Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#39 - Jenny Danson: Transforming Social Housing - Data-Driven Strategies, Healthy Homes, and AI Innovations
Can technology and data revolutionize social housing?
In our latest episode, we speak with Jenny Danson, the visionary founder and CEO of the Healthy Homes Hub, who believes so.
Jenny shares her journey and the profound impact that smarter, data-driven strategies can have on tenant well-being. We explore the fascinating intersection of technology and social housing, highlighting how proactive data use and innovative maintenance can lead to healthier living environments rather than just ticking regulatory boxes.
Jenny's expertise provides a deep dive into the nuanced challenges facing the housing sector, from the unintended consequences of retrofitting to the slow pace of organizational change driven by risk aversion and underfunding.
Finally, we consider the broader implications of focusing on healthy homes amid crises like COVID-19 and the energy crisis.
Our conversation reveals the importance of aligning leadership with tenant health and sustainability goals and how leveraging AI-driven best practices can create more resilient and equitable housing solutions.
Jenny Danson - LinkedIn
Healthy Homes Hub
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Air Quality Matters and we already have what we need to make a difference. I believe the conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and this is Episode 39 of the Air Quality Matters podcast, coming up a conversation with Jenny Danson. We discuss, in the context of housing, what makes a healthy home, jenny's vision behind the Healthy Homes Hub, knowledge sharing, best practice and the challenges of driving change in social housing. She is the founder and CEO of the new Healthy Homes Hub, a pioneering social purpose company and centre for excellence platform at the forefront of fostering healthier living environments within social housing, bringing together housing providers, industry contractors, academics and health in a coordinated and genuinely collaborative way to learn and share knowledge and explore solutions to make homes healthier to live in. Here Jenny has form. She successfully created the PropTech Innovation Network, which many people will know, supporting the social housing sector to adopt technology and to manage their properties. For over 30 years, she has led transformational change and service improvements in CEO, coo, executive Director and Programme roles. She has worked from start-ups to multinational brands, including BAA, plc, boots, opticians, lovell, ilk Homes, fortum. Along with several councils and housing associations, jenny has been at the heart of innovation and thinking in housing for years.
Simon:This was a thoughtful conversation about what healthy homes means in the context of housing and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks for listening. As always, do check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. This is a conversation with jenny danson. It is quite a big, open question that what is a healthy home from the perspective of social housing, and I think that's what's interesting to unpack with you, particularly where you're coming from, from the hub is. You obviously saw something in that, so what is your vision for it? I suppose is the question when we talk about a healthy home for social housing, I suppose, to start with, what does that mean to you?
Jenny:Yeah, it is a big question and I think a lot of the we've looked at health as part of the PropTech innovation network for the last two or three years that we've looked at it because it's such a key part of where technology can really support a home being healthy.
Jenny:And I think it's an area particularly as we've gone through the energy crisis and with one eye looking at the climate warming so much and the impact that that's having on residents that health for me was becoming much more of an issue that we just needed to be able to resolve, and the more that we looked into that, the more it was then something where you just think actually there's so many parts to this of creating a healthy home, as well as actually hearing too many stories where retrofit had happened and absolutely with the right intent, but actually the unintended consequences of that are actually making the home more unhealthy or making your neighbour's home more unhealthy, and therefore it was just I suppose it was just something that shouted to me to go. Actually, this is we've just got to focus a lot more on the health of the home and if we have that as our anchor, actually there's so many other things that then can come off it yeah, that's interesting because there's two parts to that from what you're saying.
Simon:Um, one is the, the value proposition that you were trying to get across, or the business case is probably too harsh a word, but the value of some of that property technology beyond the, it saves you X in electricity bills or Y from a bodied carbon perspective or whatever it is. There's this whole value proposition of health and well-being and better communication and better social value that all of this prop tech stuff can deliver. So that'd be interesting thing to unpack a little bit. Where what were the kind of things that you were seeing that you just weren't able to um frame sufficiently or that the housing providers weren't able to get properly, and then you have.
Simon:Then you've got the unintended consequences piece, the bit that we all see where, for the right reasons, retrofit or reactive maintenance or planned development, where they, where it's going wrong with the best intentions. If you're close enough to the coalface, we see the unintended consequences every day. You know, beyond the headlines of our abishak and and the horror stories. Obviously we see it going wrong on a daily basis. So there's two parts to that piece, I guess. So maybe the prop tech one.
Jenny:Let's unpack that a little bit yeah, and I think I think the challenge that a lot of housing providers have had is is that whole challenge around around data, which is where a lot of this then comes back to. Um and the majority well, pretty much all landlords have been managing their properties on a best guess. You know, I, when I was um, in the roles I've had within the sector itself, you've managed on best guess and what some of the data is telling you around repairs and things, but not using the data as much as we should have done. Whether that's rental data, whether that's getting access into properties for compliance, whether that is looking at the number of repairs or the type of repairs to go through, it's not really driving what needs to happen to move forward. And there's the general feeling that data is not great in the sector. I think it's better than we think it is and we need to use it and not use that as an excuse. But we end up very much in a compliance environment. So the way that the regulators position things has been much more around complying rather than necessarily innovating. So you're really relying on organisations to have the leadership to be innovative, to be able to try something different.
Jenny:And when it comes to technology, because you've been used to managing things blind and being a very reactive business, so actually you only know when something's gone wrong, usually because the tenant has told you that something's gone wrong, not because actually you know something's gone wrong or you've been able to fix it before um it's it's caused, caused a problem, um, and therefore that whole model needs to really turn on its head, where it turns much more into a proactive service, a bit like we get in anything else that we do in our lives, and not a reactive one, relying on your customers to tell you where there's a problem. So technology can help on that and obviously that comes back down to a data. But if you're working in a compliance environment to put your head above the parapet, to then start doing something different, that is potentially a bit of a problem and a bit of a challenge and a risk for those organisations and therefore it has taken, you know, a lot longer than it should have done for some of those prop tech solutions to start coming into it. So IoT, for example, so the Internet of Things and looking at sensors in homes is much more commonplace now, but that's taken. That's taken a number of years for organizations to do that and we're still in the language of testing it and piloting things rather than actually this is the way that you need to do it. You need to gather information from the home to allow you to manage it, to get the data to then make the decisions you need to make. So that whole prop tech side is still taking some time to really bed in.
Jenny:But whilst we're doing that, particularly because the environment has changed around that so we've obviously had COVID and the effects that that's had not only on residents' health, but also just on residents' and everybody else's expectations around what a service should look like.
Jenny:But you've also had all of the energy crisis that's then come in, as well as what we're experiencing now from the climate breakdown of meaning additional rain and floods and the heat and stuff too.
Jenny:There's a lot of things that are changing where technology is really going to be able to help with that, but the effect on people's health is still there and I suppose, going back to your, going back to your question, there's a number of stories, um and you know, conversations that I've had with residents that have stayed with me and probably will stay with me for the rest of my life around where people are really struggling from a health perspective because of their home, and we see it in so many stories that I still, you know, um be part of, to hear, um, how people are really struggling, the effect that it has both on their physical and their mental health, um, and therefore there was a bit around.
Jenny:Well, actually, I really want to make a difference to the sector that I care about and I want to be able to, you know, make and help those organisations that have got so much coming at them to help make this easier, to bring everybody together, both the landlords, the academics, the industry, to then say look, if we come together, we've got the answers. I can see from the work that I've done over the last three years the answers are there. We've just got to bring everybody together and help educate them so we're all moving in the right direction to end up with homes being healthier and actually the stories that we probably have all heard and seen actually become a thing of the past yeah, it's interesting you say that about that evolution of technology.
Simon:I had tom robbins on the podcast a few months back and he was describing how the expectations over the last few years have changed so much that we're now at a point with a lot of this technology where the expectation is it just works out of the box.
