Waqar Ahmed: the sector-disruptor who has helped L&Q grow

“That meant bankruptcy, and they lost their home at the same time,” Mr Ahmed says. Their son still feels the injustice keenly.

“I didn’t know what the hell housing associations were, but the notion that you’ve got this group of people who actually care about helping people who haven’t got housing was amazing. That’s why I decided to stay in the sector,” he says.

‘This company will grow’

As one of Mr Ahmed’s colleagues at L&Q, Vicky Savage, group director of development and sales, puts it: “He was a real working-class boy, who was very intelligent, very smart, and got himself through education.

“I think that he’s never forgotten what it was like to grow up in less-than-perfect housing.”

Mr Ahmed’s next move was to London, where he spent four years working for Network Homes. Kelsey Walker, now a director in Savills’ affordable housing consultancy, worked with him at Network while it was undergoing merger talks with L&Q, which later fell through.

“I wasn’t surprised when Waqar was offered a good job [at L&Q] – he was clearly going places,” she says.

He joined L&Q in 1998 and stayed for more than a quarter of a century. “I liked L&Q from day one,” he says. “It was a very business-type organisation, though it was still a sleeping giant.”

Mr Ahmed joined with the specific remit of setting up a major stock transfer from Bexley Council, which transferred all its housing to L&Q and Orbit in 1998.

Together with Don Wood, the chief executive at the time, and David Montague, then finance director and later chief executive, he helped establish Project 2020. At that point, they were creating a mere aspiration.

“It was all about, what do we want L&Q to be in the year 2020? What we wanted to be was a 50,000-unit housing association, which was pretty much unheard of back then,” he says.

Their shared strategy focused on a strong balance sheet and efficient core business, together with the bravery needed to take big development risks. “That meant moving away from just buying from house builders to actually buying land, taking planning, construction and sales risk,” he says.

“All of that led to this one very clear strategy: we’re going to be efficient, we’re going to provide good services, but we are going to grow. This company will grow.”

Mergers and acquisitions were an important part of realising that 2020 vision. In the past three decades, L&Q has acquired a slew of organisations, including Trafford Housing Trust, Buckinghamshire-based Nucleus Housing Group and East Thames Housing Group. By 2020, L&Q had reached more than 100,000 homes. “We’d kind of parked the 50,000,” he smiles.

Mr Ahmed believes a core part of L&Q’s success in a changing sector has been its ability to take risks.

Danny Sutcliffe, who started in the regeneration team at L&Q on the same day Mr Ahmed joined the business (he is now a partner at development and regeneration consultancy Red Loft) tells me it was “obvious” that Mr Ahmed wanted to build. “It’s not always the case with finance people,” Mr Sutcliffe says. “Some finance directors sometimes forget that part of our remit has to be to try to end homelessness as well. I think he always understood that.”

To achieve this, the business had to innovate. Mr Ahmed saw through a record list of firsts: L&Q was the first housing association to introduce tax-saving initiatives such the ‘golden brick structure’ (which avoids VAT issues in land sales); the first to go into the debt capital markets in its own name; the first to carry out a joint venture with a house builder.

He points out the changes made in the early 1990s to Housing Corporation accounting requirements to standardise financial reporting, which made it possible for banks and house builders to understand and quantify the value housing associations brought.

“We introduced so many banks that are now the norm in the sector: MUFG, HSBC, National Australia Bank, SMBC – they’ve all come through L&Q,” he says.

The move to closer collaboration with developers began organically. “You start forming a relationship just through your normal day-to-day contacts with colleagues in the development world. They wanted to do more. We wanted to do more,” he says.

L&Q’s first joint venture was with Taylor Wimpey on a scheme called Academy Central in east London. How did it come about? “It was over a coffee, to be honest,” he says.

Paul Hackett, now chief executive of Southern Housing, also started on the same day as Mr Ahmed and remembers him as being “great fun”. “Waqar brought fresh thinking and challenge and played a huge part in L&Q’s subsequent growth and success.”

“He is a real generator of ideas,” adds Ms Savage.

Looking back, there have been changes over the course of his career – mostly for the better, in Mr Ahmed’s estimation.

The sector has evolved, he says, from a “movement-type mentality” to a successful financial business model that still has “social purpose at heart. The sector is far more efficient, far more creative, takes far more risk and is far more innovative than it was back then. That’s all for the good of the UK.”

Mr Ahmed is clear that “there’s still more to do” in the provision of social housing. For him, that means taking even more risk.

“It’s OK to take more risk in development, because, ultimately, we’re building housing in a country where there is a massive shortage of housing.”

More risk

This is his message for all involved, whether that is the banks – “what we need is the banking sector to fund both development risk and enable housing associations to borrow against their existing assets” – or credit rating agencies, which, he says, sometimes “get nervous about the social housing sector”.

“This sector is AA. Any rating below that suggests that somebody doesn’t know the full credit risk of this sector,” he argues.

The government has a key role to play in providing land, he says. “There is a lot of land in the UK that is developable. If that requires compulsory purchase orders, if it requires more joined-up thinking on how you can access that land, then you need the government to do that.”

But housing association boards are not off the hook, either. “It’s too easy to say, ‘Sorry, our financial ratios don’t allow us to’. People are sleeping in the streets. You need to take more risk,” Mr Ahmed warns.

There have been particular difficulties in recent years, though, including the huge impact of the 1% rent cut in 2016, which required social landlords to reduce rents by 1% a year for four years.

“What that did was take away the capacity to absorb risk from the sector,” he says, which, of course, led to reduced development.

“I don’t know who engineered that,” he says. “But whoever it is, whenever they walk past Westminster and they see someone sleeping there, homeless, at night, they should be saying to themselves, ‘I did that’.”

That’s a bold statement he quickly qualifies. “I don’t think it’s just that, because it’s too easy to blame one aspect.”

Despite its scale and strength, L&Q has not been immune to the tough circumstances of the past decade. Housing delivery has slowed at the landlord as a result of rent cuts, the pandemic and the need to invest in existing stock. In 2022-23, it completed 4,047 homes, but in 2023-24, delivery fell to 2,955 new homes.

“We ourselves have had to reduce the targets for new supply. But that’s not good enough for L&Q,” he says.

To fund the extra costs to the landlord, L&Q is in the process of selling its portfolio of private rented homes. In July this year, it announced it was offloading L&Q Estates, the strategic land company it acquired for more than £500m in 2017. “We’re looking at bringing in alternative finance into development so that we can just do more,” Mr Ahmed adds.

Mr Ahmed is retiring from his director role at the end of the current financial year, but will stay on in an advisory capacity for a period of time. He will also be fulfilling his six-year term as a board member for homelessness charity Crisis, describing the 18 months he has spent with them so far as an “eye-opener”.

“It’s humbling as well, the experience you get of seeing just how hard those people work to try to achieve an outcome that only gets worse as each day goes by,” he says.

Disruptors

He can get impatient, he acknowledges, when he perceives a lack of urgency and action. “This sector does not need another academic piece of work to know that being in housing poverty is not good for your health.

“We don’t need any further discussions on that. What we need is money, land and development,” he says vehemently.

Ms Savage believes L&Q and the whole social housing sector will feel his loss. “Waqar is one of our great personalities. He has that bravery, that commitment and confidence – that, ‘I’ll say it and be damned’,” she says. “And I do feel we need disruptors.”

What’s next for Mr Ahmed? “I’m one of the most boring people I’ve ever met. You know, the only thing I’ve enjoyed in life is L&Q,” he jokes. “What I will say is this: it’s nice having free time, isn’t it?”