we work in Somerset and that means that we are in a county where about 48 percents of the residents are in rural areas. So, a big part of what we do is about focusing on net zero and climate change because we can see the impacts of it here in Somerset, and Somerset has declared a climate emergency. So, making sure that rural communities are fully engaged digitally, that they have the transport they need, that we are able to build the homes we need.

Angela Gascoyne
That's really important to us. I think that's the, our tenants are going, in the future, are going to increase their expectations. They're going to expect more of us, that they're going to expect more in terms of the standards, and we're up for that. That is something that we're working really hard on now, and we're significantly investing in our homes, and we are significantly investing in energy efficiency because we also know that within Somerset, our worst, we are, I think it's the fourth, we're the fourth most expensive in terms of homes, in terms of house prices, but we're the sixth in terms of the, of income. So, where our income profiles are alongside the northwest and the northeast, but our house prices are alongside London and the southeast. So, we have got real difficulties here in terms of affordability. And I don't think that people are going to have, you know, income to spare. So we have to do more and we have to make sure that our rents continue to be reasonable.

Angela Gascoyne
I think the other aspects of it is kind of what we were talking about before in terms of the sort of digital face to face thing, we're going to have to do more digitally and people are going to expect that office. So, we're reviewing what we're doing digitally and how we make it more customer friendly and make sure that our customers have a good experience of all digital offer. And at the same time, we also know that our tenants value relationship and they value that face-to-face contact with us. So we want to make sure that we continue to do that and to offer that, and to be really human as an organization and to continue to have that sense of community and relationship at the very core of who we're at, shall.

Angela Gascoyne
And I think the other thing that I would say is the issue around people's own communities and their sense of empowerment within their communities is really important. We have been working as the locally trusted organization with a big local project called Villages Together. And they had £1 million to spend over 10 years. And it has been such a privilege working with that community and seeing what they can do. They, they, I, it's just been wonderful. They, you know, they just bought a big playing field. And there, there, it needs to be drained and so that it can be properly used by the football team who are sloshing around in the mood at the moment. They've got football teams going. They're looking at a community hub where all of the services can get to because this is a rural community. It's just been amazing. And there are other communities that we would really want to work with, and we're looking at how we can, what we can do as an organization, as a small community focused organization, what we can do to support people to do what they want to do in their communities.

Angela Gascoyne
One of the other priorities that people said was important to them was help us to help ourselves, help us to maintain our home ourselves, help us to work in our communities ourselves. So that sense of wanting to take control of your life and wanting to have power over your destiny, that's really something that we want to encourage and take very seriously. And look up what else we can do to make that, and to make that a reality for more people.

Victoria King
Okay, so we talked earlier about communication with residents and you talked about how you know who you're going to write, so who you going to email, who you going to phone, how do you keep on top of those records? How do you ensure that your records on residents are up to date and the relevant? And then how do you use this information in your service for residents? I know we've talked about that communication element already.

Angela Gascoyne
We run reports so that we know where the gaps are in our tenant data. And then we contact people, and we ask them to give it to us. So, we're constantly updating the data as we go, but this isn't always as easy as it could be with the systems we have. So, this year, we're doing a review of the systems we have and how they integrate, and we're looking to step this up.

Angela Gascoyne
We use the data we do hold pretty much every day. An example is how we set up the stock condition surveys. So we linked the known vulnerabilities of tenants to the homes that we knew were lower EPC ratings, and then we spread the first surveys geographically so that we could get an early feel of where the problems were likely to be.

Angela Gascoyne
And excuse me, we're also linking work that we're doing on supporting people who are struggling financially to family sizes, particularly where families have been impacted to buy the third child cut. And also to people with disability and to people who are on UC and hit by the bedroom tax and to people who are off gas in rural areas, we want to improve our data holding on people who are, have incomes that are just above the benefit levels because we know that those people are struggling as well, and we think that we can make sure that if we can target them, we can make sure that they have all the information they need and as much support as we can give them, another people, other partners can give them so that they can maximize their income.

Angela Gascoyne
Of course, some people may not want to tell us everything all at once, and I think that's where our commitment to building relationship comes in. People give their information to Jackie or Nicola or Collette or Louise or Lee because they trust them. And they trust them to use it in a way which is positive. And we're looking at how we communicate what difference giving us the data can have. So, if you tell us your income, we can help you with your financial struggles. We can put you in touch with others who might be able to help you even more than we can. And I think sometimes with the data, collecting the data, it does, it just takes time. And I think that's okay because as a social landlord, Shao is in it for the long term. And I think that the important thing about collecting this data is that we're doing it because it is going to benefit the tenant, it is benefiting the person who is giving us that information. And by communicating what that means, it's more likely that people will think, yeah, there is something in it for me if we do that.

Angela Gascoyne
But I think the other aspect of it is that we have to make sure we're trustworthy, and all of that takes time. And we live in a world where everything happens really fast and building trust doesn't happen fast but losing it does. So, we have to take our time and we have to appreciate that it is an honour to have the data shared with us voluntarily.

Victoria King
I love that. An honour to have that information shared voluntarily. Brilliant. It goes back to what we say in the report about ash itself, why a resident might be reluctant to share personal and sensitive information with you. But I love how you talk about, you just explain how, like how and when you collect that data, what you'll be doing with it and how you can actually benefit those residents. But definitely in sharing that personal information, you don't just want to share it with anybody, do you know?

Angela Gascoyne
You don't. No. And sometimes the information that we gets is very sensitive. And it, it has been, it's taken courage, actually, for that person to have shared it. So, you know, we need to be really sensitive to that.

Victoria King
Well, thank you very much for your time today, Angela. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. And hopefully we'll speak again soon.

Angela Gascoyne
Yeah. Thank you, Victoria. Thank you.