Articles

Dan Craven, Head of Sales at Hyperoptic, discusses how it's part of the housing officer role to help improve digital skills within communities…

It is estimated that 11.3 million adults in the UK are digitally excluded and 37% of these people – some four million – live in social housing. It’s a high number and has many negative consequences for society not least because most of the best deals for utilities and shopping are now online and digitally excluded people can miss out on some £456 of online savings per year compared with more digitally savvy counterparts.

Whilst the availability of accessible and affordable property technology products soars in an increasingly paperless world, the need for improving processes couldn’t be greater. Stakeholders in the property world are moving on from traditional methods, the transition includes moving away from Excel sheets and home-built DIY management processes to cloud-based software that is up to 2020 standards. 

In order to improve efficiency within housing management, the uphill daily battle against outdated processes must be eradicated. The implementation of software is a great way to improve productivity and service delivery. 

Digital transformation can seem overwhelming, but the good news is that new software can be very cost effective in relation to the value gained. Property management software will enable you to move away from inefficient and time-consuming methods and towards more automated and streamlined processes. 

The current housing crisis wasn’t created by some ‘housing crisis god in the sky’. It didn’t just happen by chance. Government created this crisis. They made it happen. Nobody else.
Yes, as a society the industry and businesses respond to government policies and there is no doubt that many have added to the crisis, but the simple fact remains that successive weak governments, poor housing government policies and ineffective housing ministers have created, a ‘broken housing system’.

A new financial borrowing vehicle created by housing associations for housing associations has funded 2,233 new homes across England and Wales in the last year according to its Social Impact Reportreleased today (6 February 2020).
 
MORhomes, owned and created by housing associations, lent its first nine borrowers a total of £260m which is being used to fund new homes in 36 local authorities in England and Wales. The homes are for a range of tenures including 1,206 for social and affordable rent, 536 for shared ownership and 31 designed for people with support needs to be more independent.

Golding Homes, one of the South East’s largest housing providers, aims to build more new affordable homes in Kent as part of its development pipeline, with the goal to have 8,000 homes in its ownership by 2021. 
 
Based in Maidstone, the housing provider has set out ambitious plans thanks to a new £100m credit facility secured with NatWest and additional funding of £20m from Santander. 
 
Golding Homes owns and manages over 7,650 homes in Kent and provides services to more than 20,000 people. The additional credit funding has already played an important part in Golding’s latest development plan, with the organisation recently entering into contract with three major UK developers to provide 164 homes across five new housing schemes.

Housing Association Magazine Editor Joe Bradbury takes a sneak peak at the social housing wishlist for 2020. What resolutions should we be making as a sector?

From Greta Thunberg travelling by boat to New York from Portsmouth, to the Amazon rainforest disaster, climate change continues to be a dominating theme in today’s society; with each controversy underlined by the threat of rising carbon emissions. 

While the spotlight is often shone brightest on transport, meat and the rising population, one of the biggest culprits of carbon emissions is spoken about less - the building sector. Almost half of all emissions in the UK are linked to construction, operation and maintenance of the built environment.

It’s not just the onsite building process, but there’s a huge correlation between the extraction and consumption of materials for the use of building materials, and their environmental impact. For example, billions of tonnes of sand and gravel are extracted per year to make concrete for the building industry, affecting beaches and river beds.