Q&A: Darrin Gamble, Bromford
Social landlord Bromford is using “neighbourhood coaches” to build community and help residents realise their dreams
In recent decades, forward-thinking housing associations have invested plenty of effort in making their housing developments more environmentally sustainable, whether through better recycling facilities, better insulation or even solar panels on roofs.
But there is another dimension of sustainability that is just as important: social sustainability.
Broadly speaking, achieving social sustainability is about putting the right conditions in place to actively support people in creating healthy, liveable and resilient communities, today and tomorrow. It’s what happens when houses become homes, streets become neighbourhoods, and housing developments become communities.
Bromford is one of several housing associations that are taking social sustainability seriously. It’s developed a pioneering approach to “neighbourhood coaching” that helps a diverse range of customers to achieve their goals while also enhancing the community as a whole.
The Bromford Deal
At the core of this approach is the neighbourhood coach, who develops trusting relationships with each customer. The genesis of this came from what it calls the “Bromford Deal”.
Put simply, the customer agrees to pay their rent on time, look after their home and garden, make an effort to get on with their neighbours and play a part in building a happier neighbourhood.
In return, Bromford offers each tenant the support of a “neighbourhood coach”, backed by a team of specialist advisors, to help them achieve their goals (as well as providing them with a safe home and repairing what the customer can’t fix themselves).
Each “deal” is tailored to the individual’s own skills, talents, interests and aspirations. They may need help getting back into employment, advice on home ownership, help with managing money better or simply coaching on how to develop a particular skill or access a specific service. The neighbourhood coach acts as the customer’s first point of contact for accessing a range of services, and is responsible for getting to know their customers and building a strong relationship with them.
In this way, the home that Bromford provides becomes a springboard for helping people achieve what they want out of life.
Transforming the landlord/tenant relationship
There are three key innovations embedded in this approach, all of which redefine and reimagine the traditional relationship between social landlord and tenant.
First, the approach seeks to shift the emphasis to the customer’s strengths and potential, rather than defining their relationship with Bromford solely in terms of need and weakness. The neighbourhood coaches are not there to dip in and out “fixing” problems: their role is to focus on the positives in people, build trusting long-term relationships and equip people for success. This requires effort from both sides, unlike a typical service provision relationship.
Second, the neighbourhood coach is more than simply a customer service manager who seeks to ensure that customers are happily using Bromford’s own services. Rather, the coach seeks to connect customers to all local services and assets that might help them thrive and grow: for example, making better use of parks, allotments, cycle paths, community centres, gardening clubs or toddler groups, etc.
Third, the neighbourhood coach’s role is also to connect customers to each other and build community. It’s the coach’s job to know if a customer is a great baker, can coach football or is good with computers, and whether they might be able to share those skills with a neighbour or the wider community. In other words, customers can help the neighbourhood coach to help other tenants, building a network of mutual support that becomes freestanding and sustainable.
It’s up to the neighbourhood coach to identify these opportunities and make these connections, which is what makes the role and programme so innovative.
At Purpose, we were intrigued to learn more about what it takes to get a programme like this off the ground. We spoke to Darrin Gamble, localities leader at Bromford, about how the housing association has developed and adapted this innovative approach to neighbourhood social sustainability.
Q. What was the original inspiration for the Bromford Deal?
It started seven years ago as a direct result of us taking a fresh look at what we were about as an organisation: what is our purpose, what are we in business to achieve? From that came our purpose of “inspiring our customers to be their best”.
This was set against a backdrop of radical change in the country, with austerity and welfare reform high on the agenda. We knew that our customers faced a much more challenging future, and we wanted to play our part in helping them prepare for it. At the same time, we were thinking about the 30,000 homes we own, and the billions of pounds we had invested in them — was there a way to get more out of that investment, rather than just moving people into homes and managing them afterwards?
That’s where the Bromford Deal came from. We wanted to create a different type of relationship with our customers. Often, the journey into social housing is about focusing on need, and what you can’t do. We wanted to tip that on its head. This meant reframing the relationship to focus on skills and aspirations, while securing a promise from the customer to make it a proper relationship between the two of us.
Q. How have you developed and innovated the project over time?
The first two or three years of the original Bromford Deal project really gave us a restlessness to do things even better. We dreamt some new dreams and brought some new thinking in about how to further reframe our relationship with customers. On the back of that, we started a further two-year experiment to test a whole new way of delivering services, centred around coaching and relationships.
We ran a research project alongside this to give it statistical validity, and to learn quickly where things weren’t working. For example, we initially had different colleagues coaching our customers in various different areas of their lives. But we quickly learned that people don’t like telling the same story to three or four people. So we tried investing more training resources into “multi-skilled coaches”, which became the genesis of the “neighbourhood coach” concept.
Based on this experience, we completely remodelled our service delivery and launched the neighbourhood coaching programme in August 2016. We now have 153 coaches, with the last one brought on board a couple of months ago. They deal with customers directly and provide help and support across the board, except for a few very specialist services.
Q. How did this transformation affect you as a company?
Culturally, it lit the touchpaper for us as an organisation. It really feels that there is a complete connection between the neighbourhood coach programme and our core purpose of inspiring customers to be their best.
