100 years of Midland Heart: Glenn Harris reflects on the past and sets out his plans for the future

Speaking to a packed hall, Glenn Harris, chief executive of Midland Heart, set out his ambitions for the next five years. After extensive consultation with tenants, he said the five-year plan “is not merely shaped by the voice of our tenants, this new plan is the voice of our tenants”.

“It took 100 years for this organisation to accrue debt to the level of £550m. By the end of this plan by 2030, that £550m will be £1bn of debt and investment. £300m of that will go into our existing homes. We will halve the time taken to repair our homes – that is the number-one thing tenants have told [us] that matters,” he said.

Tough decisions

New housing remains an ambition, as it was for the founders, and Mr Harris pledged to build more than 2,500 homes in Birmingham and across the Midlands over the course of the plan.

Midland Heart will also launch Project 100, to deliver 100 zero-carbon homes in Birmingham, and a modernisation programme “way beyond Decent Homes, way beyond replacing kitchens, bathrooms and windows” to equip its homes for the next 100 years.

What about the person in charge of delivering these ambitions? Inside Housing met Mr Harris to find out more about the man in the hot seat as Midland Heart hits 100. We wanted to mark the anniversary by finding out how he is approaching the role and how that will inform the housing association’s future.

Mr Harris is a details man interested in making sure the building blocks for success are in place. As a qualified accountant – “my dad said, ‘You’ve got to get a trade of some sort’” – Mr Harris’ career started at the end of the 1980s at British Coal, before he moved to the NHS Supplies Authority, which provided supplies of healthcare products to NHS trusts and other health bodies in England. He rose to become director of finance and performance at the NHS Logistics Authority. 

He then shifted to become director of corporate services at the East Midlands Development Agency, before being promoted to deputy chief executive.

“It wasn’t particularly [due to] any sort of massive ambitions,” he says of his career progression. “It’s just I’ve always been somebody who, whatever I’m doing, I want to do it right. Whatever it is you’re doing, you need to know how you manage it and organise it.”

The closure of the regional development agencies by the coalition government prompted Mr Harris to move into the housing sector. He joined Midland Heart, first as executive director for corporate resources, before becoming chief executive in 2018.

One of his early focuses, he says, was to nurture the social purpose of the organisation and put it on an even stronger footing to deliver it.

“We didn’t want to lose that [social purpose] in any way, shape or form,” he says, but the finances needed getting into better shape to enable it to plan for the future. Tough decisions were made – such as exiting care provision, a decision prompted in part by the 1% rent cut imposed on the sector in 2015.

“The services went to specialist providers and we felt that is where they should be, because they have a specialist focus on it. We felt, and still do, that our focus is fundamentally on the core rental business and the core landlord service.”

This has to be the prime focus across the sector, he feels.

“It’s always the core landlord service that brings the sector into opprobrium. It’s seldom the stuff on the edges. The view of the board has been, and I firmly believe, that we should do our main job well, and if you do it really well, then by all means look at other stuff.

“If you take undue risks and overcommit an organisation such that you get into financial difficulties, then effectively you’re taking risks with people’s homes. There is no doubt about that,” he adds.

A source of pride is that “not a single target” from Midland Heart’s 2019-25 corporate strategy – such as its pledge to deliver 4,000 new homes – had to change, despite COVID and rising inflation.

“You have to assume things will happen,” Mr Harris says. “The question is, can you insulate the organisation such that if and when that does happen, you are able to continue to invest in people’s homes? If the answer is no, then you need to have a long think about it.”

Midland Heart’s scores in the recently published annual tenant satisfaction measures, collated by the Regulator of Social Housing, certainly suggest that the focus on the core service is working.

Its 2023-24 results showed that 78.6% of tenants who had received a repair in the past 12 months were satisfied with the overall service (more than six percentage points above the sector average). It outperformed the sector average on other indicators, such as satisfaction with the overall landlord service and time taken to complete repairs, too.

