Patrick Franco sets out his plans to transform Notting Hill Genesis

Two years in and this is Mr Franco’s first major interview since he took on the role. “I spent a lot of my first year listening, and that’s probably why we’re only doing this interview now,” he says, adding: “I realised I had a lot to learn.”

Customer focus

So, today’s conversation is a chance to find out about the man who has taken the reins at one of London’s housing giants, and his vision for the 67,000-home association. But we are speaking at a serious moment
for the organisation, too.

Just months before our conversation, NHG was downgraded to a non-compliant G3 governance rating by the Regulator of Social Housing and handed a C3 consumer rating. The judgement couldn’t have come at a worse time. Mr Franco was just starting to roll out changes. Many of these seem, on the face of it, to have identified and set out to tackle some of the issues the regulator was so worried about. Which means one of today’s jobs is to try to understand some of the timelines at play and piece together the extent to which Mr Franco’s approach is set to – and was already looking to – address some of those regulatory concerns.

Certainly, Mr Franco is someone who has always sought out challenges. After graduating from the University of Oxford with a bachelor’s in history and politics, he moved into a job in financial services “because I wanted to understand how companies operated” and “complete that knowledge gap”.

His early career at global investment bank Credit Suisse (where he rose to the position of chief operating officer of the UK asset management business) was spent “thinking about what service looks like for ultra high net worth individuals”. This gives some insight into his current approach, because “what good service looks like for them is largely the same type of service anyone should be experiencing”.

“The risk for the [social housing] sector, and something we’re very mindful of at NHG, is that you run the risk that you don’t necessarily build a service proposition as if you need to win over customers, or they could leave you. We’re trying to create a service proposition here where we are striving for something more, like a net promoter score, where our residents truly feel like customers.”

A net promoter score is a measurement used in market research to measure how likely someone is to recommend a service. Mr Franco says the goal is to reach a stage where residents would tell friends: “You really should rent with Notting Hill Genesis, they’re a great landlord.”

Mr Franco thinks “that’s a significant shift to make in a sector that has sort of been moving at a slower speed, just inheriting an infinite supply of residents”.

There are other changes he would like to make. Mr Franco’s LinkedIn profile states that he is a “champion of diversity and inclusion with a focus on LGBTQ+ and social mobility”. This is another area where he wants NHG to excel.

“Justice and fairness have always been important to me,” he says. “If I just start with LGBT inclusion, I’m gay and when I started off in financial services, I didn’t feel like I could be my authentic self in the office. There were no gay role models.”

In the workplace, he wants to focus on “talent mapping”, with a people strategy that looks at people’s career plans “and cut that through the lens of ethnic diversity, gender”.

“We should know through mapping out our talent pipeline that it is already diverse, and from a succession planning standpoint, we can embed that in the organisation,” he says.

Mr Franco says he spent the first 18 months looking to “get the foundations right” at NHG. He says his main focus is on delivering a better service for residents through increased investment in homes and improving the service proposition through centralised teams in areas such as repairs and complaints (the overall strategy is called Better Together).

The focus on customer experience has led to some difficult decisions, such as “attenuating the development pipeline in the short term” – 500 homes a year are planned over the next 10 years, of which 60% will be affordable.

There has also been huge scrutiny of performance in frontline roles. “I would say probably 90% of roles have been reviewed across the entirety of the organisation in terms of frontline customer service roles. About 20% of people have been moved on.”

In practice this means many residents “may have seen a change in housing officer”, he says. “I’m mindful that can be disruptive at times, and we wouldn’t want a situation where that’s happening every year, but there was a reset.”

Dramatic as those figures sound, for Mr Franco, action was needed to drive a message about improving services. “I think what has changed is a focus on getting the job done, in addition to caring,” he says. “Everybody’s heart is in the right place in this organisation. But if we don’t get the job done, then we ultimately don’t care, right? So, we need to execute.”