Simon:You've got to hit the ground running with this technology. We're beyond the pioneering stage. Yet you do get the sense that we sit in our own echo chambers sometimes and we feel like this is familiar to us and familiar territory sometimes, and we feel like this is familiar to us and familiar territory, um, and I know it's a constant source of frustration for innovative companies where they're saying what another pilot like I've got five dozen pilots behind me at this stage it's not a pilot, just go and talk to somebody that's done this. Um, what you need to do is roll it out, um, but it's never quite that simple, is it then? And I think what we're missing is that broader framework for people to come into that kind of roadmaps, this stuff. For them, it is a hub for information and knowledge and sharing of these kind of stories, so I don't think you're ever going to get people out of that pilot mentality. It's very difficult not to try before you buy on anything, but nonetheless I think we can make that transition a lot easier for people with the technology.
Jenny:No, I agree, and I think the lack of strategy around this area is part of the problem. And I think that acknowledgement that you know technology will continue to change. But it's the principle of what you're trying to achieve to understand what is happening in somebody's home as a landlord so actually you can ensure it is comfortable for them and healthy for them, which really, as a social landlord, that should be the top priority really, to ensure that actually you're ticking those boxes. But to do that, the technology is going to be different. Switch's technology is going to be different now to what it was five years ago, which would be different in five years time, but actually the ethos of what you're trying to achieve, the outcomes are still the same and I think having a strategy to do that and to what you're trying to achieve through that is key. And I think we see too much of the magpie syndrome of people seeing the next shiny thing and we'll have 50 of those, of people seeing the next shiny thing and we'll have 50 of those and then we'll try 20 of those and I'm not really quite sure what we're achieving by this, because we're just adding little bits. It's like a patchwork quilt, whereas you know, having worked both in and around the sector for so many years, and particularly in the roles that I've had in the last five, six years, we're all doing the same thing. There's 4.4 million homes that over 1,400 or so landlords were managing, but the problems are still the same in all of them.
Jenny:We just need to be better at sharing that information, and that's really one of those key things that we want to do as part of Healthy Homes. We want to share that best practice. When people are doing it well, let's share it. Let's share those pilots, let's share the information and how people are doing it, because actually, we're not helping each other by just reinventing the wheel every single time.
Jenny:Let's have another list of customer FAQs to be able to go through, or a whole list of Q&As that we need to be able to go through, or, you know, we've talked before about 1400 ventilation strategies. We don't need that. We need to have, you know, a core common thing that's the same throughout, and then we add our little bits on top of it, depending on the geography, depending on the type of 10 years that you're managing and depending on the type of archetypes, but a lot of it is the same and I think we we've just got to be better at coming together and and sharing that information, because the longer it takes, the more unfortunate stories we're going to have, where people are getting ill or dying as a result of living in our homes, and that's not good enough yeah, very true, and I think I don't know there's there's this contradiction for me in there somewhere, in the sense that housing is quite conservative.
Simon:It's a slow-moving beast at the best of times, as is, as is construction, to be fair, and I understand why.
Simon:Because it's a slow-moving beast at the best of times, as is construction, to be fair, and I understand why because it's a risk-averse sector and it's a sector that's underfunded often and can't afford to innovate and change and reactive maintenance policies and things that you'd be lucky if you have those running through on a five-year cycle within an organization, even if they are on time with it and are implementing it, never mind the organizational change management that often has to follow through behind those changes. That often doesn't. It's a slow moving beast, and I think you hit on a really interesting point. The built environment is moving faster than the pace of change of social housing, and that's the key misalignment here is that technology is moving, that our ability to use data and AI is moving quickly. We've got a massively diverse probably more than we ever have done social housing sector now, where we've got absolute behemoths at one end of the scale, you know, with hundreds of thousands of properties literally all the way to small independent organizations of a few dozen at the other end of the scale.
Jenny:Yeah you're right, absolutely, it is um, and I think I'd probably add on to as well as the built environment changing quicker, customers expectations are changing quicker than yeah than we are within social housing, of catching up with it, and I think that becomes part of that, that challenge, and we certainly saw it through the pandemic, where a lot of service companies changed their offering as a result of the pandemic, because of customer expectations changing, and there aren't that many housing providers that have dramatically changed their service, their operating model since COVID, have dramatically changed their service, their operating model since COVID.
Jenny:There are some and there's, you know, there are some that are definitely moving forward and really embracing how technology can support them, but we are lagging behind even councils and the NHS and others on a number of areas at the moment and that is part of that frustration as well from a residence perspective, which all feeds into this, and I think your point around the housing sector is incredibly complex, but we've got amazing individuals that work in them, work in them and from the smallest housing organizations through to the largest, there's some great innovation and people wanting to be able to do things differently, because for a lot of the time, particularly from an asset perspective, we're still doing the same things we did 30 years ago.
Jenny:We look at retail, we look at banking, we look at automotive industry, utility industry. It's all moved on. It's not the same as it was 30 years ago, and yet there aren't that many things that are different from an asset management perspective in the majority of organisations than there were 30 years ago and probably even longer than that, to be honest, and that's the bit we've got to really think about how we then change that and move that forward, which can save us money as well as delivering a better end result.
Simon:So do you think it's as much about enabling the change actors within those organisations as it is the nudge theory of the masses within those organizations? Um, because, as you say, housing is unique, but it's not unique in its complexity and size and makeup of the status quo and the change actors. You know, like you say, plenty of what would be considered conservative industries have been able to shift the gears and move on.
Jenny:Um, there's probably a lot to be learned from other sectors, I guess, in how you actually enable that in a sector that is complex and as big as housing yeah, and I think, going back to your point around the those change agents, where we see where I see so the change really happening and and things moving forward, is where you've got um, either a chief exec or the exec lead is willing to be able to look at innovation and willing to be able to try different ways of being able to do it and accepting that actually it might not work first time, but that's fine, that's what we expect and certainly you know, even 10 years ago when I was, you know, in an exec role, we turned them experiments. Then. Because we turned them experiments, because experiments quite often fail but we take the learning from it and I was always delighted and I don't want to say amazed, but really pleased about how many residents wanted to get involved in it, because they could see that we're trying to be able to do different things and as long as it's positioned to them that actually this is what we're trying to be able to do and this is how we want to be able to do it and get some of their input into it. Quite often not all the time, because I think sometimes there isn't really anybody that has the answer to it what we're looking for is how we work collectively together to be able to get those things, is how we work collectively together to be able to get those things, but as long as it's positioned in the right way. The same as it is when we try things out in a service provider, I don't know, with a bank or with a holiday company, whatever it is that you're having the conversation with. You're trying things out for the first time and there's learning to be able to take and refine from that.
Jenny:And I think that's the bit where we sometimes just worry because it's so focused on compliance, because if you get it wrong, the housing ombudsman is there or the regulator is there and actually you will be told off and there'll be a consequence for it. That doesn't really position an environment where people want to take a risk and to be able to start doing things properly and properly sorry, better, I would say not properly, that's not fair but better. Um, because I think technology does allow things to be better and does allow it to be better and cheaper for the housing provider and the resident as as we move forward yeah, you kind of started answering my very next question there, which was are we fostering a culture within housing?
Simon:do you think that enables people to give them the space to make mistakes? Because it's an increasingly regulated uh and in the public domain sector, housing, uh, for all the right and wrong reasons, yeah, um, which which must put, you must see it in your day-to-day conversations. What's the? What's the feeling out of the sector about innovating and trying new ways of doing things? Do they feel like it's a necessity or risk?
Jenny:I think probably both, and I think it depends on a lot of this depends on the board's appetite and the chief exec and exec's appetite, and I think it's too easy to say that we're not going to be taking the lead on this or we're not going to be a fast follower, or we're not. You know it's working, why mess with it now? So there's some that have opted out completely, and I think that's where we see the lag effect from things like Grenfell, and you know that you end up with regulation being put in to be able to push everybody where they need to be able to get to. But actually you need those innovators.
