Jahanara Rajkoomar: back in the heart of the community

She developed an expertise in debt and financial inclusion, and then in 2009 took a role as financial inclusion manager at Hyde Group, which marked the beginning of her transition into a now 15-year career in housing associations. It also changed her view of housing associations, who she’d always seen as “the bad guys” because of her advice experience.

“I really got to understand the role that housing associations play, the impact that we can make, just even by giving people a roof over their heads,” she says. “I think one reason I have stayed in housing is because it really showed me that social housing is such a special thing that we have in this country, because for the people who are at the margins of society, social housing acts as a safety net.”

There is a misconception, she says, that smaller housing associations are easier, a belief she shared before her role here. In reality, she says, the much fewer resources means all the staff, herself included, have to cover lots of different ground, and be more multi-skilled and adaptable.

“For me it’s not a statement on my own social class, it’s just where I lived, and I look back on that with such joy”

For example, she says, Gateway’s one complaints co-ordinator also runs all the feedback analysis and implementation. Ms Rajkoomar herself has spent many weekends doing policy updates and reading the fine-print of proposed changes to the consumer standards, to make sure Gateway is keeping up. Despite the heavy workload, Ms Rajkoomar says that the new regulatory framework is crucial in reminding the sector of its core mission, which some have “veered away” from.

“Many housing organisations became very transactional and took on a very transactional role with the tenants,” she says. “And that’s why we have tighter regulation, to get us to do the thing that we should have been doing in the first place – keeping the person in mind rather than that transaction.”

Taking this job was a full-circle moment: when Ms Rajkoomar moved to the UK as a child in the 1980s, her family spent around 18 months sofa-surfing and in temporary accommodation in a B&B, before receiving a three-bedroom council flat on an estate a stone’s throw from Hackney’s Broadway Market. “It was the first proper secure home that we had in this country and it became my base, it gave me my identity,” she says.

But when asked about whether it is important that the social housing sector is led by people who grew up in it, Ms Rajkoomar is a self-declared cynic. Some wear their social housing upbringing “like a badge of honour, because now they are so far away from social housing”, she says. “For me it’s not a statement on my own social class, it’s just where I lived, and I look back on that with such joy.”

And when she reflects on her time in temporary accommodation, more than being squeezed into one bedroom or sharing a bathroom with other families, she remembers the novelty of the full English breakfast they were served in the mornings. It wasn’t an easy time for her or her parents, but she knows it is a far cry from the housing conditions of so many families today.

“I was really young, but the difference in the conditions of that experience compared to the experience of many now is very different,” she says. “And we were only there for a few months. If we were in that place for years and years, I don’t think I would remember it as these rose-tinted, nostalgic memories as I do now.”

Her driving ethos, she says, is that at the core of their work, is not a tenant but an individual human being, who deserves to be treated as such. “Fundamentally everything that we do is to look after the people that we serve.”