Karbon Homes chief executive: ‘Professionalisation would cost at least £1m a year’

However, he adds: “I get slightly worried when I see things about making the Affordable Housing Programme go further and do more, and I wonder whether they’ve really got their heads around what that might look like. 

“But I know they set a lot of store by the planning process and CPO (compulsory purchase order) and land value uplift. So I think there is a belief there that they can drive volume through that, so it would be great to see what they can achieve if they indeed are successful on 4 July.”

Labour also pledged to give combined authorities new planning powers along with “freedoms and flexibilities to make better use of grant funding”. The party would also deepen devolution settlements for existing combined authorities and widen devolution to more areas.

Local housing need

Mr Fiddaman says the system is “long overdue a greater local influence over how money is spent”. “I know that locally, for example, the new North East mayor [Kim McGuinness] is very keen to have control over the funding streams that currently route through Homes England.

“I’m ambivalent about who controls it as long as there is flexibility so that funds can be deployed to meet local priorities. As you well know… the housing crisis manifests in different ways in different places.”

He says local mayors and their teams are “well placed” to develop a strategy to ensure that the housing needs of their areas are met. He adds: “Certainly our mayor in the North East is very keen on making sure that housing is an important priority because it underpins economic growth and everything else. 

“We’ve developed a great relationship with Kim during her candidacy.”

Mr Fiddaman is also chair of the North East Housing Partnership (NEHP), a membership of 17 housing associations, councils and ALMOs. It was set up last year to increase affordable housing delivery and work collaboratively across a range of topics for the region.

The group is focused on four key themes: regeneration, development and placemaking; net zero and sustainability; employability and social inclusion; and health, care and homelessness.

Does the partnership have any collaborative procurement in the works? “The big opportunity that we’ve identified is around decarbonisation. The argument runs, if we can pull our collective programmes so that we can give the supply chain visibility and certainty over the scale of what’s coming down the tracks, then they’ll be better placed to innovate, invest in skills, and make sure that they have the capacity,” Mr Fiddaman says.

“And all of that together should help drive prices down as well so that when it eventually becomes the turn of other parts of the housing market, like owner occupiers, there’s a mature and cost-effective market in place.”

He adds that a number of organisations are intending to pilot something collaborative around the procurement of a programme for wave three of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. “Some organisations currently have their own procurement arrangements in place so they won’t be able to join on day one,” he explains, but they can join maybe in the third year. 

“Then that brings us volume, so we will be able to build a programme which is going to be pretty attractive to the supply chain. Because one of the other factors of the North East market is there are relatively few players who can deliver work on that scale. A little bit of competitive tension might also be helpful. It’s a big enough scale of a programme to make that possible,” he says. 

Professionalisation of the sector

We move on to a subject that Mr Fiddaman has already given his views on for Inside Housing. This is the significant and controversial “professionalisation” mandates that are set to be placed on the sector through the Competency and Conduct Standard.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities launched a consultation on the new standard at the end of March. It closed in early April and the government is still reviewing responses.

As it stands, the proposals will require an anticipated 25,000 senior housing managers to have a Level 4 housing qualification. Senior housing executives will need a foundation degree or Level 5 housing qualification. The government proposed a two-year transition period for staff to be enrolled in courses and to have completed the qualification within three years. 

The sector has raised significant concerns about the proposals, particularly around the length of the transition period. 

On this, Mr Fiddaman says: “Nobody is going to argue that it’s not a good idea for people who choose to develop their careers to go out and seek qualifications that will help them to develop. 

“That’s great. And we as an employer, like most housing associations, would be keen to support people on that journey.”

However, he says his personal view is that “we’ve come up with the wrong solution to arguably the right problem”. “In the aftermath of Grenfell – and the Awaab Ishak case illustrated this further – you have lots of people who feel that they’re not listened to when they have legitimate concerns.

“In my view, an academic qualification doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll be listened to. It seems to me that this is a cultural point for individual organisations to recognise in themselves and do something about.