Jenny:And innovation sounds really grand, doesn't it? But actually it's really only just a service improvement. It's doing things differently to what you're doing now. Um, but it's not. It's not um, and I suppose I'm not. I'm not hung up as much about whether it is service improvement, whether it's innovation, but we've got to be careful that we're just not um you know it there's some things that are just properly broken in the sector and we try lots of different ways to be able to make it look better.
Jenny:So that could be through a restructure, it could be through having a look at the process, or you know how many times we've been involved in re-looking at the voids process.
Jenny:You know every organisation must look at it at least once a year. But really, should we be just ripping it up and actually re-looking it? What the voice process could look like, you know? Or looking at um, you know how we can a bit like a lot of the the for-profits coming in and certainly there's some fantastic work that they are thinking about because they're not bound by a legacy housing system. That limits the way that they're thinking and I think that element of being brave and having something that is around, what is the service that you would, what's the process and the service that you would really want to be putting in here that is really resident focused, that delivers a, delivers a healthy home, what does that look like?
Jenny:And now work backwards about how we're then going to achieve it, and I think we feel constrained because of the culture of that regulation culture and the nervousness about moving away from legacy housing systems which, in the main, aren't necessarily set up to deliver something that is, you know, really going to be driving the sector, driving the sector forwards. It tends to be still fairly reactive and not in a proactive approach, but when? But I think we will. Well, we are seeing you know certainly.
Jenny:LNG Affordable Homes have done some fantastic work there of looking at how you can remove the people from the process. How can you have it? So it's pretty much automated their compliance process. You know their gas process is pretty much all automated. They're going through and we're doing the testing through that on last year. But you know that whole process where the only person involved in it is the resident and the gas engineer.
Jenny:Now, brilliant, because actually you look at any other organisation and goodness knows how many handoffs there are and how many spreadsheets there are and all those other things that go through to be able to give you the answer. So I think having the leadership that uses the compliance culture that we're in as a baseline to be able to hit, but not as the culture that you need to be able to work in and I think that's the difference. So you've got some working in the culture and it's quite easy to have the answer the regulator won't let us, or housing ombudsman won't let us. If we do this, this is what will happen and those that use that as the foundation of that. This is our operating. You know it's our base level, but this is where we want to be able to be, and this is what our vision is and this is what we're trying to be able to deliver.
Simon:So I think we're going to see really some interesting stuff from the for profits coming through and I think it'd be really interesting to see what that equates to with regards to healthy homes as we then move forward. Yeah, and I'm, I guess I kind of know your answer to this, but I I'm guessing that the we've got to seize an opportunity at the moment. As you've said, in the past few years, we've had an energy crisis, we've had COVID, we've had the condensation, damp and mold crisis, as it's been seen over the last couple of winters, exacerbated by all of those things. Needless to say, there is a focus on the home and the tenant at the center of that at the moment, I think, and it shifted the dial quite rightly in that direction, away from asset management, yeah, property management, and there's always that natural tension within housing provision of both being responsible for assets and providing homes for people, you know, and it's, I think, that focus on health and the tenants at the centre is a very useful shift in that dial.
Jenny:I'm guessing you'd agree with that absolutely, and I think um having having that anchor of creating homes that are healthy and the sustainability um and achieving net zero being a an output of that um is a much better way of looking at it rather than necessarily having net zero at the heart of things and hopefully getting a healthy home as a result of it, because I think that's where organisations may end up making the wrong decisions or doing things in the wrong order and not delivering a healthy home.
Simon:If you have the health at the heart of it, I just think it will give you a better outcome every time yeah, and I think the interesting thing about homes and I have this conversation a lot around air quality and ventilation is that it's a very complex picture. Uh, the built environment, you know, but it just take ventilation and air quality as one example. You know it's enormously complex mix of air chemistry and physics and social science and behavioral science and you know you become bewildered by the complexity of it. Yet somehow it's all got to funnel through the conduit, which is a hope, and ultimately there are only so many levers we can pull in that environment to affect an outcome and the diversity of outcomes out the other side of e-career is complex. But we're fortunate in that we have this conduit, this piece in the middle where we are fairly limited with what we can do in the grand scheme of things, certainly from a ventilation and air quality perspective, but I think more broadly on the healthy homes perspective. It, you know it's interesting because there are so many co-benefits of getting one thing right. You'll be dealing with many of the others well as well.
Simon:And you you touched on net zero as an example.
Simon:You know, whether we like it or not, we've got to fundamentally alter a large part of our built environment over the next 20 or 30 years through the process of that.
Simon:If we do that with the right policies and strategies, we can also deal with many of the other things on your list of healthy buildings at the same time. It's just having that policy and that strategy to do that in the right way and understand how to roadmap that. So I think that's the interesting thing of this and I think that's what's been really interesting about looking at your ideas around the healthy homes hub is that, in effect, it's a manifestation of that conduit, of the levers that you can pull to affect an outcome. You know, as complex as the the housing piece is in its scale and diversity, ultimately we've got to run all of that through, regardless of whether you're 150 home, 150 000 home housing association or a 200 home independent association, it's a home that we've got to run those changes through ultimately. And the pieces that you've built up within the Healthy Homes Hub are, in a way, those levers, aren't they?
Jenny:Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it and I think they certainly, when I was reflecting on this and we were setting it up, there is even, as you said, just with regard to air quality and ventilation, there is so much that you could potentially need to know around what you need to do as a landlord for your 150 homes let's just say 150 homes and actually you build in all of those other areas. There isn't really anybody, not one person or even a small team. Really, that's probably got all of the answers within here. And because technology is changing so quickly and because also the environment outside of it is changing so quickly, in the grand scheme of things, of what we had with regard to the damper mould, with regard to where we are with net zero with regard to technology, there's lots of things that are coming in, both regulation, legislation, as well as the guidance that's been positioned.
Jenny:It's really difficult to be able to have all of that and have the space to be able to think about what you need and to keep your, to keep your knowledge levels up. To be honest, it's really it's really hard and actually everybody who I speak to is running just to stay still because there's so much? Because a lot of this, the system is broken. At the moment, people are working goodness knows how many hours just trying to be able to keep it running, and that, again, is part of one of those problems with regard to the innovation side is that if you're so busy trying to be able to keep it running, you're not giving yourself that thinking time about what you need to be able to do to solve the problems that you're so busy spending the day doing. Then you add on top of that, as you said, all of those levers that you need to be thinking about.
Jenny:You know, it's quite overwhelming. It is very easy to be able to make mistakes or not think about something. So to have something you know, and that's part of, I suppose, the vision that I've got of having something that we can create that allows people to get the answers that they want, or to be able to feed them through to trusted partners, to be able to help them to deliver the strategy that they need, to be able to then move forward to create those healthy homes and, as you said, to deliver the outputs which most of them are focused on, on delivering net zero, but there's also those other benefits of people living in comfortable homes and homes that are healthy. Everything that I go through keeps coming back to that. Actually, as a social landlord, if you can have you know residents and families living in homes that are not making them ill, then you've done a great job.
Simon:I'd like to borrow your attention for just a moment to discuss ACO, a partner of this podcast. You may have heard of Eiko, an EI company, as the experts in pioneering new technology in fire and carbon monoxide alarms. More recently, you may have heard about their outstanding work in the housing sector with their HomeLink offering, which is aiming to solve some of the industry's most serious challenges. They are utilising Internet of Things technologies to increase home life safety. The technology incorporates multi-room environmental sensors, a gateway and advanced actionable insights, which has a proven track record in helping landlords reduce operational costs and carbon emissions while improving residents' well-being and safety. Their team of data scientists are developing solutions for problems at the heart of the housing sector like damp and mould, fuel poverty and air quality. I've been amazed at how they are innovating here with a laser focus on unpacking the complex nature of these challenges in a way that answers the what next question we need so much at the moment. If you're in housing, they're worth talking to. They have a large network of expert installers and distributors covering the uk. Trusted is an overused word, but not here. Ask around, and echo are synonymous with it. Details are in the show notes at air quality mattersnet and at echo. That's aicocouk.