Unusually for the sector, NHG may also downsize to improve services. It currently has about 6,000 homes outside London and is “exploring options to transfer those homes to a housing association that has local knowledge and supply chains that would be better suited to delivering a really good experience”. In turn, “you will probably see an organisation that’s closer to 60,000 homes” focused within London.

NHG is also reviewing the future of its 3,400-home market rental portfolio, Folio London. “One of the things that we’re looking at now is the opportunity to joint venture with an institutional investor or operator that may be able to add their value to the portfolio through either patient capital or additional levels of operating experience that would make this portfolio even more valuable.”

NHG will be appointing advisors “imminently” to conduct a strategic review of Folio. The results could “allow us to unlock value in that portfolio that we can either use for de-leveraging and/or investing in our homes”, Mr Franco says.

“Folio is a bit like an endowment, or it could be positioned that way for NHG, and in that sense it is quite interesting because not all housing associations have £1bn endowments on their balance sheet,” he adds.

‘The art of the possible’

Whatever the result of the review, the question is how Folio can best help NHG deliver its Better Together strategy. Part of the aim of that is to drive up customer satisfaction. In order for that to happen across the board, the sector needs to change its mentality, Mr Franco thinks.

“It’s around the art of the possible,” he argues. “Designing the service around ‘what would it take to have 100% satisfaction?’ Whether we can afford that is a second question, but we need to be working off the best, not working off a strategy that maintains mediocrity.”

If these are the ambitions and the strategy, the regulatory judgement last November is the elephant in the room. The regulator found that the board did not have comprehensive assurance on the health and safety of tenants in their homes and, for the consumer grading, it highlighted a “substantial backlog” of more than 2,000 overdue fire safety remediation actions. It also pointed to a lack of data on whether legal requirements had been met in a large number of third-party-managed buildings, along with a repairs backlog.

“I don’t think there is a massive disconnect between the judgement and what we’ve been doing over the last 12 months with the Better Together strategy,” Mr Franco says. “It clearly says we need to redouble our efforts and move quicker on this front, which we will do.”

The judgement also highlights one area where Mr Franco would like to see the law changed to help it gather information from third-party managing agents about health and safety. “One of the conversations I’ve been having a lot with MPs is how to create a mechanism to force third-party managing agents to make this information available for residents and housing associations in a clear and timely way.”

In the current system, managing agents that NHG hasn’t appointed “are not compelled to provide this information” and that means “you end up sort of breaking into a plant room, so to speak, to do a check that isn’t our responsibility”.

“In order to have a long-term solution, we need third-party managing agents publishing this information or making it available like you would see for EPCs.”

In terms of stock data, 60% of the association’s homes have had a stock condition survey carried out within the past five years – up from the 50% of homes at the time of the regulatory judgement. “This will be at 100% before 2027,” Mr Franco adds.

What about the backlog of more than 2,000 fire remediation actions identified in the regulatory judgement? As of December 2024, that figure had reduced to 1,598 (there were more than 3,000 overdue remediation actions in September 2023).

“There is clearly a need to do more there,” Mr Franco says. “Over the last year we’ve closed those out significantly, 60% year on year, taking a risk-based approach. Of course, we would like to see it go faster. We had Savills benchmark that we are doing twice the productivity of our G15 peers, and it is now about relentless execution.”

The benchmarking point isn’t just a throwaway line. In fact, Mr Franco would like to see the regulator provide more contextual information when it publishes judgements. “I do think generally regulatory judgements could benefit from having more data in them with consistent benchmarking across social housing providers, which would allow residents to have transparency but also lenders.”

If those are some of the core concerns, what about the big picture? Do the judgements suggest a need for NHG to change course, or just accelerate its strategy?

Mr Franco thinks the latter. “Had you marked that homework in March or April of this year, I think it would have been a different picture.”

Time will tell, but there is no doubting the scale of Mr Franco’s ambition or his enthusiasm for the job at hand.