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Meet L&Q’s new chief executive: ‘We will still build. But the emphasis is on existing residents’
L&Q’s new chief executive, Fiona Fletcher-Smith, speaks to Martin Hilditch about her plans for the housing giant and precisely what a focus on safety and existing homes will mean for its development programme. Photography by Dan Joseph
In January, housing giant L&Q set out the scale of the challenge facing its new chief executive, Fiona Fletcher-Smith.
Its statement announcing her appointment said her “first task” would be to… (brace yourself)… “set out how L&Q will continue to tackle the housing crisis and provide quality homes and support services for those that need them most, while working with residents to build on existing work supporting the recent Social Housing White Paper, delivering on essential building safety requirements and the climate change agenda, and dealing with the impact of Brexit and the global pandemic” in a five-year strategy. If you think that sounds big, you should see her second task.
It is a notably more detailed public brief than that accompanying the appointment of her predecessor David Montague in 2008, which suggested finances would need to stretch little beyond L&Q’s “substantial and diverse development programme”.
Certainly, it is an indication of the high-profile and interlinked challenges facing today’s chief executives (and, perhaps, a growing emphasis on the public-facing nature of the role). Lockdown adds another layer of complication. “To start a new job running a multibillion-pound business like L&Q from my dining room is just a bit weird,” Ms Fletcher-Smith points out.
Inside Housing met with Ms Fletcher-Smith (on video chat, naturally) to find out what makes the new chief executive tick. Given L&Q’s well-publicised move away from its previous ambitions to build 100,000 homes over 10 years, we want to learn precisely how many homes it is now planning to fund. And we also want to know just how Ms Fletcher-Smith will set about that sprawling to-do list.
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Ms Fletcher-Smith’s housing career started out in the late 1980s when, after dropping out of university – “being Irish you go to university at 17, which is way too young to be let loose, I can assure you” – she got a job as an admin officer at Dublin City Corporation.
“On the first day, the woman in HR had two envelopes and she held them out and said, ‘Pick one of those,’” Ms Fletcher-Smith recalls. “I went for the one on the left, opened it up and it said ‘housing department’.” The envelope on the right? “Vehicle licensing.”
With a touch of serendipity, a career was born. “I found myself in inner-city Dublin dealing with emergency housing requests,” she says.
“I was having to deal, aged 19, with some of the most awful housing situations,” she adds. “In Ireland at the time, contraception was illegal [sale of condoms without restriction only became legal in 1993]. So, you had families of 11 or 12 children living in two or three-bedroom homes and needing to move desperately. You had massive heroin addiction problems and the crime associated with that. It was cheaper to go out and score heroin than it was to go out and buy a pint of Guinness in a local pub.”
It was a huge learning curve for Ms Fletcher-Smith, a convent school girl from rural Ireland. But the housing bug had bitten her: “It absolutely fascinated me.”
One of her next jobs, after moving to London in her early 20s, must have been an even bigger eye-opener. She started as a housing officer at City of Westminster Council in 1989. As anyone with a smattering of housing history will know, this is when the ‘homes for votes’ scandal was starting to break publicly. This was one of the darkest moments in England’s housing history and involved the sale of vacant council homes in marginal wards to residents more likely to vote Conservative – with some left standing vacant and homeless people moved to less marginal wards.
“It was tough, the designated sales policy, as a housing officer, when you knew you had somebody stuck on the fifth floor who had mobility problems and you could see we were securing the ground-floor flat because it was going to be sold off. Your instinct was telling you, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just moved this person in housing need down there?’ I felt after a couple of years it was a pretty toxic place to work at that time. That is what prompted me to go back to university and add surveying and valuation and estate management to my portfolio.”
This was followed by other council jobs, including roles at Lambeth, Hammersmith & Fulham and Hackney, bringing with it a wide variety of experience. “I have run the street-cleaning and bin service in Hackney. I was in charge of the mortuary,” Ms Fletcher-Smith notes.
This was followed by more than a decade at the Greater London Authority (GLA), as executive director of development and environment, running the planning service for Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan, before she joined L&Q as group director of development and sales in 2018 and was then promoted to the top job at the housing association.
Today, it is this range of experience that she thinks stands her in good stead as a first-time chief executive (and why she tells anyone looking to develop their careers to “volunteer, say ‘yes’ to things”). “What you need in your top team, what you need in your board, is the cognitive diversity that comes with either diversity in your life and walking a different path, or diversity in your career,” she says.
Not all of the experiences were good ones, though. “I’m an immigrant to the country and coming to Britain in the late ’80s as an Irish person was not a pleasant place to be,” she states.
“I have deep memories of being treated appallingly because of the country I came from,” she adds. This included her professional life. “I was treated badly in a workplace by a manager.”
