Flexible working (3 days per week) | Competitive salary
Hybrid role (working from our office in Chester and from home)

Hough Bellis is on the lookout for a Business Administrator to support our growing team and help ensure our operations run smoothly and efficiently. We’re a national communications consultancy dedicated to delivering work that improves people’s lives and strengthens communities.

About the role
You’ll be at the heart of our business support function, working closely with colleagues across project delivery, finance, planning and events. Your key responsibilities will include:

1. Using our software systems to facilitate effective project and client management
2. Managing invoicing and financial processes – experience of QuickBooks ideal
3. Supporting diary management and planning
4. Assisting with events, travel arrangements and team activity coordination

Who we’re looking for
We need someone organised, proactive and adaptable, with strong attention to detail and a collaborative approach. You’ll enjoy working in a flexible, supportive environment where no two days are the same and you can help make a real impact.

What you can expect from us
We value trust, flexibility and doing great work in a way that’s compatible with real life. You’ll be supported to grow, contribute to meaningful projects, and work with a team that cares about quality, collaboration and making a difference.

To apply or find out more, please get in touch with us today via Bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk
SORRY, NO AGENCIES

• Halving the number of long-term rough sleepers by 2029.
• Ending the unlawful use of B&Bs for families.
• Preventing thousands more households from becoming homeless.

• A new ‘duty to collaborate’ which requires prisons, hospitals, social care and other public bodies to work together to prevent homelessness.
• Targets linked to institutions, including halving the number of people made homeless on their first night out of prison, and ensuring no eligible person is discharged from hospital to the street.
• A pledge to end the unlawful use of B&Bs for families, focused on the 2,070 households currently stuck beyond the six-week statutory limit (a figure which is still growing).
• Councils will be mandated to publish a local homelessness action plan with       measurable outcomes.
• A £124m supported housing programme to help more than 2,500 people move off       the streets and into stable accommodation.
• A £15m Rough Sleeping Innovation Programme, which is designed to help councils develop new solutions for long-term homeless people who are hard to reach and to support.
• A £37m Ending Homelessness in Communities Fund for voluntary, community and       faith groups providing frontline support.
• A commitment that new mothers are not discharged from maternity care into B&Bs or unsuitable accommodation.
• A funding boost to increase the supply of temporary accommodation: £950m       allocated through Local Authority Housing Fund (Round 4) to improve the availability of good-quality homes for those in urgent housing need.
• Stronger protections against the use of out-of-area temporary accommodation and unfit housing for homeless people.
• A £50m top-up to the 2025/26 Homelessness Prevention Grant for local authorities and a new National Workforce Programme (a £12m funding allocation over three years) to upskill frontline homelessness teams.

• Fears the plan does not go far enough to meet the government’s goal of halving rough sleeping by 2029.
• Only £100m of the £3.5bn appears to be genuinely new funding, with the majority already announced at the Spending Review, according to homelessness       charity Crisis.
• Disappointment that there is no national roll-out of Housing First, considered the strongest evidence-based intervention for entrenched rough sleeping and already popular and proving highly effective elsewhere in Europe.
• Housing benefit still remains frozen until at least 2030, making it “almost impossible” for low-income households to secure private rentals.
• There is no guarantee that newly-built homes will be allocated at a sufficient scale to people experiencing homelessness.
• Lack of detail on specialist provision for vulnerable homeless households, such as survivors of domestic abuse. This issue was raised by Labour MP and homelessness APPG chair, Paula Barker.
• There is no comprehensive plan for supporting refugees, who face a particularly high risk of homelessness.
• Without major increases in social housing, families will still struggle to move on from temporary accommodation, according to Shelter.
• Youth homelessness charity Centrepoint says the strategy says the funding attached to the strategy “doesn’t face up to the scale of youth homelessness” in Britain today.
• Some Parliamentarians have described the strategy as lacking detail, ambition and clarity around prevention and accommodation supply.