Simon:Now back to the podcast, and it's the one golden thread I think that runs through society is that desire and need to live in a safe, comfortable and warm place. You know, the has low hierarchy of needs and all that good stuff. At the end of the day, shelter is fundamental, um and a foundation to our potential and, and I think the the interesting thing in that is that it creates a framework that we can hang everything off. Um, and it was. You know, the, the retrofit fit thing that you were talking about made me think of a lot of the learnings that have happened around renovation of buildings.
Simon:You know, outside of social housing, in that the, the key takeaway from retrofit from the vast majority of people that experience it is not the kilowatt hours of energy they save on their fuel bill, it's a healthy, warm home. It's being able to use the entirety of their home for the first time, as opposed to just a couple of rooms. It's the health and well-being that it gives them, the, the sense of pride in a property and reduce of shame of bringing people into cold and damp homes. You know, like that, the the co-benefits of getting a home right for people you just can't underestimate, and particularly for young people. It's transformative, so there's a lot in it. But I think the other interesting thing about the retrofit piece is one of the other big takeaways that have come from that is understanding that timing is everything as well. From that is understanding that timing is everything as well and that there are only so many opportunities in a building's life that you get to make fundamental changes to it.
Jenny:I think you're. Yeah, you point about when the retrofit or when upgrades are done to to homes is a really interesting one, because the majority of asset-based programs for people's homes are based upon, you know, the based upon the home. So the age of the home, the age of the component, the quality of the components in there, is not really based upon what's going on in somebody's life and, as you said, in those home, things that are happening, you know, whether somebody is about to get married or whether somebody's just died, or whether they've just had a child or all of those other things. It is based purely on the asset. What we need to be thinking about more is how do we get more, how do we get different, a different way of looking at how we upgrade our homes? So if I give you a couple, couple of examples, one is really around what we, what we measure. So we don't again thinking about a compliance side. We're very focused on safety and compliance and we've got the building safety act and we've got the hhsrs and we've got um a lot of the other compliance and areas that we need to be able to look at. What we don't measure is around that health and well-being, and the question that I've asked for the last couple of years to organisations is do they know how many of the homes that they're managing, how many of the households are in fuel poverty? There's not been one organisation I've met so far yet that's been able to tell me what number of homes are in fuel poverty, because it's just something they don't measure. And yet we know how many gas boilers are compliant and we know where we are with asbestos, et cetera, et cetera. So I think so that's what? Because the points you made around the effect that this has on people's lives by having a home that is comfortable and healthy and safe, is just not something. That is a is a measurement at the moment, um, so that's that'd be one thing.
Jenny:The second one is some fantastic work that um, that a nhs trust um in the northwest is looking at, which is where they. So this is going back to another one of my big mantras around the UPRN, so the Unique Property Reference Number. So this is a code, effectively, that every single building garage flat in the whole of the uk has um, which is a generated from each council um, and pretty much everybody outside of housing uses it. Some housing providers do use it and I've badgered a lot of them to move to it, but there's still a lot of people that don't. But all of the blue lights use it, the retail companies use it and it's just their way of being able to have that unique code. So at the moment most of the legacy housing systems generate their own legacy UPRN. So because they're only sharing the data inside that organisation, actually that UPRN is fine in that organisation, or so they think. But as soon as you're wanting to start layering the data with other things outside, that becomes a problem by having the UK UPRN so having that one potentially as well as your own legacy one if you need to have two, actually you can start looking at things differently.
Jenny:Now this NHS Trust has used the UK UPRN and mapped to that in their area all of the physical and health, both primary and secondary health, to each UPRN and by the end of August they will have mapped all of the mental health data. That's the aim to link the mental health data to the UPRN. So what the trust really wants to know is and what's going on in the home? So actually, when these patients keep coming back to A&E because of respiratory issues or whatever they're presenting with what's going on in the home. How warm is that home? How humid is it? What? What are those things that happening in there? Um and the same as um.
Jenny:I suppose this the the bit that they've done some work with prima housing association and I. I you know, without getting into all the gdpr, this works. You don't have to share that the child's got asthma or the fact that someone's got COPD, but you can start linking through around those areas that where, from a going back to a an asset management role plan program, these are the areas you should be highlighting, because these are the areas where actually people have got an underlying medical and health condition that may be associated with the home that they're living in. Because where a hospital wants to be is they want to send somebody back to a safe, warm home, knowing that they're not going to then come back in again, you know, a week or two later with the same problem. So that discharge of patients is a problem, but also we can then understand when people move into a home and they're then going to have medical attention. We'll link that back to it.
Jenny:So we will see more and more of that moving through and that's certainly something that we're really keen to work with, with others on, to start looking about how we look at asset programmes differently and really thinking about the you know how we prioritise them based on health, you know, and the impact for UK PLC as well as the residents. You know. Health and wellbeing, you know. To me that's what gets me out of bed every day because you just think this is properly life-changing for people. If we can intersect at the right points, I know if I was back in a proper job doing the role as an exec or a chief exec, that's exactly what would drive me to be able to mean that the people that I'm housing I'm not causing them to be in hospital or having to return to hospital because we can adapt to our programs accordingly.
Simon:Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there and I think it's a really fascinating area that this. You know we use the term kpi, or I wrote down the the term kpi and and in in. Like in any function, we develop these metrics to define success or failure or trajectory in one direction or another, and one of the things we've struggled with health from the environment from out in this case, our built environment has been drawing those straight lines between cause and effect, and we're into this era now of data and data silos where there's enormous potential locked up within this data of value. And, yes, as you say, notwithstanding the GDPR and the genuine concerns that people have about what data is used. Where I was having a chat with Corrine Mandin, who's an epidemiological data scientist based out of France, and she was making the point as part of conversations we're having around the uk observatory for indoor air quality that that's being looked at, is that there are already institutions that are very well trusted to hold the most sensitive data that we have on our own health and they've run very well for years, notwithstanding the odd breach here and there that's always going to happen, but generally speaking, people have a very high degree of trust in certain institutions to manage sensitive data.
Simon:This isn't about giving a housing association access to data that might tie into insurance policy data or something that might have an impact on you down the road.
Simon:This is about access to elements of that data to help the provision of better services and to start to develop kpis where we can create an environment where homes are valued on much more than the asset value and the energy costs and how much it's costing a year to maintain that.
Simon:We can start to genuinely create some metrics around health and well-being and your, your academic potential and your your ability to to live a fulfilling life and all of these things that are tied up in health and well-being. There's enormous potential in that. I don't know if you've seen the work of the born in bradford yeah, a cohort study. They're absolutely unbelievable piece of work where it's not just tied into health and well-being, it's tied into education and social services and mental health, and the lines that they've been able to draw between cause and outcomes are unreal and unlocking enormous potential to improve society in Bradford. That's what's at stake here. I think with that and that's what's fascinating about the database. I think with that and that's what's fascinating about the data piece and perhaps also then helps organizations unlock finance opportunities that they don't have.
Jenny:Because if you can create KPIs of true value, it opens up opportunity to access finance that perhaps you wouldn't ordinarily have, because you can show value in different ways. Yeah, I'll just go back slightly just on the measurement side and then pick up the finance, because in the sector we've been using a significant amount of data, that is, sensitive data on income. A number of organisations have for some time for rental data and working with companies like Experian to help with, you know, with the residents brought into this to be able to understand where people are struggling from a financial perspective, because more often than not, the rent is the last thing you know. Sorry, it's the first thing that's paid, it's the last thing to then not be paid and therefore, you know, with the old way of looking at it, as long as someone's paying the rent, everything's okay. What you don't know is what they're not doing or what they're having to do to be able to mean that the rent is still paid.
