15 minutes with… Geeta Nanda, chief executive of Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing
Geeta Nanda, chief executive of Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing, has just finished a two-year stint as chair of the G15. She reflects on her time in an interview with Peter Apps
How has it been being a figurehead during a period when the sector has been under quite a lot of scrutiny?
I wouldn’t say it’s been a walk in the park. It’s been a challenging time for larger organisations, and London organisations in particular, but I think for me the thing that really has been good is the collaboration between the G15. There’s much more of a commitment to work together and I think we’ve got a stronger focus now on the people we provide homes for.
That’s been the shift really. We used to talk about development a lot, the number of homes we’re building, and we’ve moved the focus more to the people that we provide the homes for. So I think it’s been a challenging period, but it’s been good to really focus everybody on that.
You say that the focus is more on residents now, whereas in the past, you might have talked quite a lot about development. From your perspective, what caused the G15 to take that change in approach?
I think it was different personalities, changes of people at the top of organisations. Sometimes the focus previously was around development, because it was about agreeing we need more homes and therefore what do we need to do to provide more homes? I’m not denying that’s really important. That was the only thing that we could get headline focus on. I think all the building safety stuff, as well as the external environment, has shifted as well.
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Do you think, it was a mistake in prior years not to have enough of a focus on the services that were being provided to existing residents?
I think you could do more through collaboration, so I think it was a mistake not to have that voice of the G15, which houses one in 10 Londoners, talking about the impact of things on our residents. But as individual organisations, the priority has always been existing residents. I don’t think the priorities change. I think the priority in terms of what we’re talking about at the G15 has changed.
In London, it’s very difficult to find good contractors – you know, the problems of recruitment, the problems of overcrowding, of existing stock. All of these problems are sort of common to us as organisations. So I think it’s been about having the space and time to talk about them and therefore what we can do about it and how we can collectively pull our weight has been more of a priority.
What’s your view of government at the moment? Do you think government is giving enough priority to social housing?
I think Michael Gove has been a powerful character in terms of focusing on social housing. I think it’s still a shame that we have this revolving door of housing ministers that come and go, but the stability of the secretary of state role means we’ve kept social housing as a priority.
That is being reflected to an extent in grant funding, but it’s nowhere near enough.
We’ve had to cut our programmes by about a third as the G15 in terms of developing new homes. That’s not just a threat, it’s reality. And the model of ramping up borrowing is problematic because our interest cover is starting to come under pressure. I think there is a realisation that there have to be more social rented homes built, but I can’t see the how it going to happen without more being put in.
What role do you think for-profit providers will play in the next few years in terms of the social housing sector?
I think the need is such that you need all the players you can get right now. There are some for-profits that have got very big plans and funding behind them, and they’re long-term institutions that are quite trusted.
But they will invest in what works best for them, which means they’re going to be doing a lot more around shared ownership than they will be around social rent. At the moment, we’ve got high interest rates. And any investment committee will be looking at where they put their money. Do they put it into something like affordable housing, or do they just put it into the market and get a return, which is an easier return?
As rents and mortgage rates rise, do you worry that shared ownership might stop becoming affordable – especially in the London market – to the kind of buyers that you’ve historically tried to reach with it?
I think you only do it where it does work for people. It’s got to be affordable. So there are lots of places in London where it doesn’t work any more. I think shared owners are in a very difficult situation at the moment with increases in mortgage rates. We do allow flexibility for people, if they’re really stuck, to be able to go down, so if they’ve got 50% and they can’t afford it any more to go down to 25%. But there are definitely bits of London where it’s just too expensive.
There has been a lot of talk about diversity in leadership, but we’re still quite a long way from where we need to be. You are currently the only Black, Asian or minority ethnic chief executive in the G15. What progress has been made?
We’re looking at the managers and we’re looking at the senior managers, and we’ve seen improvements in those areas. We’re monitoring it, we collect the data, and we’ve seen improvement, both at manager and senior manager level. I would love to see the improvement at chief executive level. We spoke to headhunters about how they spot talent from diverse communities. We’ve looked at how we can help develop the talent within our organisations, we’ve got our ethnicity awards to celebrate the success and to highlight leaders within the sector. We feel it’s a collective success.
What do you think the future is for London in terms of housing?
I think the city is resilient. But I worry that you’re just going to have the wealthy and the poorest able to stay and that bit in the middle is vanishing. There are reports of schools closing in Camden and Westminster because lots of people can’t afford to stay when they have children. The schools are great, but the families just can’t afford to live here.
So I just really worry about that group in the middle who want to stay, who love the city, who have established their lives here, having to leave. And I don’t know what that is going to make the city look like, but I think it’s happening before our eyes now. So that intermediate kind of housing model which is going to keep London moving is really, really important.
Geeta Nanda is speaking at Housing 2023. Hear from her in the keynote session, 3.30pm, on 28 June, and in the ‘Increasing diverse representation in senior roles’ session on the same day at 11.45am. To find out more, click here
