Alana Durnin: ‘Floods happen. Housing is dynamic and you need to be resilient’

Ms Durnin was working on the finance side in North Ayrshire Council’s maintenance service, when one Christmas, bad weather left many residents with frozen pipes. The head of service was travelling, and Ms Durnin was drafted in to visit some affected tenants.

“I went out to see an older couple, who reminded me of my grandparents. They were sitting on a wet couch and I said to the operative, ‘You came in and you fixed [the pipes], but… why did you leave them in there? Why didn’t you flag up that we need to rehome them?’” 

Ms Durnin was able to raise their case and they were rehoused in sheltered accommodation.

That experience led Ms Durnin to seek out roles in housing. She took on various positions as director of finance at housing associations.

In 2015, she went to run the finances for Oak Tree and Cloch. Cloch was a separately operating subsidiary of Oak Tree and finance was a shared service. In 2012, Cloch had been forced to join up with Oak Tree after regulatory intervention. Ms Durnin was part of the team that helped Cloch to de-merge.

Ms Durnin left after six years and took a four-day-a-week finance director role at Lar Housing Trust in Edinburgh. Her husband, a police inspector, was retiring. They bought a motorhome, which arrives this month. “Our life plan was going in this direction,” she says.

But then, the job back at Cloch came up. “I said to my husband, ‘That is my dream job. I would absolutely love to do that.’ I started life as a YTS. So from a YTS, ending my career as a chief exec – I just thought that would be quite special,” she says.

Coming back as chief executive, Ms Durnin immediately had to refresh the business plan. Inflation was driving up Cloch’s costs and pushing residents to the edge. The rent cap from the Scottish government threatened Cloch’s financial future.

In her first week, she was presenting data to MPs and MSPs on the impact of the rent cap over 30 years, as Cloch struggled with inflation. The cost of kitchen and bathroom replacements alone had gone up 40%, she says.

Meanwhile, Cloch’s repairs contractors were struggling. The association and two others set up a new repairs framework in response, which makes it easy for small local contractors to take work on. This has been a “success story”, she says. Now, other local housing associations have been asking to join.

Climate change is an inescapable factor for Cloch and Inverclyde. In December 2022, residents of six Cloch houses on Kilmacolm Road in Greenock were flooded out of their homes. Drying out and restoring the homes took from January until August. Four families moved back in. Then, in September, the same homes were flooded again. The impact on the families was dire, with one child developing an eating disorder.

The homes were really popular. When one came up for relet after the first flood, Cloch received 300 bids. But for now, they’re standing empty, due to the high risk of another flood – Cloch was quoted an insurance excess of £50,000 a house. Ms Durnin is lobbying for flood mitigations and hopes the government will redirect grant for building new homes.

So it’s been a busy first year. “If someone had said to me [write down what is going to happen in] your first year in the job, I would never have written that,” she says.

Ms Durnin puts her success down to a learning mindset, which kept her studying from age 18 to 40.

“Floods happen, you know, cost of living crises happen, mortgage rates go up. It’s a dynamic sector, you need to keep reflecting and learning and adapting, and be resilient and passionate about what you do.”