Jenny:And certainly the Experian data for those that are involved with that is really beneficial and working with companies like RentSense and others that really then help using that to predict what's likely to happen and to be able to allow those conversations to happen to mean that people aren't then struggling in a position where they're potentially not eating this is before we had the energy crisis but not eating because they're paying their rent or the children are going without a lot of the basics to be able to then pay the rent.
Jenny:So there is already precedence in there and, again, a lot of rules and regulations around that. This is just the next layer on it and there'll be more that we can add into this. If we're in that position where we start valuing our data and valuing sharing our data. You don't get value by just putting your arms around it and not sharing it with everybody. You get value by sharing this and taking that learning and using techniques that AI allows us to be able to do, to look at that predictive and that that forecasting so I just wanted to make a point, a point on that.
Jenny:But going back to the, the finance side, absolutely because we've got to be able to fund the, you know, primarily to be able to fund the work that needs to happen to get homes to to net zero, and there's a lot that needs to happen on there. I think we are certainly, from the bank's perspective too, thinking about even lending to be able to build new homes and to be able to allow housing associations to be able to continue in the model of around growth. They've got to be able to meet. They're under their own regulation to be able to meet.
Jenny:From the ESG perspective and I think not all organizations are really tuned in to this enough that actually, unless we are moving forward a lot quicker than we are doing now, actually borrowing could become much more of a problem. There's certainly, you know, those that can borrow cheaper by doing some of those things, and people who aren't doing it are paying a penalty. But I think there'll become a point where actually you won't be able to borrow if you're not doing this and I think, if you are achieving your sustainability targets but you are putting that focus around the health and demonstrating, going back to those measurements around health and well-being and what those knock-on effects are. And you're absolutely right. You know the born in bradford and um and a lot of the case studies that people have done locally.
Simon:You can see the difference of just having those interventions in place from a, from a housing perspective, have that ripple effect everywhere, um, and I think that's the bit we've really got to think about how we're then going to be measuring in it, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's one of the things where some of the banks and funders want to be able to then push some of that measurement to, to understand what that, what that ripple effects looks like yeah, you give me an idea for another conversation I need on the podcast actually is with some finances around esg, because I I've started to understand quite well the the case for esg in real estate and within the traditional built environment and you know you can see already the impact that the environmental impact has had on funding and access to green finance and the kind of pressure that developers and the supply chain are being increasingly put under to evidence the environmental efficacy of what they're doing. But we're now slowly moving and transitioning into the S of ESG as well. As things like the social taxonomy starts to come to bear, you're increasingly seeing those money cogs starting to say, well, what are the social benefits that these projects? How is this asset going to be valued in 25, 30 years time when it comes up for release or rent or we're selling it on? You can see them starting to go down that road.
Simon:What's less clear for me in social housing, where it's a much less traditional asset in the sense that it's not something that you're trying to release or rent in 30 years time or 25 years time, but the same fundamentals are there and I and I do remember having a conversation with a housing organization in the last six months where there were a couple of standards based around esg and I was saying I've just looked at your last four or five developments and you'd be a slam dunk for half of these standards because you're so strong on the social aspects of it, because you have to be your, you provide housing for people, yeah. So where traditional real estate would get its knickers in a twist about access to gardens and social value and education on site and all of the kind of the social impact stuff that goes with providing real estate Social housing providers are doing that by the nature of the service that they deliver. So they should be really strong strong actually, on the s part of this. It's just I don't know how that's quantified yet. I think that's the interesting thing.
Simon:How do you demonstrate that value as a social housing provider and who's that of used to it? Would it ultimately be the government? That that's? That's, that it's of value to a social value, or is, in some ways, the money tied up in the asset? Is there value in that in some way to social housing providers? I don't know if you do. You know the answer to that.
Jenny:No, I was going to say that the sector is relying very much on the fact of the ticking, the social, because of building social homes and affordable homes and absolutely the right thing to do. But I think it goes further than that, because if you can do this in the right way that produces healthy homes, that actually not only delivers that social housing but means there isn't a knock-on effect to education, to health, to antisocial behaviour and other things that we see as a result of unhealthy homes. Actually, that's where I think you can then really start demonstrating what the social impact is, because if not, we're coming back to, we're just producing another asset and this isn't an asset. This is somebody's home and actually a home, as you know, from an air quality perspective, where people spend the vast majority of their time. And if, if that's going to turn into an unhealthy home, then you know that that isn't, that's not ticking, in my view, that social element enough, just by producing a social home.
Simon:And one of the lessons that's being learned from the non-residential sector is as important are the negative consequences of getting this wrong, the impacts on health and education and sickness and absenteeism, and all of that that we'd metric within the non-residential space. Increasingly now we're starting to try and create metrics and value propositions around the the positive aspects of this cognitive performance, the impact on wealth generation, on presenteeism, on, you know, on your ability to function and contribute to a business if you have the environment right. And the same thing applies to housing. You know I have this conversation with people all of the time.
Simon:At the end of the day, housing is also a, a revenue generating machine, and its potential to generate that revenue is locked into the performance of the people that occupy those spaces, and if you get that wrong, you significantly limit the potential of those occupants to generate revenue for you. You know and that's the bit I think that we we need to map out much better is what are the positive contributing factors that getting healthy homes have to a housing provider, and some of them, you know, um, I looked at it the other day. Clarion basically has a population the size of coventry in its housing, you know, like it's a city's worth of of people you know. So getting that right from a performance perspective has enormous potential for generating revenue for the organization you know and, as you say, as, and society yeah, absolutely, and that's that's a bit for me.
Jenny:Yeah, the revenue, absolutely, revenue, absolutely, but actually the knock-on effects of what it is. It's the saving to UK PLC, but more importantly, it's people's health and wellbeing and allowing people to thrive in their home, which is what it's all about. It's got to be, in my view, it's got to be that and yeah, and hence why I keep coming back to health being part of it, and I just, I think we all subconsciously know it, but we're not consciously putting it at the heart of things, and that's, I suppose, part of the challenge that I'm trying to bring to the sector as part of that Healthy Homes Hub is to say, look, we can help you do this, but really think about having that as your anchor to move things forward, because actually I can't see why it wouldn't be the right thing for organisations to focus on.
Simon:No, and I think one of the interesting things here is the is the bell curve of scenarios that we find when we look at healthy homes and and instinctually we, the extremes, stand out, you know, because they're so awful and the impacts on people's lives are so impactful. Um, but they represent quite a small proportion on the bell curve, if you like, of where health and wellbeing impacts are locked in. And I often tell this story of this family I went to see on an estate and it's they were unremarkable in their remarkableness in that they were just getting by, you know they, they didn't have damp and mold everywhere, that the house wasn't falling apart. In fact it's puts my house to shame how clean and tidy and well looked after this property was. But the suck on resources to them, both financially and from a health and well-being perspective and a mental health perspective, were enormous, because for years and years they've been just getting by, just getting by financially, just getting by every winter from damp and mold, just getting by from a health perspective, just getting by from a mental health perspective and their capacity to take chances and risks and flourish and do the things they needed to do as a family.
Simon:And often we focus, when it comes to health and well-being, on the extremes. But actually where we can have the impact is in that grey middle ground where there aren't standouts but incremental improvements and nudges in the systems and the way we do things. There's huge hidden, locked in potential there to improve society and I think that's where the game is, that you know. Consequentially, we'll deal with the outliers, the extremes, but if the focus is on the meat of the bell curve, that's where we have the impact. But the trouble is is that we need KPIs for that. We need to be able to metric that, because it's not going to be transformative in the same way of scraping the mold off someone's bathroom is going to be. It's much more long-term and esoteric than that so if you don't develop the data for it and you don't develop the metrics for it's very difficult to evidence and therefore very difficult to implement, and I think that's the big challenge really I think I'll probably go one further as well.
