Risk and resilience in the Scottish social housing sector: ‘We're all risk managers’

Abstract

Social housing providers confront an array of risks strategically and operationally. Recently, models of hybrid organisations have been developed to understand how non-profit landlords are changing in response to market and other external pressures. In this paper, we draw on a multidisciplinary conceptual framework of external and internal risks, multiple stakeholders and resilience strategies, as well as the notion of hybridity, in order to make sense of change in Scotland's social housing sector. The paper draws on elite interviews as well as case studies that seek to capture the range of approaches adopted by providers. Although providers handle and respond to risk in a variety of ways, risk management is a necessary part of the management of social housing businesses. Increasingly, providers are concerned with questions of resilience – the need to make themselves as organisations more resilient and also to promote greater resilience amongst tenants as a way of mitigating risk. Our research suggests that this is leading to some positive outcomes e.g. greater diversity within the sector and increased customer focus but there is concern that government policies remain within silos and are insufficiently flexible to deal with changed circumstances and the evolving needs and aspirations of the sector.

Keywords:

• risk
• resilience
• hybridity
• path dependency
• diversity

Acknowledgements

We thank colleagues at the Wheatley Group for partnering with us and supporting this research, plus everyone who participated in interviews, the steering group and our case study organisations. All views expressed however represent the views of the authors alone.

Disclosure statement

Tony McLaughlin was seconded from the Wheatley Group to participate in the research that led to this article.

Notes

1. Inside Housing – Colin Wiles October 30 2015 ‘The beginning of the end?’, http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/debate/expert-opinion/the-beginning-of-the-end/7012516.blog

2. The Scottish Government has retained high per unit grant levels for social housing (compared to other parts of the UK) and while there is a clear retained medium term commitment to new social supply, the overall programme for new supply is constrained by wider austerity pressures.

3. The Scotland 2016 Act confers more powers to the Scottish Parliament and this includes powers to alter the housing cost elements of the main working age social security benefit, Universal Credit. This is a significant devolution of social security to Scotland and is both a considerable challenge in terms of implementation but also has implications for Scottish control over housing policy.

4. Councils need less grant because they tend to own the land they build on and can access better terms for long term loans.

5. Commercial diversification usually requires the establishing of a subsidiary and, if the provider is a charity, maintaining consistency with overall charitable aims. The regulator may also have a legitimate say in the matter insofar as it affects the regulated part of the business and its tenants.

6. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/

7. This is in fact a different representation of a phenomenon well known to behavioural economists – the ‘saliency bias’ where individuals over-estimate the significance of the familiar or known

8. One of the authors was a board member of Sanctuary Housing Association during this episode.