Of the 153 coaches, 90 are existing colleagues who have transitioned, while 63 are new colleagues. The energy that came with the influx of new people, and the new challenges taken on by those swapping over — it was incredible to watch. There was a real resurgence in our belief in people and our desire to get better outcomes. And not just among those 153 coaches: it has affected the whole organisation.
That said, it was a big cultural change. A lot of people join the social housing sector because they want to help people — and for many, that means doing things for people. We wanted to move them away from that, and towards a situation where we are helping customers do things for themselves. Moving from being a ‘rescuer’ to being an ‘enabler’ or ‘coach’ was a big, big change for some of our colleagues.
Q. How did you find the right people to fill the neighbourhood coach role?
We really recruited for attitude. This meant that we could bring in people from all kinds of different backgrounds: police officers, teachers, ex-DWP staff. All of them brought different skills and experiences that their fellow neighbourhood coaches could learn from. It brought a lot of fresh energy into the organisation.
It wasn’t always easy. We learned early on that some of the new coaches were less comfortable with having more challenging conversations with customers, around things like rent arrears or anti-social behaviour. These conversations can’t be avoided. In our early recruitment, we had perhaps over-egged the positive aspect of transforming people’s lives while downplaying the tough, practical parts of the role. We lost a few coaches on the way, but we have rebalanced how we present the role now.
By the same token, a handful of our existing housing managers have made the decision to move on. These tended to be the ones whose natural style did not fit easily with our desire to move to a coaching approach to our services.
Q. What have been the big wins so far?
It’s already providing a big benefit for our customers. Over the last six months, 91% of our customers have said that they get what they need from their neighbourhood coach. We’ve also met face-to-face with 65% of our customers over the last 18 months — and not just to update records, to properly get to know them.
Very few organisations would invest the time and energy in doing this. Housing management is traditionally very reactive. You only get to know customers when they are in some kind of trouble, be it rent arrears or antisocial behaviour. We wanted to get proactive so that we can understand them more and have a more planned approach to what they want to achieve.
Within the next 12 months, we will have met all 30,000-plus residents, and talked to them about what they want to achieve and what we can do to help them. It’s a long-term investment, but we learned from our pilot stage that we have to give our coaches the time and capacity to build relationships.
Q. This isn’t something that you can impose from the top down. How do you get buy-in and build trust?
Ultimately, it’s a one-to-one relationship and you have to go at the customer’s pace. We’ve certainly had cases where residents would initially be anxious to get a knock on the door from us, but by having a chat and getting to know them, a coach can start to build trust.
Part of it is scale. In the old model, we had housing managers each looking after 500 to 600 homes. At that scale, you can only really be reactive, not proactive. When we started to pilot changes, we brought this down to 175 homes. This gave our coaches a lot more capacity and time to develop relationships. You can make visits week after week, which would have been impossible before.
The other part is the skill of the coaches. The first skill set we looked for when recruiting coaches was the ability to build rapport in a wide variety of circumstances. The technical parts of the role, we can teach — but we need people with real desire and commitment to help people in that way.
Q. What’s the scale of the investment, and what do you hope to achieve?
We’ve made an additional investment of £3 million a year in the programme, and we expect it to break even in five years’ time, with the financial outcomes ramping up along the way.
We expect rent arrears to decrease, with more customers being in credit on their rent accounts. That’s good for us, and good for our customers.
So far, arrears have remained steady, against the expectation that external factors like universal credit would cause them to rise. We’ve also seen an increase in the number of customers in credit, a decrease in failed tenancies and a decrease in the number of anti-social behaviour cases that we take to court.
Q. Couldn’t you just spend that money on building much-needed new homes?
Housing is very high on the political agenda at the moment, and with that always comes a lot of pressure to focus on building new homes. We are doing that too, of course, with our housebuilding programme increasing quite significantly through our five-year new homes plan, but it all comes back to our core purpose.
We believe in people. We are not just a housing association; we are also a people association. So we have to get the right balance between investing in new homes, and investing in the people who will live in those homes.
Q. What are your ambitions for the programme in the future?
We believe in what we are doing and we want to spread the message. We are forming partnerships with Merlin and Severn Vale to deliver the neighbourhood coach approach in their geographies, which could potentially help another 12,000 households. Our ambition is to find likeminded organisations, as we have done with our recent partnership and merger announcements, and spread that impact even further.
Q. What advice would you give to other housing associations looking to develop a similar programme?
Figure out what you are about as an organisation first. Do that thinking upfront, and then bring in new thinking behind your vision of what your organisation is.
Also, recognise that it takes time to create sustained change. It took us seven years to bring our vision to reality, while trying and testing all kinds of things along the way.
To talk about how to build innovative solutions based on your core purpose, get in touch with us about Future Housing Lab, a new collaborative network for housing innovation and business transformation. Call The House on 01225 780000, or email graham@thehouse.co.uk.
[Disclaimer: we are sharing Bromford’s story here for inspiration and to spread exciting ideas throughout the sector. No endorsement of The House or Future Housing Lab by Bromford is implied.]
