‘‘What we do is sexy’’: Sinéad Butters speaks to Inside Housing

Ms Butters sets the scene in her sprightly Midlands cadence. “There are two villages close to each other. One is posh, one isn’t. We were in the not-posh village.

"They’re in the same parish, but they had all the money for Christmas decorations. Our village had no decorations and they had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”

Eventually, after much campaigning, Ms Butters’ mum raised enough money to buy Christmas lights for her village.

“But when they put the lights up, they hadn’t got any way to supply energy to them. I remember going to the loo in the downstairs toilet, and there was a big cable coming [through the window and] into the downstairs loo from outside.

“It was plugged into our electrics and it had the Christmas lights on. You could sit on our toilet and turn the village Christmas lights on or off. My dad nearly had a heart attack. Forget the toilet roll or the Blackpool Illuminations, we were lighting the whole village.”

Despite his protests, the lights stayed. For Ms Butters, that emblematises a don’t-take-no-for-an-answer attitude which she tries to carry with her. “It’s been a motivational story about being brave, bold and doing what’s right,” she says.

It was this attitude which saw her get into housing. Having been rejected for a senior finance officer job at the Housing Corporation (the body today known as Homes England), she phoned up to reiterate her interest in working there. As it happened, the person who had been given the role refused it unless she was granted a parking space. She was not, and so Ms Butters’ determination paid off.

Inside Housing last interviewed Ms Butters just two years ago, but it feels like much longer. On a national level, the sector has had to weather the rent cut storm, watch the loom and topple of the Local Housing Allowance cap threat and search its soul in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, to name but a few things.

Aspire has gone through some huge changes too, influenced by this policy climate.

A review of the business after the rent cut announcement saw it shrink from 600 staff to 420. But it also took on a far more ambitious debt programme.

Now, at 67% geared, it has stepped up from plans to build 500 homes between 2014 and 2019 to nearly 2,000 in the 2016 to 2021 strategy.

That’s a large output for a 9,000-home stock transfer landlord. In this light, Ms Butters acknowledges there was a certain value in the process of facing up to the challenge posed by the rent cut.

Then there have been notable changes in the organisation’s governance structure and senior management team – while in the midst of all that, its operating margin doubled.

“We made all the changes we needed within six months. We took the decision to go hard at it, sort it out and come out the other end,” she says. “So now we’re in a really good place, but you’re kind of thinking ‘what next?’”

For Aspire and the sector, she posits, the big challenge in the immediate future is “to get underneath the quality of our service”.

That means taking a more rigorous approach to measuring and improving tenants’ experiences – which will be crucial when people start seeing their rent climb by Consumer Price Index plus 1% after 2020, Ms Butters warns.

“Culturally, are we an open organisation and a learning organisation, or are we one that defends our backs and tries to look good, and likes to cherry-pick statistics to demonstrate that we’re great?” she thinks aloud. “It’s OK for us to accept that sometimes we get things wrong.”

Ms Butters cites an example from a recent meeting, where ‘right first time’ repairs were discussed.

The numbers showed more than 90% of repairs were sorted on the first attempt. But further scrutiny cast some doubt over those figures. Surveyor visits, for example, were being recorded as successful repair jobs. It was promptly changed.

“We can do anything as long as we don’t break the law. We can flex that.”

“What a boring place it would be if you were achieving your optimum,” she reflects. “What does that even look like?”

All this self-honesty is a by-product of affording the housing association model the confidence it deserves, Ms Butters suggests.

“What we do is sexy,” she says. “What we do is exciting. People who work in this business love to help people and it turns them on in the work environment in a way that you never feel when you’re just making money for somebody else.

“The model is sexy, it’s exciting, it’s quite unusual. There’s nothing like it – you’re commercial or you’re public sector, but we’re this beast that sits somewhere in the middle.

“We can do anything as long as we don’t break the law – and we can flex that a bit,” she jokes.