• Removing smaller works from the BSR’s building control approval processes.
• Allocating the same multi-agency safety approval teams for similar buildings or       projects built by the same organisation, which could improve efficiency and consistency.
• Government provision of long-term funding to train building and fire inspectors.

• The Regulator of Social Housing has opened a 12-week consultation (ending on 3 March 2026) on the latest updates to the Transparency, Influence and Accountability (TI&A) Standard, the Consumer Standards Code of Practice, and the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs). The competence and conduct requirements are aimed at improving professionalism in the sector by ensuring housing staff have the required skills, knowledge and experience to improve services for tenants. It means that senior housing managers and all exec teams will be required to hold, or be working towards, a housing management qualification. You can have your say on the consultation here.

• The PM is facing direct attack for the choices he’s made for the upper chamber, after appointing housing lobbyist Peter John, the former  leader of Southwark Council, as one of 25 new Labour members of the Lords in Number 10’s latest peerage list. John was appointed on the basis of his two decades of service to local government, planning and the built  environment – but others in the sector have a more detailed memory of his career. For five years, he was chair of Terrapin Group, the lobbying firm that represents developers and estate agents and according to the Times, he is still listed as a founder of Quoin Partners, which is described as an “advisory service” to businesses that “need to understand and influence local authorities and central government”. A LinkedIn post by Quoin partner Kevin Davis appeared to indicate that he would continue in this role while also serving in the Lords – which would be against House of Lords rules, which state that peers cannot provide paid parliamentary services, including advice or lobbying. Peter John said he would remove himself from all obligations before he commenced his role in January, but the move has caused yet another backlash for the PM.

• The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the       Ministry of Justice have together launched a call for evidence over the role and impact of claims management in the handling of housing disrepair claims. The departments want to hear from tenants and  landlords as well as legal professionals and companies managing disrepair claims around their experiences of the system, how well the current process works, and what they feel doesn’t work, is unclear or could be  improved. Have your say by filling in this online form by 12 February.

• A short MHCLG review of the functioning of the Regulator of Social       Housing has concluded, and it found that a full-scale review is not necessary at this time. “Overall, the review confirmed that the Regulator is a well-run organisation that demonstrates no fundamental weaknesses across its operations,” a statement said.

Labour leadership contests rarely begin with declarations or dissent.

They begin with a thinning of authority, with the quiet sense that a leader is no longer shaping events but reacting to them. That moment has arrived far sooner, and far more starkly, than anyone inside Labour expected.

Labour governs, but can it persuade? The question now being asked quietly in Westminster is no longer whether Starmer can turn the tide, but whether the damage to his authority is recoverable.

The next few months will therefore be make or break for Starmer’s premiership. His great advantage remains that he holds the tools of government. Delivery is still possible; policy can still be reshaped. Momentum can still, in theory, be rebuilt. But the window is narrowing.

One strategic danger for Starmer is mimicry. Mirroring and magnifying Reform’s language on asylum and immigration may appear tactically astute, but it ultimately serves Reform’s purpose rather than Labour’s. Hollow soundbites about toughness validate Reform’s frame without offering the economic seriousness that government demands.

The early exposure of the contradictions in Reform’s offer, and the gradual erosion of Nigel Farage’s outsider mythology, have already prompted a modest softening in their support. There is a route back for Labour here, but it lies in conviction…. and delivery.  Expect a big focus on new build and regeneration this year.

If Starmer fails to turn this around, a leadership challenge becomes almost inevitable.

The field is already being quietly assessed. Wes Streeting remains the most obvious inheritor of the current project. He speaks the language of progress fluently and without apology and understands that Labour will be judged on whether it can make the state function.

On housing, his instincts are practical rather than sentimental. He treats homes as infrastructure, essential to staffing the NHS and sustaining growth. A Streeting premiership would prioritise planning reform, urban density and partnership with private and institutional capital. Social housing would matter, but as part of a wider system focused on speed and scale. His appeal to the Parliamentary Labour Party would be immediate. His challenge would be persuading a suspicious union base and a disillusioned electorate that a change in name is enough.