This immediately prompts another memory. In 1991, she was travelling to work at Westminster Council on the 36 bus when an IRA bomb went off at Victoria Station. “Other people thought it was a car backfiring, but I had grown up in the ’70s on the border in Ireland and I knew what a bomb sounded like,” she says.
As the bus was rerouted to St Mary’s Hospital and passengers comforted the wounded, some people were making aggressive statements about Irish people.
Fiona Fletcher-Smith on:
The future of the office: “About 90% of our colleagues are saying they don’t want to come back full-time. So we will go for a mix where we are using our office space for meetings and collaboration.”
Why she joined L&Q as development director in 2018: “For me it was about the development sector and post-Grenfell – about the disgrace that is new build in a lot of cases… a desire to change that.”
Rebuilding following COVID: “I think overcrowding in some of our deprived areas will have led to the spread. There has to be some good coming out of this appalling grief – it has to be about building more and better housing.”
“That was it, immediately, [I thought] ‘don’t speak’,” she says.
Her own history clearly informs Ms Fletcher-Smith’s response to a horrendous court case involving L&Q last year. Just weeks before Ms Fletcher-Smith was announced as L&Q’s new chief executive, it was ordered to pay a tenant £31,000, who was not told of her neighbour’s “abusive, threatening and racist behaviour” before moving in. Tia Jones, a Black woman, was forced to flee her home in 2015 following months of racist abuse. She was then threatened with possession proceedings on the grounds that she was no longer in occupation.
“The first thing to say is it was shameful, absolutely shameful,” Ms Fletcher-Smith states. “It has made us ask ourselves a lot of questions about how that happened.”
Today, Ms Fletcher-Smith promises a “wide-ranging investigation into what went wrong, not just focusing on that case but what it is telling us about our management service and how we interact with our residents”. L&Q is also working with its staff cultural diversity network, Kaleidoscope, on how it approaches race as an organisation and its resident services board about how it engages on issues around race and “policies and procedures, ways of working, our strategies”.
Talk of strategies brings us right back to that five-year plan. While the press statement announcing her appointment did a great job of listing all the competing demands, Ms Fletcher-Smith is clear about her top priorities.
“The emphasis for us for the coming five-year plan is about our customers,” she states. “Firstly, their safety. Secondly, about our investment in their existing homes. And the third point for us is about the operational excellence in service, so that not only are we seen as one of the top builders in Inside Housing’s top 50 developers survey, but we are also seen as one of the top performing in terms of our residents’ views of us.”
Clearly, this will impact on development. While a pause on new business announced just over a year ago has not been lifted, Ms Fletcher-Smith is also quick to point out that L&Q is on site with 21,000 homes currently, with 178 live sites, an approved pipeline of £5.3bn and ownership of almost 60,000 plots for new homes. “So, we are going to build,” she states. Where does this actually leave delivery, though? Up until now that has not been precisely clear.
“It will be slightly less than 3,000 homes [this year]”, Ms Fletcher-Smith says. “We are probably going to keep along that level, aiming to possibly outperform it if we have got the spare money to subsidise. And that will be for about five years.” For context, while this is less than a third of the previous 10,000-homes-a-year ambition, this would still have seen L&Q build more homes than any other social landlord in 2019/20.
Could this lead to conflict with government, which is still publicly committed to delivering 300,000 homes a year? Ms Fletcher-Smith thinks ministers are realistic, following a statement from housing secretary Robert Jenrick last month in which he acknowledged that safety work will make it harder for housing associations “to invest in more affordable and social housing… That is the difficult situation we find ourselves in”.
“If you want us to build more you have got to talk about more subsidy, haven’t you, because we have no spare cash to do that subsidy,” Ms Fletcher-Smith states, emphasising that this is still a live debate with government and flagging work she did at the GLA about the “immense” contribution of social rented housing to gross domestic product.
“I think everybody recognises that existing grant rates are not going to be adequate and there is certainly a willingness to listen to that argument from all sectors of government,” she says.
If L&Q would like more grant, what is its attitude to supporting leaseholders in paying for fire improvement work on blocks?
“There is no real certainty,” Ms Fletcher-Smith states. “I have got to be frank about that.”
But she pledges to “look at every possible option first, before we look at charging [leaseholders], whether that is funding from government, or if we discover poor quality going after contractors or sub-contractors”. She adds: “We are regularly in discussions with lawyers about all sorts of builders.”
L&Q is also in negotiations with lenders on residents’ behalf, she adds, “because we are getting crazy valuers asking for External Wall System [EWS1] forms on two-storey houses, brick built” (after our interview the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors published new guidance that may solve this problem, but at the time of going to press the impact was still uncertain).
For now, it is still early days for Ms Fletcher-Smith, but her success, it is clear, will be about more than just a substantial development programme.
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