Jenny:I think it's the model too, because the model you know, the break-fix in there, just about coping, um, but actually where do they appear on any compliance or any any measurement? And actually they are, you know, unless something is broken, they're just lost in the system. So that whole element of moving much more to a proactive service a bit similar to what I was saying about rents to start off with having that, having that, that information that allows you to be able to help understand where you can create those interventions to be able to support, has absolutely got to be the right, the right way, because that, yeah, the the mental health impact on on this that you you touched upon is, is significant. You know, if you are, if you are having to think about, and you know, a hand-to-mouth existence for a lot, for a lot of people, um, and particularly going to the winter, that number gets even more so that's, that's quite a lot of stress to be able to then manage on a day-to-day, day in, day out, exactly the same to go, to go through. That's, that's hard, really hard, um, and I think, because it's not you said not appearing on a, on a matrix somewhere of a measurement, or the fact that it's just it's just not seen, because the fact that, actually, that they're not flagging anything that's wrong doesn't mean to say that there isn't something wrong.
Jenny:And I think, yeah, providing that, providing that voice, is something that is, yeah, I suppose, link back to all of this stuff that we just need, which comes back to the, you know, the beginning of the conversation around that prop tech side and how we need technology to really help us. You know, 20 years ago we couldn't do this because we didn't have the technology and we were relying on a lot of housing managers, teams and neighborhood teams being out and about to understand what was happening and trying to be able to to manage it, um, and that, you know, that was great because that's what we had then. But we've got the technology now to allow us to be able to do this better and to be better for the residents, and actually the environmental positions that we've already, you know, touched upon have changed dramatically as well, for for people. So it is it's harder for everybody at the moment, but there are solutions. We've just got to think about how we do it and I think it's how you frame that, how you want to be able to frame it is the key, and framing that of how we're then going to make our homes healthier and put the right technology in and the right approach and the right model of how we're doing it.
Jenny:And I know that's not an overnight thing, but you've got to start somewhere and start that whole process to move forward, and there is some fantastic work happening in the sector on this. I just think we've got to be better at showcasing this, and I know a number of them are worried about putting themselves on a platform to demonstrate that, because if something does go slightly wrong with these as they go through, they don't want the housing ombudsman or the regulator to jump on them and that's you know. Going back to the culture again, that's not a great place to be in, because we want to be able to share this and accept that things do go wrong sometimes, but we're still moving forward and that's what we need to be celebrating and sharing the learning.
Simon:And that's something that you were very successful with with the DIN network, wasn't it? It was creating a space for that innovation to be showcased and for people to learn and help roadmap for others.
Jenny:So I'm guessing you're going to bring some of the learning from what you did there across to this healthy homes hub that there is a space for that networking and innovation and showcasing and safe spaces that you create for people to to discuss these ventures yeah, I mean in in din ian and I put together a number of um din labs, as we called them, then um and then dinky baiters, where we're really looking and working with a number of housing providers, with an industry expert, to test some of these solutions and to share that learning.
Jenny:And it's much better to be able to test with four or five different organisations, because actually what you then test is I don't know 100 properties rather than the 10 properties that you were going to be looking at. So there's a huge amount you can benefit from that, from. What we're looking at at the moment from a healthy homes perspective is we're working with Switchy and with CERO and with five housing providers, looking at the Warm Rents Project, which will be running over at least a couple of years, which will be running over at least a couple of years, looking at how we can, what we need to be able to do, to heat the home to 18 degrees for the landlord at the moment to pay that and to end up a bit more like the Swedish model and some of the European models, where actually, if you are renting this home, the minimum temperature is 18 degrees centigrade. If you want it warmer than that, you pay the extra.
Jenny:But this is what we're looking to do. So we're wanting to be able to understand what that looks like across a whole range of different archetypes, as well as different stages of upgrading works that have carried on to that and what that looks like, and working with the residents to understand again the health and wellbeing benefits of that, to understand how we then scale that up to have something as an offering to be able to have for the sector.
Simon:Yeah, those as a service models I think are fascinating and a fascinating frontier for the built environment. And when you kind of look at the history of as-a-service models, they all seem to start to get to a threshold when there's enough data coming out of that sector to provide the assurity that you're getting what you paid for and to provide the feedback loops for the service provider to provide a service and a business that's effective for them as well. And obviously you know everybody knows of the Rolls Royces and the Apache helicopters and all of the start of that kind of industry. And that was only ever possible because of the value of that technology and the data that was able to be captured at the time out of it. And we've seen that as a service model now trickle down into all sorts of interesting industries.
Simon:Having a fascinating conversation with a boiler manufacturer there last year who's starting to think about as a service models perhaps not into housing yet, but certainly into things like schools and education and office spaces and things like that.
Simon:So we're getting there and you get the sense now with the property technology that's available, we've got enough insight and feedback loops potentially coming out of that sector now and certainly there's the value in the asset. There's no doubt about that that those as a service models seem to be at the the brink now of coming through, and I think that's very exciting because that changes everything. I mean, I've been talking about air quality as a service for 15 years. I'd never got. You know, there's something slightly dodgy about selling air, um, but you know that's effectively what you're doing with the comfort. You know these comfort as a service models are starting just starting to be at the point where we think we can know enough contextual data about the building to know that we can accurately provide comfortable environments but also know why that's happening. So as a service provider, we can protect ourselves in that process as well. So so I think that'll be fascinating.
Jenny:Really excited to see that one. Yeah, I think you're right, I think we're going to see more and more of that, yeah, of that whole service offering coming through. And I think the other bit to add into it is traditionally the landlords wanted to own everything, if you like, around it. So actually own that customer journey, um, because it's their, their customer, and I absolutely get that um, and therefore to have that um, everything, I suppose, going through the landlord, whereas a bit more challenge around, actually, if you can get rid of the landlord out of that process and actually it's between the, the, the resident and the provider, whatever that is of the solution provider, uh, be that, uh, you know, go looking at the gas servicing, be that looking at repairs and maintenance or retrofit or whatever those things are, actually it's less likely, you know, the shorter the process, the less likely there are things to go wrong and quite often we're adding more complexity by having the landlord in there.
Jenny:So actually, what are the ways that we could do that which, again, you know, comes back to, I mean, one of my other hobby horses is the amount of waste that we have in organisations, which I think for most housing organisations I'd say they're running on between 40 and 60% waste, which is, you know, is a huge amount of money.
Jenny:But if you think about the number of times that people can't get into a home from repair or can't get through a communal door, or the fact that people are losing their fobs or losing their keys, or we're thinking about a contact centre, most 50% of calls on average coming into a contact centre are chasing somebody that hasn't done what they said they were going to do. So there's wastage all the way through. The more we can shorten those processes down to free up more of the resources to feed that into the areas that are going to make the difference. Or again, thinking about how we can come together more as a sector with those 1,400 organisations and have some of those core services just delivered just as one service. Why have we got so many different IT systems? We could effectively have one IT system that everybody uses, that everybody uses, and yet we're spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds bespoking systems to be able to then fit for that housing provider when somebody down the road is providing exactly the same service.
Jenny:Yeah, it's just so. I think that whole element of how do we start thinking differently to free up the resources, to feed this into help, support, you know, homes to be healthier, um, and upgrading those homes as we're going through it, I, I think, is we're going to see. We're just going to see when well, we need to see more of it, because the the one you know, the, the, the for-profits that are coming into the sector don't have all of this legacy stuff and will be coming in and forcing the change. If we're just happy doing what we're doing, then we'll be extinct before long because the for-profits will be coming in to be able to do it. I know it's quite a big bold statement, but I just think there is a bit around that lack of perceived competition means we're not on our toes, thinking about what the next thing is, and I think we've got to just perhaps think slightly differently and there's a rail politic to those legacy organisations.
