CIH CONFERENCE: Housing associations need to focus on their core purpose, rather than blindly going trying to scale up and create efficiencies though mergers.
Richard Peacock, chief executive of Soha Housing, said it’s a myth that bigger is better, or that smaller means better customer focus. He said the question should not be to merge or not to merge, but: “What’s the purpose, and how best to achieve it?”
Ann Santry, chief executive of Sovereign, said she had now been through five mergers, and even more failed mergers, preliminary talks and beauty parades. But she also that mergers are important: “As our word becomes more difficult, the organisation I am responsible for is so much more resilient than the organisation of five years ago.”
Bronwen Rapley, chief executive of Onward Homes, said her experience at housing association Symphony, which had a federal structure of six different housing associations, was that there was a huge difficulty to get anything done.
“What we had in 2016 was an organisation trying to make a federated structure work for some time… There were some benefits, but mostly there was an awful lot of frustration,” she said.
She explained that the merger meant 30 board members had to step down, alongside five managing directors, but it created the capacity to grow.
Santry said for those looking to merge, the first thing to take into account is similar culture, ambition in terms of travel and a similar geography.
Sovereign now has a comprehensive strategic alliance matric, which rates partners, and secondly comes quality of stock, team, governance and finance.
“For me, what makes a merger work? Parking the personal impact, because the reality is if this organisation can provide more homes and better services ,why wouldn’t you?”
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