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Housing officers under pressure
Grainne Cuffe talks to housing officers about the stress of their jobs, as Inside Housing reveals that turnover in some frontline roles has risen dramatically. Illustration by Mary Haasdyk Vooys
Content warning: this article mentions suicide
It is not easy being a housing officer. But in the past few years, the job has only got harder. Inside Housing has spoken to housing officers from councils and housing associations. Mostly speaking on condition of anonymity, frontline staff told us about being overwhelmed and left without enough support or training, and a desperate search for jobs outside the sector.
This story began when Inside Housing started hearing stories of high turnover in housing officer roles, and social landlords struggling to recruit to these key positions. We reached out on social media to talk to people in these frontline roles, to get their perspective on what is happening. We also used a Freedom of Information request to councils with housing stock to find out if the reports of high turnover were correct.
Here, we set out our findings – which raise big questions about whether social landlords are putting enough resources into frontline roles, or providing enough support and training.
One housing officer had to take time off work last year due to stress. “I don’t think I got dressed for a week. I was physically and emotionally drained,” she says. It followed a particularly upsetting case involving a vulnerable tenant with several mental health issues, for whom the housing officer says the council she worked for failed in its duty of care.
“Nothing prepares you for the mental health side of things – you’ve got no tools. I didn’t have any relevant training for any of that. Once he was crying his eyes out and he just kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself.’ I said, ‘John [not his real name], don’t do that, please don’t do that,’” she says.
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Overworked and under-resourced
Housing officers told us they are overwhelmed with huge patches and expected to do everything, whether it is in their remit or not; they are overworked and under-resourced, and senior management have failed to do anything. This is despite some housing associations, including L&Q and Peabody, recently reducing patch sizes and moving to a more localised approach.
Some officers are not sleeping because of the stress. Some are working weekends with no extra pay. Some have been attacked. Others have left the profession altogether. One, who has taken a pay cut of more than £5,000 to move to another job out of the sector, says: “In the end, I was like a woman possessed, applying everywhere and anywhere and the first person that gave me a job, I was out.”
Budget cuts in the years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition started the pressure. Since then, financial difficulties have only increased, from the four-year 1% rent cut, to building safety, decarbonisation and disrepair. This has led in turn to pressure on frontline roles. Meanwhile, after the Grenfell Tower disaster claimed 72 lives in 2017, regulation has put a greater focus on tenant engagement – but at a time when the sector has less money and resource.
Liam Kelly, a London Tenants Federation (LTF) trustee with more than 20 years’ experience working in the sector, says that frontline housing teams used to have several sections, such as supported housing, resident engagement and community development, and housing officers. “These roles have been merged in most organisations, with resident engagement being the poor cousin or absent partner,” he says.
Amber Pullin has worked in the sector for many years, but is taking a year out because her mother passed away. She emphasised how hard-working her colleagues are. “They expect the housing officers to do absolutely everything – rent arrears, anti-social behaviour, housing management, repairs, service charges, and it just puts so much pressure on [us],” she says. “You want to give the best customer service you can, but a lot of the time you can’t because you’re just fighting fires.”
She said the workload and targets impact record-keeping – an issue the Housing Ombudsman highlighted in its latest Spotlight report.
Ms Pullin, who has worked for several housing associations, has previously been praised for her record-keeping. But now she says: “A lot of the time, you don’t actually have the time to make notes; you want to, but no sooner than you’ve put the phone down, you’re dealing with another inquiry.”
Housing officers report doing work they are not trained to do, such as surveying damp and mould.
Most significant is their work with vulnerable tenants. Although some received training on how to spot coercive control and mental illness, often that was as far as it went. One, who has a patch covering more than 1,000 tenants, says: “There were a lot of functions that were dealt with by social services or other organisations that have been passed on to us without any consultation as to whether we could handle the workload, or are actually equipped to deal with some of the issues our tenants face.”
Another, who works for a large council, says social services cuts are a “big issue”.
“Once it took me nearly five months to get a social worker out to do an assessment for my tenant,” she says.
Another of her tenants, who is suicidal, was told that a psychiatric nurse would ring but never did. “I’ve spent many hours on the phone with her… The last time I was on the phone to her for two hours, telling her not to give up hope.” She says she works weekends to help her tenants.