Simon:You know it depends on your perspective. But you know I mean I travel the length of breadth of the UK, ireland and Scotland and it's quite staggering the difference in culture and positions of housing organisations and even the market that they sit in. You know it's an anathema at the moment, talking to an approved housing body in Ireland, to think about some of the housing associations I'm working with in Scotland who have got a shrinking market. You know they're legacy organizations that have taken on old council and local authority stock and staff in deprived areas where people are moving out, where there's net migration out of those areas and they're dealing with for-profits coming into the area that carrying none of that weight. And you're a tenant and you get to live in the old concrete tenant block or that brand new two-bed semi that's been built in the estate down the road.
Simon:It's an unfair fight for some of those organizations. Um, so, like you say that it's survive or die or understand the trajectory and understand how you're gonna manage that decline, um, and that that's why I think when we talk about all of these programs, that the because of the diversity in housing, it has to be fit for purpose for that full spectrum. There will be some that are on that growth trajectory that I'm dealing with, some at the moment, who probably growing 15%, taking on 15% of their stock per annum at the moment, which means in 10 years time, 65 75 percent of their stock will have been acquired or built in that 10 year period. So the choices they're making now on the how they build and the types of buildings that they acquire are going to be hugely impactful in five to ten years time on how they manage those properties, whereas another housing organization less than 250 miles away is shrinking, is taking on less than half a percent of new stock every year and is in a very, very different position.
Simon:How did you find yourself here, jenny, setting up the Healthy Homes Hub For people that aren't familiar with you, what's your kind of story into housing, and then the din network and ultimately here um, so my I suppose my, my background originally um was, or perhaps I started my career after a business, after a business degree.
Jenny:I started my career in the working as a contractor for the NHS, in facilities management, just as and it shows how old I am because that's just when 2P started being introduced so I did, I worked there in operational of turning around contracts as well as starting and closing contracts, and then I worked quite a bit within the business development side as well. So that was really interesting and seeing the effect, the effect of actually just you know a lot, to be fair, a lot of low-paid, very passionate people but delivering such an amazing service that really did, from a patient perspective, make a significant difference. I then moved from there into work for BAA, so at the airport, so British Airports Authority, as it was managing working at both Heathrow and Gatwick. So I had a number of a number of roles there, both Heathrow and Gatwick. So I had a number of roles there, one of them being airport duty manager, so responsible for the 24-hour operation of Heathrow Airport. So I had some interesting experiences there, from managing 9-11 through to hostages, through to water being out at the airport a whole range of things, um, which again was really interesting. Um, and then I also worked in both retail and development um at those, um, at those airports, and then I moved from then.
Jenny:How I got into housing was I then want to go and work for a service provider? Um, so I suppose a bit a mixture between an interim management and a consultancy, but going in and working with predominantly councils to help them improve by service their areas. So started off in rents and benefits, worked a lot within the asset teams, which is, um, which is the bit I suppose I fell in love with and did that for a number of years across a number of councils and housing associations and ALMOs, managing DLOs and having a lot of different experiences around all of the whole of the asset side. And then I moved. I took some time out of the sector then and worked for Boots Opticians for a year, so I worked with them on their supply chain, their glasses supply chain, which was interesting, and then moved back into housing but spent more time with contractors then. So working on the other side, particularly from a repairs and maintenance side, focusing a lot on the culture and the operational side. I spent about 18 months, just short of 18 months at Ilka, at the factory up there, working predominantly with Nigel Banks and with Dave Sheridan in supporting their design team. So, yeah, I love that.
Jenny:And then I've worked with Ian Wright and the DIN network for the last six years and, what I should say, I actually also had an exec director position at Metropolitan. So I was exec director and interim chief exec for a short time there before they merged with Thames Valley Housing and Gita came in housing and gita came in um. So I I started there just when there was um, when it had actually merged from three organizations into into one um, so spent quite a long time in there supporting that, that, that turnaround um, and, yes, that led me into this sort of where it's been the last six years working with, with ian, working at ilka, doing some more consultancy with repairs and maintenance and contracts and other housing providers. So I led the PIN network, so the PropTech Innovation Network, for the last three years and, as I said then, really wanted to focus on that health side and, yeah, making a difference, as we've talked about there, and I think the fact that I suppose, as you just get older, simon, you just think I want to be able to, you know, be proud of the legacy that I'm leaving.
Jenny:I believe I've delivered a lot for this sector and a lot for the other sectors that I've worked into, but actually this is still something that just hasn't moved fast enough. And, you know, in the conversations I've had with academics, with industry and with housing providers, it really feels that there's a void here to be able to help organisations move forward. And I was sort of looking around and nobody else was doing it. So I thought, well, okay, we'll take some of the money out of the pension and we'll invest in starting this up and seeing if we can make a make a go of it, because if I didn't, I'd regret it.
Simon:So, um, and hopefully we can really make a difference with this as well and I mean, obviously, your feeling is there's something here that the time is right somehow, that this is needed, um, but the needle's moved in that direction a little bit as well. There's a, there's some momentum of some description, both in what we've seen with our abs law and condensation, damp and mold, but the covid period and people's recognition of the importance of home as being a place of safety and rest and recuperation and protection.
Jenny:I think all of us have felt that, um, or felt the negative side of that, not having somewhere to call that during the pandemic, which has been the case for many people, um, so there's something here, isn't there that there's a we're at a crossroads, a time we get this sense that some, something needs to move yeah, and I think I think there's also because of the shift and the move that needs to happen towards towards achieving net zero that for a lot of people outside of those of us that working on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't really mean anything, um and but actually to be able to live in a healthy home is something that people either those that can afford to will invest in doing it to make their home healthier and more comfortable and warmer and secure. That need, you know, potentially have got to invest their own money into this. As we go through and look at remortgaging of what needs to happen, actually, again, achieving net zero, but achieving something that makes it a healthy home for you and your children. That's something that's different and I think it's that narrative that needs to to change. And I can see, I can see some of those things that are coming through and I suppose it's just it feels like the time is right because this is the direction of travel that we're going to see and I think the more, the more technology that we've had and the more that people's understanding gets better, which we we've seen with, you know, the, the press around um um awab's law and the building safety act and the dreadful things that have happened at grenfell.
Jenny:All of all of those things are coming together and they've talked about much, much more. You know the same as heat pumps and ground source heat pumps and people who's. You know a number of people. I'm sure you're the same who actually, when somebody's asked them what they did before, no one's ever been interested and suddenly now they're one of the. You know people who want to talk to you when you go out. So I think the whole narrative is changing as people start to understand the impact and I think when the health bit is really joined together, that's where we'll start seeing the difference.
Simon:Yeah, I was, um, somebody was talking to me, I was, just I couldn't remember the guy's name quajo, uh, to anaboa, you know, the guy that wrote the house, our country in crisis. I've just finished that book. Actually. It was interesting and for me it's. It's part of a trilogy really of my worldview that really started with tenants by I can't remember her name.
Simon:Now there's an amazing book called Tenants which really breaks down social housing, I think, and the structures of tenancy. And obviously I read the Show Me the Bodies book, which was the Grenfell one. They were two bookends really for me on just how bad it can get, both from a physical built environment perspective, but also socially from a housing structure perspective. And now you've got this emotive piece of Quajo's book which talks so viscerally about the lived experience of that life. I think it paints a picture of where we are and the fact that there's so much low-hanging fruit here that this is the great thing. This isn't something that we're trying to tweak and refine. Incremental changes here can have very big impacts and I think that's the exciting thing about healthy homes.