“The holy grail for me at Karbon is having staff who feel empowered, able to make decisions locally, and who want to take ownership of customers’ issues and solve them for them.”

He states that access to academic learning that “helps you understand the technical side of that is useful, but it’s the mindset and the culture that underpins it and the behaviours that we really need to drive as a sector”.

What will the impact of the standard be on Karbon and the sector as a whole?

“First, I’m concerned that it’s a barrier to attract new talent into the sector. Second, I’m concerned that people who are well experienced and very customer-focused and very capable in a frontline housing role will think, ‘If that isn’t recognised by my employer, I’ll go somewhere that does value me.’ 

“If there are individuals – and there are individuals that I’ve spoken to in our organisation – who are thinking, ‘Oh great, I’d love to do that’. Fantastic. Please do.”

He continues: “But if I’m a 58-year-old housing officer and your employer is suddenly saying to you, ‘Hey, guess what? Off you go to do dissertations, academic learning, and your experience counts for nothing in this process.’ I think I would be really miffed and I might well be thinking whether this was really the place I wanted to spend the rest of my career.

“So I think, practically, what we need to think about is whether there’s a way of structuring a qualification which recognises through evidence, people’s experience and competence in the role that they do. 

“If you can do that and if you can get somebody to a point where actually you know what, based on the evidence portfolio, here’s your qualification and you don’t need to do any classrooms – that’s a sensible way forward.”

Potential implications and impact on recruitment

At Karbon, there are around 75 people who would be affected by the rules that were consulted on.

Mr Fiddaman says: “You do day release for that cohort of people, you’re probably talking somewhere around between 20 and 25 full-time equivalent people. 

“And that’s a lot of experienced resource that’s going to be absent from the business for a period of time. 

“So we need to backfill that, and who are you going to get to backfill it? Probably people who aren’t qualified and experienced, and it seems to me that the standard of service that you deliver is at least at risk while those experienced people are focused on other things.”

He says the total estimated cost to Karbon, including the qualifications and getting interim staff, would be about £1m a year for the transitional period. 

“We could do without it alongside everything else. In my more angry moments about this, you’ll hear me waxing about nanny states and how appropriate it is for government to think it’s OK to tell independent organisations who they should employ and what qualifications they should have. It just feels like a massive overreach from the state to me.”

He adds: “People say to me, ‘Oh, well, you wouldn’t go into hospital and have unqualified people treating you.’ 

“I think the more accurate analogy is going in for brain surgery and a gynaecologist rocks up to you.

“We’ve created a bit of a monster there, and I hope ultimately common sense will prevail in dealing with the responses to the consultation.”

“In my view, an academic qualification doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll be listened to”

There is also a concern that it will deter people who have good customer service skills, for example, but no housing background from joining the sector.

“When Karbon was formed – and I hope I’m not embarrassing colleagues in any way – we recruited as our director of customer experience, somebody who came to us from a software firm, having been their global director of customer experience. She was great.

“And she thought about customer service in a different way to what I’m used to hearing people saying in a housing setting. I think it’s easy to fall into a paradigm where you view your housing assets as a scarce resource, and your customer service evolves into something which is kind of a gatekeeper role. 

“How do I make sure that I only let the most worthy through the gate to access this scarce resource? And you think about all the customer service implications and that is quite challenging. 

“So to have somebody come in with none of that baggage should go well actually. Customer service is customer service, and you need to design processes that reflect that. I just think if we close the doors to people like that, our sector loses out.”

Inside Housing recently launched a Housing Hires campaign to promote the social housing sector as a place to work and support people to find and develop careers with housing associations and councils. NEHP has backed the campaign. What does Mr Fiddaman think about this?

He says “it’s amazing to get that message out there” and make sure that people understand the positives of the sector.

Mr Fiddaman adds: “[The sector has] been through the wringer in the past few years for various reasons and some of that self-inflicted, and some of that [criticism] is probably deserved. But behind all of that, you have a group of talented, committed, caring individuals trying to make a difference to people’s lives. 

“And I think that’s a great sales pitch for anybody wondering what their career path should be.”