Under Mr Harris’ leadership, Midland Heart was behind the creation of the first All-Party Parliamentary Group on anti-social behaviour (ASB) – a key concern of tenants – and it outperformed the sector average for resident satisfaction with landlords’ approach to handling ASB by almost 10 percentage points.

Given that we are in a housing crisis, there is an argument about how far landlords should push themselves to deliver more homes.

In Inside Housing’s most recent survey of the sector’s biggest builders, Midland Heart was in 25th place for completions.

Mr Harris is proud of Midland Heart’s targets when it comes to development ambition and its record of delivering on them. He also warns that comparing development ambitions in the sector is dangerous, because there can be “a big difference between what people say they are going to do and what they actually do”.

“When I first joined the conference circuit, I listened to people [talk about their development targets] and I couldn’t work out how they were doing it really. I thought there were some kind of magical powers that I wasn’t yet availed of, because I couldn’t see how it was going to happen. Now, some have delivered some big numbers, but a lot of the ones that people promised haven’t delivered,” he says.

Future-proof homes

Moving forward with that 2,500-home target, Mr Harris says Midland Heart’s ambition is to “build as many new social and affordable homes as we can because, Lord knows, there is a demand”.

Nonetheless, the prime focus will remain on existing homes, he says. “That’s not a new thing. It’s not because it’s been on the TV and because of new housing regulations. That has always been a focus for the board.”

Now, as Mr Harris told attendees of the event in November, Midland Heart’s plans for its stock don’t just extend to keeping it maintained to basic standards. Its Project 80 scheme has delivered “the first social homes built in the UK to the modern Future Homes Standard” (the government standard coming into force in 2025 to reduce carbon emissions in new homes). Next up, Project 100 will deliver 100 zero-carbon homes.

All of this is driven by a belief that while some of Midland Heart’s stock is more than 100 years old, much of it will be in use in 100 years’ time, too.

“We’ve taken stock and said, ‘Well, we don’t think there’s going to be major regeneration in the cities of the UK that is going to replace those properties.’ There might be some examples. But is somebody going to set aside billions to knock down and reprovide? I think the answer is, ‘Probably not.’”

If that is the case, then “we have got to think about how we can allow those properties to potentially last another 100 years”, Mr Harris adds.

Midland Heart has consulted its residents about what modernisation of homes means to them.

“Simply replacing components [like in the Decent Homes Standard] is not what people want,” Mr Harris says.

Instead, people said they want to make their homes warmer and cheaper to heat. That means “we’re going to detail 10,000 properties to modernise in a way we think they need to be to equip them for another 100 years – that will be a 15 to 20-year programme”.

“That’s another reason to look after your headroom,” Mr Harris adds. “It doesn’t matter what government [is in power], it doesn’t matter what the grant regime is, it doesn’t matter who’s sat here as chief executive. If you’ve promised people that those homes need to be upgraded over 15 to 20 years and suddenly you do something which means you can’t [afford] to do that, who’s going to have that conversation with residents?”

Mr Harris is sceptical that fabric-first approaches to improve energy performance in housing are the right way to go. Fabric-first involves improving performance through changes to the physical fabric of a building, such as cladding or insulation, rather than relying on, say, renewable energy systems.

Internal insulation is difficult in narrow, back-to-back terraced housing and external cladding is similarly problematic, particularly in rows where the landlord doesn’t own all the homes.

Instead, he favours options such as solar panels on roofs, which can drive costs down for residents and which are more deliverable, he feels.

For now, however, the focus is on the next 100 years. “I take heart from where we have come from and I take heart from where we are today,” Mr Harris concluded to the audience at the anniversary celebration. “We are a strong organisation that is performing well and is in a position to make the investments that I have talked about.”

In 100 years, Mr Harris hopes people will look back favourably on the decisions the association is making today.

“One hundred years from now, when people once again gather here, it is doubtful that we will be called Midland Heart, just as we are not called COPEC. But I believe Midland Heart will be a significant chapter in what the organisation of that time will be.”