Angela Rayner’s position is more complex. Once seen as the party’s emotional anchor, her fall from grace as Deputy PM following questions over her tax affairs related to her Hove flat has dampened enthusiasm. Within the PLP it has introduced caution. Among voters it has punctured the image of authenticity that once set her apart. On housing, Rayner remains the most instinctively interventionist of the serious contenders, committed to council housebuilding and stronger regulation of the private rented sector. Increasingly, however, her influence may lie less in leading the party than in shaping it. She could yet emerge as a king or queen-maker, trading her backing for a substantive cabinet role and decisive sway over housing and social policy.

Lucy Powell and Louise Haigh represent Labour’s quieter future. Powell is disciplined, trusted and deeply embedded in the workings of Parliament. Her housing politics emphasise planning reform and city-region growth, with social rent framed as part of sustainable development rather than ideology. Haigh approaches housing through infrastructure and place, understanding the links between transport, work and homes. She has consistently argued for a more assertive use of public land and state backed development. Both would lead competent governments. Neither naturally generates momentum in moments of crisis.

Lisa Nandy remains the party’s most articulate voice on place and belonging. Her housing worldview centres on community stability, particularly in towns hollowed out by decades of neglect. She sees social housing as an anchor of civic life rather than a supply target. A Nandy premiership would focus on regeneration, renter security and rebuilding local pride. Yet her long-standing problem persists: she is respected, rather than rallied behind – and respect alone rarely wins leadership contests.

Two further figures complicate the picture. John Healey, long regarded as a serious operator rather than a natural front runner, has re-emerged as an outsider candidate of authority. A more than competent Housing Minister from the last Labour government as well as a Shadow Secretary of State for Housing under Corbyn, his politics are sober and state-centred. On housing, he is well regarded in the sector and has argued consistently for large-scale public delivery and stronger central coordination. He would reassure MPs unnerved by drift, if not members hungry for inspiration.

More intriguing is Al Cairns, a former Captain in the Royal Marines. Not yet widely known outside Westminster, he is increasingly spoken of as a rising star, particularly among the large 2024 intake of Labour MPs. He speaks their language of pragmatism and delivery rather than ideology. On housing his instincts reflect the frustrations of a generation locked out of security. He accepts that the market alone will not deliver and that speed and scale matter more than doctrinal purity. His strength lies in his relationships with newer MPs. His challenge would be converting that generational base into the broader coalition required to stand.

And then there is Andy Burnham, looming over the entire discussion like an unfinished chapter. The King of the North is not shy about his ambitions. He has never concealed his belief that the job he ultimately wants is Prime Minister. The only thing keeping that ambition theoretical is the absence of a Commons seat.

Were Burnham able to return to Parliament, he would almost certainly be the front runner. He offers something few others do in equal measure: broad electoral appeal, previous cabinet experience and a visible record of delivery. His mayoralty has been defined by interventions that matter to people’s daily lives. The takeover of bus services in Greater Manchester was not just a policy success but a political one, proof that the state can act decisively and improve everyday life. The same moral clarity and determination would almost certainly be applied to social housing, which Burnham has long treated as foundational infrastructure tied to dignity, security and belonging.

It is precisely this combination of delivery and moral purpose that makes Burnham formidable and threatening. He speaks comfortably to working-class voters drifting toward Reform without adopting Reform’s cynicism. He understands place, patriotism and public service without nostalgia. He looks like someone who enjoys exercising power on behalf of the public rather than managing it.

That is also why his path back to Westminster would be contested. To mount a leadership challenge Burnham would need to be an MP, and those around Starmer would be acutely aware of the risk his return poses. Selection processes, shortlists and timing become instruments of control in such moments. Speculation has already focused on whether a Greater Manchester by-election could offer Burnham a route back, and whether that route would be quietly closed before it opens.