Housing officers say their own mental health is being affected. One, who worked for a housing association but left due to stress, had to take time off last year. The stress is still with her, impacting her future prospects, despite the fact she moved to a new job. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to be as vocal, or I don’t want to do too much of a good job in case [my employer] ends up giving me responsibility and I end up getting back to that stage where I was burnt out,” she says.
All this is affecting tenants. As one officer put it: “We can’t provide the robust service that we’d want for our residents… we just don’t have the bandwidth to give.”
Turnover
An Inside Housing investigation found that nearly a third of councils saw an increase in percentage each year in housing officer turnover – voluntary resignation – between 2017 and 2022. This excludes the year of the pandemic, when it reduced the most.
It must be noted that the findings are not definitive: some councils have few housing officers, so one leaving would represent a large jump in turnover. Only around half of stock-owning councils provided full figures.
Of the 67 councils that gave figures, 46 (69%) had a higher turnover in 2022 than in 2017. The average turnover for the above councils nearly doubled from 4.5% in 2017 to 9.8% in 2022.
On average, turnover has increased across the entire sector, including at housing associations. Jonathan Cox, director of data at Housemark, says that historically, voluntary turnover in the sector was around 10% per year.
“At the height of the pandemic, this dropped significantly to around 8% – but post-pandemic increased to around 14%. Over the past two years, turnover has been particularly high in customer-facing roles,” he says.
Mr Cox says there are signs that staff attrition “may be settling down”, but it is too early to draw conclusions.
The change will in part be down to the ‘Great Resignation’, a worldwide economic trend that saw workers resign en masse in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, The Better Social Housing Review, created by the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing and published in January, acknowledged that “exceptional pressures and demands” on frontline staff working directly with tenants “are contributing to very high turnover rates… and making it harder for many tenants to communicate with their landlord”.
According to Indeed, the average pay for a housing officer in the UK is around £27,000. Level of pay, although raised, was not the biggest issue for most housing officers Inside Housing spoke to for this story.
Mr Kelly says: “The real victims are the tenants who are stuck and it’s a vicious cycle of their stress due to poor service delivery being fed back to the only faces in the organisation they get to have direct contact with.”
One tenant says he has seen three housing officers come and go in the past 18 months. “They soon realise the poor attitude management has towards tenants and their issues and get demoralised.”
Better training
Housing officers say admin support could help relieve the pressure. One says: “There should be a support team in place, an admin officer to deal with our department, so we can do tenancy management and not the administrative side of things.”
Other suggestions include “an impartial line where you can ring up and say I feel stressed out with the job”.
Dr David Crepaz-Keay, head of research and applied learning at the Mental Health Foundation, says it could be more useful to train housing officers in supporting vulnerable tenants than focusing on mental health services. He says if they were “properly trained, resourced and adequately paid”, both tenants’ and staff’s mental health would improve.
The Better Social Housing Review recommended that landlords increase investment in recruiting and retaining more housing officers to enable them to re-establish more manageable patch sizes. It said the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) should promote the traditional housing officer role as a “supported and valued” employment opportunity with a CIH-recognised programme of training and continuing development.
Gavin Smart, chief executive of the CIH, says: “We have committed to a programme of work to address the recommendations, including the work to promote the training and continued professional development of the housing officer role.”
Linda Taylor, housing spokesperson at the Local Government Association, says: “Many housing teams in councils are already experiencing challenges in recruitment and retention. New strengthened regulatory requirements being introduced through the Renters’ Reform Bill and Social Housing (Regulation) Bill will add further responsibilities relating to both council housing and private rented sector housing.
“Therefore, it is vital that the government works with councils to develop a skills and capacity-building strategy to tackle current and upcoming workforce challenges, so that staff feel fully supported in their roles and any new burdens are sufficiently funded.”
Responding to Inside Housing’s findings on housing officers’ experiences and turnover rising at councils, Jamie Carswell, co-chair of the London Housing Directors’ Group, says: “While these results show how difficult things are for so many housing officers at the moment, we are determined to listen, to learn, and to work with our brilliant frontline staff in securing the positive changes we all want to see.”
Everyone Inside Housing spoke to is working in the sector because they want to make a difference.
One says: “It’s not easy being a housing officer and
it’s getting harder. But I fight for my tenants. I have to fight for them because if not, they’re just going to be
in an even worse situation.”
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