15 minutes with… Kevin Ruth

Insight25.02.227.00 AM by Lucie Heath

Kevin Ruth is chief executive of Together Housing. In a quarter-of-an-hour chat with Inside Housing, he discusses the customer experience, decarbonisation plans and the successful local football team

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Kevin Ruth is chief executive of Together Housing. In a quarter-of-an-hour chat with Inside Housing, he discusses the customer experience, decarbonisation plans and the successful local football team #UKhousing

You were appointed to the role of chief executive in August last year. What has been your top priority since you’ve been in the job?

I see the purpose of the organisation as being the best landlord it can be.

We want to place the customer experience at the centre of what we do as an organisation. Everything we do as an organisation impacts on people’s lives.

We’re a long-term asset business. The legacy will be the organisation and our housing stock – they’re going to be here for a long time – but during my tenure, we want to make sure that people are looked after in those homes.

We’ve developed our corporate plan and our strategies around that agenda, around the customer experience and how we can enhance the experience on our estates. I think that’s where our focus is.

There is a trend in the sector right now of housing associations spending less on development and more on their existing properties. Does Together Housing fit into this trend?

One hundred per cent yes, definitely. We’ve got a renewed focus in our corporate plan on investment in our existing stock, in the safety of our homes, in the amenities that are provided within those homes, around decent standards, reducing energy costs and making homes more efficient – all of those things around our properties are central to our plan.

We are still a strategic partner for Homes England and we will deliver new affordable housing because we see again that’s a primary objective, but there is a renewed emphasis on our existing stock.

We work collaboratively with key development partners – some of the major builders – on our development programme, particularly where we’re doing properties for market sale. We have had good support from them in terms of their supply chain arrangements and they’ve helped to alleviate some of the pressures, but delays in delivery of materials and increasing component costs have been significant. It has slowed down some of the delivery programme.

The fact that house values have continued to increase during the period has helped to alleviate some cost pressures. We’re not losing sites – we’ve still got our pipeline – but it is taking longer to deliver.

Where are you at with decarbonisation plans?

In our corporate plan, which is a five-year plan to 2026, our ambition is to reduce our carbon emissions by 25%; 19% of our emissions as an organisation come from our housing stock, so we can do a significant amount to improve that.

We’re doing a lot of work in terms of addressing the fabric and the thermal efficiency of our poor-performing properties, so those properties that are EPC D or below, and trying to get them to C or above.

Once we know properties are efficient, we’ve got a programme where we put in solar panels and battery arrays within properties to reduce energy costs for our tenants. That will generate some renewable energy.

And we’re also piloting through our maintenance programmes – and shortly into our new build – the use of air source heat pumps and ground source heat pumps. We’ve done some successfully now and we’re just monitoring the results.

So we’ve got a quite active programme – £120m being invested over that five years in energy efficiency arrangements – but there’s a lot more we need to do beyond the five years of this corporate plan. We’re trying to access the short-term government funding that’s been available, but it’s not that significant in terms of the scale of what we’re doing.

How has the pandemic changed your organisation?

Quite significantly in terms of how we operate. Our business performance has been fairly stable. Our staff and our organisation have performed really well during the pandemic. We’ve had pressures on staff attendance through safe working and isolation – so losing staff and having to bring subcontractors in – but generally business performance in terms of service delivery has been good.

We’ve continued to deliver what we want to deliver. We’re very agile with our colleagues. It’s established a new norm in terms of smart working. We will use our office bases as destinations to bring people in for collaborative team-working, but if people want to and can work effectively at home, or at other locations, then we’ll enable that to happen.

Your offices are in Blackburn. What’s the best thing about the area?

We’ve got a successful football team at the minute – they’re hoping to get promoted to the Premier League, so that’s keeping colleagues excited. And we live around the Ribble Valley, which has got lovely green spaces and nice places to walk and to cycle. My passion is road cycling so I’m able to get out and about on my bike.