Any leadership contest will be shaped as much by process as by personality. To stand, a candidate must secure nominations from twenty per cent of Labour MPs. It is a deliberately high bar designed to prevent insurgency. Members and affiliated unions choose the leader, but only from the shortlist the Parliamentary Labour Party permits. This reality narrows the field far more than public debate admits.

The next Labour leadership election, whenever it comes, will not only be a battle between the left and right. It will be a reckoning over authority. Can Labour govern with conviction as well as competence. Can it deliver without losing its moral compass? Can it rebuild trust while wielding power?

The economy, NHS, housing, pensions, and tax will be the proving grounds. Voters are not demanding perfection; they are demanding fairness, clarity and progress they can see.

Labour has learned how to win power again. The harder task now is learning how to keep it. If Starmer cannot turn the tide in 2026, succession will cease to be a hypothetical discussion.

Well, it was a Budget that perhaps sums up the mood around Labour’s time in office so far. There’s no money, nobody’s especially happy, and the presentation was a bit of a shambles.

Other than that, Rachel Reeves actually did pretty well.

After weeks of leaks, doom-mongering and U-turns, the Chancellor finally stood at the despatch box to deliver her Budget on Wednesday – only to find that someone from the Office for Budget Responsibility had accidentally leaked it half an hour beforehand.

Given the circumstances, Reeves appeared remarkably unflustered as she delivered a detailed, impassioned and confident speech which, in the end, can be framed as a traditionally redistributive Labour Budget, symbolised by the introduction of a ‘mansion tax’ alongside the abolition of the two-child benefit cap.

A huge tip of the hat to everyone we’ve worked with over the years to make the case for getting rid of the cruel cap which kept thousands of children in poverty – and we’re thankful to those policy-makers who have finally seen it off.

Despite endless discussion about the merits of raising income tax for all to inject some fast cash back into government, in the end Reeves sidestepped that manifesto-busting choice and produced a more timid series of smaller measures.

There was neither a big financial shock nor a white rabbit pulled out of the hat – but, together, the measures aim to provide much-needed support on the ever-rising cost of living, albeit at a price to workers on middle and higher incomes.

The hope for the Chancellor is that she’ll soon be able to deliver on her bigger promise to the working people of Britain: that their lives will get easier.

Whether it will be enough to restore confidence in what has become a gaffe-prone and apparently indecisive government is another matter, especially when the buffeting winds of the Reform surge look unlikely to cease anytime soon. Much depends on the digestion of the detail.

And what does that mean for the housing sector and for social tenants? Worry not – we’re here as usual to unpick all the detail with our step-by-step guide to the most important measures in this Budget.

Thank you once again for reading. We’re all off to the Christmas markets for a mulled wine and a giant bratwurst.

We’ll be back with another Roundup in 2026! See you then.

Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan, Emma and the Hough Bellis team

THE HOUGH BELLIS BIG BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Don’t be fooled by the relative calm of Rachel Reeves’ delivery (especially given her frustration at the OBR pre-releasing its assessment of her work) – this was an intensely political Budget from the Chancellor. Reeves task was not only to rebalance the nation’s finances, but also to appease those within her own party who have become increasingly vocal about the precarious nature of her tenure.

After all the briefings and backtracking, we now have a clearer picture of what this Budget was intended to achieve: cuts to NHS waiting lists, cuts to the cost of living and cuts to government debt, all underpinned by action on welfare reform and social justice. Housing, however, was notably absent.

In many ways, this was a traditional redistributive Labour Budget, symbolised by the introduction of a ‘mansion tax’ alongside the abolition of the damaging and much-maligned two-child benefit cap, first introduced during the Conservative austerity years. Long campaigned for by housing charities and lobbying groups, this was the flagship announcement for both the government and its own backbench MPs, who were delighted.