Jenny:Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I think, if I can, it'd be lovely to be able to go and speak at a conference where, when I ask the question, to go and speak at a conference where, when I asked the question, um, because there's so there's too many, unfortunately still strategic asset asset directors that don't want to know what's happening in the home, because if they do, then they've got to find the money which they haven't got to be able to then do something about it.
Jenny:So they'd rather not ask than actually try and find the additional money. And whenever I ask that at an asset conference, there's always that uncomfortable laughter as people look at their feet, because there's too many people that are doing that and we've got to get into a position which again comes back to that model. This isn't about picking on individuals, because it's the whole system that needs to come together, but that's why it comes back to the operating model. We've got to understand what's happening in people's homes and actually how we can make those homes healthier and better and spend the money in the right places in the right way to mean that people can live in a healthy home.
Simon:Yeah, and the picture I paint to people quite often at the moment is that we're in this stage of opportunity because of the data and insight that's coming out of the built environment.
Simon:Liz, you pointed out that perhaps we'd never been in before.
Simon:Yeah, but also, if you project that forward another 10 years, that also presents a risk that wasn't there before, because, whether you like it or not, as an organization, we are going to know the ongoing performance of the spaces that we provide for people and really we're at this point now where people have to make a decision.
Simon:Is that a process that I want to be in control of and I start to build the strategies and the policies around, or do I let that come at me and continue with this reactive approach, because it's a very uncomfortable place to be? I can tell you when you're being presented with data as to how your assets are performing compared to just anecdotal complaints from tenants, and that's where we're heading, whether we like it or not, because that data is coming out of every smart thermostat, heat pump, boiler, television sets, mobile phone, you name it, and that's where we are now. You know, we this is moving quite quickly and there won't be many places to hide um, and that's the risk. I think the principal risk for housing organizations is that they'll find themselves in a space where they're just not going to be able to answer those questions satisfactorily, and it's going to be a very, very awkward place to be, I think.
Jenny:No, I think you're right and I think, as we know, technology is just going to continue to advance. Wearable health technology is going to be providing some of that information soon. So what residents themselves are wearing or the technology that they choose to have in their homes will give that information, as you said. So I think it is. It's, um, it's just, it's just the right thing, it's absolutely the right thing to do, and some of this is going to be uncomfortable as we go through it, but if we don't start now understanding that it's well, it's just, it's just not the right thing, in my view. If we don't.
Simon:So, if this all goes well with the Healthy Homes Hub, jenny, what do you see the next five years looks like, both for the hub but for organisations that are getting involved with the hub? What do healthy homes look like for them over the next five years, do you think?
Jenny:so I'll say when it goes well, not if it goes well.
Simon:So when, when it goes well, yeah when it goes well.
Jenny:So I think, yeah, we've, we've. There's some things that we're really excited about. Um, so we've. When we are, when we launch the hub, we'll have something called housing sage. When we launch the hub, we'll have something called Housing Sage, and Housing Sage is there to be able to share the best practice. So what we are looking to do is for housing providers to be able to use for a small fee, but as well as joining as a membership, they've got to share some of their best practice.
Jenny:And it's an AI large language model that we are looking to be able to gain as much best practice as we can do from across the sector that we can then share. And the fact it's because it's curated and the fact we know what's in there, we can ensure that it's kept up to date, and we've got some really great examples on that at the moment. So in five years time, you know what a fantastic resource that we will have as more share, because the problem we've got in the sector is people do want to share, but the only share with people that they know, and what we want to do is to be able to push that wider. So I'd say a significant large resource in what a healthy home looks like and how to deliver a healthy home and the best way of being able to do that. So we'll have a lot more information on that. We want to be in a position where we are working and influencing government policy is where we'd really like to be. So the fact that we are really pushing that health and wellbeing policy towards government, to think about it now whether that's part of looking at warm rents, whether that's looking at a wider wellbeing solution, all of those things that want to be able to be in a position that we've influenced and ideally, taking this from social housing, taking that learning into the private rented sector, which desperately needs this too, and to support those landlords and residents in private rented and also homeowners too. So we're going to have a lot of resource in there that we want to be able to continue to share.
Jenny:But you know, we're not the experts. I'm not the expert in healthy homes. We're working with lots of experts and it's working with them and with academics and sharing the latest research that we can then ensure that we are, yeah, helping those decision makers, be that a decision maker of an individual home or a decision maker of 125,000 homes. Actually, this has been able to move forward and also to be able to continue to have and share those projects and case studies and the podcast and lots of different ways projects and case studies and the podcasts, and lots of different ways. However, people best want to consume the knowledge that we are gaining from others. We're finding lots of ways to be able to do it and that's and keep just coming back to housing sage. All of that information will be in housing sage. So, actually to be able to have your virtual assistant that helps you deliver a healthy home, that's what. That's what we only four and five years time yeah, that sounds fantastic.
Simon:And you know I say at the start of every one of my podcasts that you know I already believe we have much of the information we need to be successful. It's how we share and communicate that knowledge is the key to our success. And you know, and I think this sage exemplifies that you know, if you, if you want to make a small change to avoid policy that incorporates best practice for x, and you just plug sage into that, it can pull on all of the best practices and the resources that are out there and help you deliver that, rather than going through an expensive and clunky consultative process.
Jenny:What it won't do, I suppose, is deliver the organisational change management you need on the ground, the changing hearts and minds, but it's a resource for information for you that that you can pull this stuff together, it'd be fantastic yeah, absolutely, and I think if we can um relieve that pressure on, as you said, from housing associations that have got 15 or 50 homes all the way through to over 100 000 homes, a lot of people are employing or doing as part of their job a lot of the stuff that we're trying to get housing sage to do.
Jenny:Actually, if that can come out and that in money being reinvested in the frontline services to deliver more healthy homes, that's what we're looking to do. We don't. We don't everybody needs to have ventilation strategy. Not everyone's got one. Everyone needs one, but we don't need 1400 different ventilation strategies. A lot of the basics will be the same and then we, you know, a bit similar to your bell curve before either end of it we need to be really focusing on, but a lot of it will be similar, and then you then end up with the support to get you the extra 20% that you need.
Simon:If Housing SAGE can get you 80% of the way, there actually's just going to make things better to for us to be able to then move forward as a sector yeah, and if I have one wish out of the large language model, it will be that it starts to create some consistency in language and framing for this sector, that we start to develop a language and an understanding of what we mean by healthy homes, what we mean by adequate ventilation, what we mean by air quality, that we create a narrative that breeds consistency. Because the challenge so many people have, I think, is, you know, if I ask 10 different housing organizations what adequate ventilation means, I'll get 10 different answers, and that's half the battle we face, I think, is is creating a commonly understood language by what we mean by healthy homes will be enormously transformative, I think yeah, I think you're right.
Jenny:I think that I suppose it also ties in just to that measurement element too, that actually, if we are talking about those same things and measuring the same things in the same way, wow, what you know how much we would have then to be able to use collectively to make better decisions on will be brilliant yeah, no, absolutely, jenny listen.
Simon:Thanks so much for spending time talking to me this afternoon. It's been fabulous, as always. Um, I'm sure the podcast wishes you every luck in this venture of healthy homes. Um, I'm glad to be supporting it from an air quality perspective. Um, it's going to be fascinating to see how it develops. If people want to find out a little bit more about it, where do they go?
Jenny:So we're on LinkedIn so that we get a lot of things on LinkedIn. There's also the website, so healthyhomeshubuk, and we'll be pushing a lot more stuff out, hopefully in the next few weeks to give you the official launch date. But yeah, thank you for today, sam. I really enjoyed it and definitely looking forward to working with you in the hub more.
Simon:Brilliant, jenny. Thanks a million Thanks. Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed this podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. The podcast was brought to you in partnership with 21 Degrees, lindab, aeco, ultra Protect and Imbiote all great companies who share the vision of the podcast and aren't here by accident. Your support of them helps their support of the podcast. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. See you next week.
