A look at the future of Great Places with its new chief executive
Alison Dean went on a housing placement at one of the associations that would become Great Places when she was a student in the 1990s. Now she is chief executive. Stephen Delahunty reports
The year was 1997. Tony Blair had swept to power and Titanic was on at the cinema. Alison Dean was doing a postgraduate diploma in housing studies at the University of Salford, when she took a placement at Manchester Methodist Housing Association.
READ MORE
She “never looked back”. Ms Dean spent the next 28 years at the organisation – through a 2006 merger which created Great Places – working across the business, most recently as deputy chief executive.
And then in July, she was appointed to the top job in the organisation – chief executive. By this time, the organisation had grown to more than 25,000 homes, and had a turnover of £172m in its last accounts, 2023-24.
“I started off in customer involvement and what we called ‘participation’ at the time, when that was kind of a new idea,” she says. “It [Great Places] was a very different organisation at that point – about 1,500 homes.”
Ms Dean stepped up after the retirement of Matt Harrison. He had been in the job for 10 years, spent over 30 years at Great Places, and has been praised for overseeing the growth of the organisation to become “one of the most significant housing associations serving the North of England”.
Inside Housing has come to meet Ms Dean and find out about where she plans to take Great Places, and how she is going to approach the major challenges facing the sector.
Building homes
One of those challenges is getting homes built, and Great Places has invited Inside Housing along on a tour of some of Great Places’ projects.
We are doing this interview in the construction office of one of its Manchester city centre developments.
“We’ve always punched above our weight in terms of providing homes, and look at taking on some of the more difficult sites that not all providers are able to deliver,” Ms Dean says.
This £20m, nine-storey development on Laystall Street will deliver a mix of social rent and Rent to Buy flats, next to the Grade II-listed Armitage Showroom. It is part of a plan that will see Great Places build around 4,500 homes over the next three years.
The landlord has about 2,000 homes on site but, Ms Dean says, it is already looking to identify new sites to bring forward under the next Affordable Homes Programme.
“There’s a lot of hope that can be placed on new technology and we’re really keen to understand the role emerging technologies can play, particularly around modern methods of construction”
The Labour government recently announced a £500m top-up under the current programme. But, like the rest of the sector, Great Places has an eye on the Spending Review slated for June, when we expect to learn more about the next Affordable Homes Programme – and in particular how much funding will be available.
The Dovecote House site at Laystall Street is being delivered in partnership with Eric Wright Construction and part-funded by Homes England and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s Brownfield Housing Fund.
“Often with these sorts of brownfield sites, you have to deal with contamination and issues, and a viability gap. It means we have to work together as a team to bridge that gap and ensure sites can still go ahead,” observes Ms Dean.
The exposed steelworks that make up the standing and supporting beams of the development were still coming out of the ground on our tour. But earlier in the day, Inside Housing had been taken around another site that is more advanced, and some residents had already been moving into parts of the development.
New tech
Downley Drive is Great Places’ first low-carbon flagship development on the edge of the Rochdale Canal, which will deliver a range of 75 new affordable homes in New Islington.
It features enhanced fabric and low-carbon technologies, including air source heat pumps, mechanical heat recovery, and a solar panel array on the apartments. The use of new technology and better use of data are areas that the landlord is looking to harness in its development pipelines and services delivered going forward.
“There’s a lot of hope that can be placed on new technology and we’re really keen to understand the role emerging technologies can play, particularly around modern methods of construction,” says Ms Dean.
But Great Places’ biggest innovation of recent times might be related to staffing. Ms Dean comes across as passionate about the importance of being visible in the community and providing residents with other support and opportunities, such as in employment.
“We believe that by employing more people with lived experience of social housing, it will help us improve our services”
She tells Inside Housing about a new project involving landlords from across Manchester that have set a target to recruit 20% of their staff from social housing tenants by 2034.
The initiative, called the 20% Movement, came from the 26 chief executives of the Greater Manchester Housing Providers and their reflections on the book The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric, which encourages people to think about their descendants.
The membership body settled on a pledge that by 2034, 20% of staff in each housing association will be from a social renting household.
According to Great Places, many landlords do not currently measure this and those that do have between 7% and 8%. For Great Places, its current total sits at 8.3% – but for the past 12 months, 11.5% of its new hires have been social housing tenants.
The pledge also links with the Better Social Housing Review, which stated: “When recruiting new housing officers in particular, organisations should seek to attract candidates from the communities they are based in, both to widen representation and to build stronger connections between the staff and the tenants they support.”
Ms Dean says the project “goes against the traditional thinking that housing associations have had about employing tenants where the risks were often considered to be too great”.
There are real potential conflicts between being a customer and employee of the same landlord – for example, being able to access the records of neighbours, family and friends, or misuse of systems to prioritise repairs to their own home. If there were issues of anti-social behaviour or domestic abuse, this could be difficult for a colleague to address with another colleague.
Great Places has a policy in place to address such potential conflicts or difficulties.
But, she adds: “We believe that by employing more people with lived experience of social housing, it will help us improve our services because our customers know our offer and understand the impact of good and bad service delivery on other customers.”
Recent longform articles by Stephen Delahunty
How recent changes to debt rules could affect the housing sector
The first Labour Budget in 14 years suggested that the chancellor has been listening to the social housing sector. Stephen Delahunty sums up the funding announcements that will have the biggest impact for housing providers
How will exemption from the local connection test work?
The government announced it would exempt certain groups from the local connection test when they apply for social housing. Stephen Delahunty finds out what sector figures think is needed for it to work
Sign up for our development and finance newsletter
Already have an account? Click here to manage your newsletters
