Andy Hulme: from housing banker, to housing chief

New generation

He is one of a new generation of housing leaders entering the sector from corporate life. Together with Patrick Franco, the new chief executive of Notting Hill Genesis who is joining from the world of commercial property, he has been welcomed into an industry that has – perhaps until quite recently – been a vocation for life. And he is not worried about shaking it up a little bit.  

For a start, he has dropped the word ‘tenants’ and replaced it with ‘customers’, a decision that he acknowledges still raises some eyebrows – from both inside and outside his own organisation.

“I think chief executives are a little bit surprised by it. Our banks seem to like it. Our contractors say they really like it because they see us as a customer,” he says. “I think we need to mix up the language a bit and mix up the dialogue a bit to change that conversation. If you subtly change one of the words that you use, it does make people listen and think, and it does spark a debate. I think it’s quite healthy in that regard.”

Mr Hulme says he has had coffee with Mr Franco, and that there is a sense of being part of a “newbie” group of housing leaders. But he has enough humility to say he has much to learn from his contemporaries who have been in the sector since the first days of their careers. He points to Geeta Nanda at Metropolitan Thames Valley and Fiona Fletcher-Smith at L&Q as mentors during his transition over the past 18 months. They have, he says, passed on their “incredible innate understanding” of how to work with tenants, local government and politicians, which has been “incredibly powerful and helpful”.

“They have just been absolutely brilliant in putting their arms around me, welcoming me, guiding me, helping me,” he says. “I think the thing that’s fascinating about this sector; we don’t really have competitors, we have peers, and we’re all here to help each other.”

Mr Hulme was the first in his family to go to university, a step that left him daunted by the prospect of moving away to a big city. He shunned Nottingham, Sheffield and Manchester for the more modest University of Central Lancashire, based in Preston – a campus university based in a busy market town similar in many ways to his home of Stoke-on-Trent.

“I had wanted to be close enough to home that I could get back, but far enough away that they wouldn’t pop in and that you can be yourself.”

He graduated, ironically, just as Preston gained city status in 2002.

In his second semester he met his now-husband, who is a teacher, when the pair were both just 19 years old. They married in New York five years ago, just before the adoption of their son, who is now in his teens.

“We’ve been together, I think, 25 years now – I probably should know that!” he laughs. “Life has changed over that time, but it’s nice.”

Banking career

He started his career at NatWest, where over six years he worked up to head of strategic development for its mortgage arm. He says doors were opened for him because, as an openly gay man from a working-class background, he was “the acceptable face” of the drive for diversity at that time.

“The women used to say to me, ‘You’re still a white man!’ Of course, they were right.”

He later moved to Lloyds as head of new mortgage business and eventually the bank’s mortgage director.

Despite working in the City, Mr Hulme attempted to bring a human aspect to his work, using a scorecard to chart not only how much had been lent and the consumer growth in his department, but how many bedrooms the homes that his team had financed had.

“How many children did those families have? How many people had we helped to have a roof over their head and a start in life? It was really fulfilling.”

From inside banking, he worked with the coalition government to create and launch the Help to Buy during the Cameron era – a scheme which had a mixed reaction in the housing sector, but of which he remains resolutely proud. 

He was working in the City during the global economic crash of 2008, an experience he describes as humbling – and also challenging, because the rhetoric around banking and the people who worked in it was at odds with his own experience of the industry.

“It was pretty horrific,” he recalls. “There was that sudden shift that these big profitable businesses – that were actually the biggest taxpayers in the UK, which people forget, the biggest employers in the UK, which people forget – were suddenly on their knees with customers that were desperate for help. And the bit that was, for me, most hard-hitting was actually we were no different. We as the bank workers at the time were no different than you or I today. We drank in the same pubs, we ate in the same restaurants.”

Mr Hulme says he learned some key skills at that time – “massive empathy and humility… how to listen and to communicate and how to be really honest” – which will stand him in good stead as he embraces a new sector in its own crisis. And the scale of the UK housing crisis, plus the extent to which the government has retracted from its responsibilities, has caused him alarm on entering the world of social housing.

On this matter, he is forceful and eloquent. “We have a government that has removed 60% of funding from the sector over the past 10 years, and effectively are starving out some of the poorest families in the UK. Hyde and others are having to make impossible choices about the quality of our homes, how we maintain our homes, how we can candidly cut corners, to be able to pay our bills and keep costs down for our customers,” he says.

“We can do more, we do need to do more. What we also need to do, though, is to recognise that we are being increasingly asked to cover the gap where other service providers are letting us down. We are not social workers, we are not the NHS, we’re not the welfare system. But we are closing those gaps. Quite often when something goes wrong at home, we are the first phone call that our customers will make, even if it’s not our responsibility.”

“We have a government that has removed 60% of funding from the sector, and effectively are starving out some of the poorest families in the UK”

Since he has been in the job, Mr Hulme has written to Michael Gove six times to ask to meet to discuss the housing crisis, damp and mould and other issues facing the sector. He says the housing secretary has replied once – to decline.

“That’s disappointing,” he says. “Now, we don’t want a combative relationship with the government at all. They’re our stakeholders, they’re our partners. I’m simply saying that we could do a better job if we worked better together. We need them to come to the table to do that.”

But haven’t social landlords borne some responsibility here, too? What about the damp and mould crisis that has so dramatically affected the perception of social landlords in wider society? While landlords including Hyde have stepped up on that issue, he insists, this also requires the government to look at the bigger picture.

“The one positive of what Michael Gove did [in asking tenants to report damp and mould] was encourage people that might have lived with things in the past that weren’t OK, to put their hand up and say, ‘Actually, can you help me out here?’” Mr Hulme says. “And we’ve been able to step in and help with that. But also, fundamentally, if you’re living in a one-bedroom flat and you have three children, and you’re overcrowded and you’re doing the washing and all those things that we have to do to keep our kids clean and dry and in school uniform, you’re more likely to have damp and mould.”

There will most likely be an opportunity to reset the relationship between government and the housing sector next year, with a new Labour administration anticipated by the end of 2024. 

Mr Hulme has a wishlist for any incoming government: a long-term funding settlement that is not approved year on year, but every five or 10 years to give investment certainty; a commitment to a mass housebuilding programme; and, most importantly, a reset of the relationship between government and the sector, moving away from the “parent/child” dynamic he finds so frustrating now. 

“It doesn’t help our customers, many of whom are vulnerable, it causes no end of stress and disruption,” he explains. “What we need is to work better together. And I actually think the early conversations that we’ve had, with the shadow government, the Labour government, have been really quite positive, and have been a breath of fresh air… And that’s what we need to see.”