Jigsaw CEO Brian Moran: ‘We don’t do daft things’

After university, he got a job as a currency trader in Manchester. Mr Moran recalls that the Brazilian real was “tanking” while people around him gloated about the price of their shoes. He walked out after a month. Perturbed by the excess of the 1980s finance world, he applied for the first job with a social purpose he found: a research post in Oldham Council’s housing department. 

His boss’s boss, Karen Mitchell (then the head of housing strategy and now chief executive of Southway Housing Trust), saw his potential and the council paid for him to do a housing postgraduate course at the University of Salford one day a week.

This resulted in a work placement at a housing association, Northern Counties, a type of organisation he had not encountered before. “What struck me was they were building houses,” he says. “They did not have the same budgetary constraints [as councils]. They were able to do good things in the community.”

He secured a job at Wyre Housing Association near Blackpool, now part of Regenda, before joining Jigsaw’s predecessor, County Palatine, in 2000, after his manager put a copy of Inside Housing with the job advert in front of him. “She said, ‘You really should go for this, because they’re going places,’ and she was right,” he says. “That was a job in this office.”

“How do you give people an opportunity to shine? That’s something I’ve been thinking hard about”

“That was the lucky point in my career,” he says, moving to a “small, hungry, ambitious housing association”. County Palatine went from 1,600 homes in 2000 to 6,000 in 2002, when it merged with two other landlords and became Adactus, to 10,000 homes by 2007. Adactus became Jigsaw in 2018 when it merged with 20,000-home New Charter. 

Paul Lees, the chief executive at the time, “recognised something in me, and I’ll be forever grateful for that… He pushed me along,” says Mr Moran. Now, Mr Moran is alert to “spotting talent” among young leaders, and keen to pass the encouragement he received on to them.

“How do you give people an opportunity to shine? That’s something I’ve been thinking hard about.”

Mr Moran stresses that Jigsaw’s previous chief executive Hilary Roberts “has done a great job”. He says: “I’m about continuing an ethos that means a lot to me.”

Jigsaw is aiming to build 4,000 homes by 2028, and despite recent supply chain shocks, Mr Moran says it has done “really well”. The landlord built 701 new homes last year and is hoping to complete more than 900 this year.

In April, contractor Lane End went bust midway through building 205 homes for Jigsaw in Winsford, but Mr Moran says it has now secured a replacement contractor and is back on site. Will there be more contractors going under? “I really hope the pressures they’ve been under have eased,” he says. “That seems to be the case.”

Jigsaw was also involved with Ilke Homes, the modular house builder that collapsed in June before it could complete 85 affordable homes for the landlord in Gedling. Thankfully only four homes were left in the factory – the rest were on site when Ilke went bust.

Jigsaw is in the process of getting a new contractor to finish the homes, which mostly amounts to installing the roofs. “We’ve been lucky that they went under when the schemes were nearly built,” he says. “It would have been a disaster if we were at the first-floor level.”

Mr Moran understandably feels burned by the experience, even if Jigsaw went in understanding the risks. “That was a decision we made to try and do something for the sector,” he says. “You can guess what our future strategy might not include.” But he says he will consider more partial MMC, such as panellised systems.

Modular is out for now, then – but regeneration is in. Mr Moran is passionate about the need for more wide-scale redevelopment projects. 

Housing associations in the North of England, he says, have stock that “was never meant to last as long as it has lasted”.

Regeneration is also bound up with decarbonising. “We need funding to be able to do something in a significant way with our older terraced housing stock,” he says. “We’ll get to EPC C, but we’ve got no chance of getting to [net zero] with that stock.”

This is a fundamental design issue: old, terraced homes were “built in a way to be the opposite of energy efficient, to have airflow through the property”, whereas new homes are closer to an “airtight unit”.

Jigsaw has 6,200 homes below EPC C that it must bring up to that level by 2030. It has secured funding from waves 1 and 2 of the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund to help with this.

“We keep things simple. We don’t do daft things… We’re not going to start diversifying into areas outside our core areas of competence”

In the medium term, is net zero the biggest challenge facing housing associations?

“It’s impossible.” But the 2050 goal is 25 years away, he adds. “So let’s rewind back 25 years. Did I have a GPS? No. Did I have a mobile phone? No… I’m hopeful there can be technology solutions coming through. [But] I can’t see that there’s a clear path currently.”

Ahead of his meeting with Ms Rayner, what does Mr Moran make of Labour’s housing policy so far? “It’s positive. They are obviously being a little bit cautious about the funding side of things. We all want to do more social rent for sure, but it requires grant.”

He would, he says, be “chuffed to bits if we do more social rent”, but there “does need to be an understanding” of the extra resources required. The last Labour government did “some good things in housing”, he adds, citing its approach to homelessness. “I would love to see something like that again.”

In 2022, Jigsaw secured a £360m sustainability bond to support its development programme. “It was a big moment,” says Mr Moran, made possible by its merger with New Charter. “You actually need funding of a certain level that gets you access to those bond markets, which gets you the money at a better rate.”

Asked to summarise Jigsaw’s ethos, Mr Moran says: “We keep things simple.” Simplicity for tenants is not easy to achieve, he adds. Keeping things simple also means “we don’t do daft things… We’re not going to start diversifying into areas outside our core areas of competence.”

Jigsaw’s last merger was in 2018. Is it big enough now? Mr Moran’s response is characteristically humble. “If opportunities come our way, we’ll look at it on a case-by-case basis. But I wouldn’t do it for ego, I wouldn’t do it for vanity. It’s got to make us financially stronger, give us an area of expertise we don’t currently have, or deal with a real crisis of succession which some organisations get themselves in. It’s not something we need.”