In repealing the cap, Reeves even took a moment to share her disgust at the so-called ‘rape clause’, which allowed women who could “prove” they had conceived a child non-consensually to claim the benefit for a third child. Perhaps it should not have taken a Labour government 18 months to act on this repellent policy, but at last it is gone.

Elsewhere, there was action to reduce energy bills and the cost of living, with a 4.2% rise in the state pension, a 4.1% rise in the National Living Wage (with greater increases for younger workers) and the freezing of some transport costs and prescription fees.

The freezing of income tax thresholds until 2031 will raise £26bn by 2029-30, and the reduction of debt and borrowing was critical for the markets.

The initial reaction had been an acceptance that it could have been a lot worse, although we are starting to see the traditionally right-leaning press set the frame of working people paying more to prop up welfare spending.

Headlines such as ‘Budget for Benefits Street’ and talk of workers subsidising the lifestyles of ‘shirkers’ and ‘skivers’ take us back to a time many of us would rather forget – when David Cameron and George Osborne sought to pit the nation against its poorest citizens as a justification for austerity.

On housing

The sector is feeling disappointed that social housing was notably absent from today’s speech, although we did expect this given a general feeling across government that the sector had already done very well from Angela Rayner’s tenure as housing secretary. The Northern Housing Consortium described it as “a missed opportunity to provide social housing providers with the clarity they need to deliver on the government’s generational £39bn investment in social housing from the Spending Review.”

It was expected that a decision on rent convergence would be made in this week’s announcement (with ministers set to decide between a £2 or £3 per-week increase). This has now been delayed until January. There was also no news on Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates or the temporary accommodation subsidy – both of which drive poverty, alongside the total household benefit cap which was also left untouched.

Recommendations from the House of Lords to build new towns into the Budget were also ignored, with the Government only stating it will “continue to consider the ways in which private finance can support the delivery of wider infrastructure ambitions, including leveraging private finance to help deliver the next generation of new towns.”

The silence on social housing will raise eyebrows among those concerned about new housing secretary Steve Reed’s alignment with the ‘YIMBY’ lobby and traditional housebuilders.

Labour backbenchers were concerned when London’s social housing development targets were dropped earlier this year (Inside Housing produced a useful list of lessons from this).

We must be alive to the fact that, without Rayner to keep making the case at the cabinet table for social housing, the argument could be lost as quickly as it was once won. We must keep making our case and showing our impact.

Reeves will, however, be celebrating the impact of recent planning reforms. The OBR predicts that while the number of new homes being built will fall from 260,000 a year in the early 2020s to 215,000 in 2026-27, it will increase to an average of 305,000 in 2029-2030. And the government has allocated £48m to speed up planning decisions, with funding used to recruit 350 additional planners.

Property taxes… 

Private landlords will be hit with a 2% tax rise on rental income, which will no doubt move some more small-time players to leave the sector. There is a surfeit of flats and small houses on the market at the moment due to the decision of private landlords to sell, which is keeping prices low(er).

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as wages continue to rise: there will be new opportunities for some first-time buyers as a result.

Meanwhile, at the top end of the market, homes valued at £2m or more in England will face a council tax surcharge of between £2,500 and £7,500 a year from April 2028.

Remember when you see the endless discussion about how the policy will hit middle class workers in London and the south-east that only approximately 160,000 in England are worth £2m or more. It will only bring in a relatively modest amount of income (approximately £400m), but it sends a useful signal.

Another notable absence from the Budget was any change to stamp duty. Changes to this form of land tax could encourage first-time buyers and second steppers to get moving, but Rachel Reeves may be storing it up for a bigger shift in property wealth taxation at a later budget.

What does it mean for social tenants? 

With a rise in the state pension and the national minimum wage, there will be more money in tenants’ pockets and being spent in our communities. The Help to Save scheme, a savings support programme open to anyone claiming Universal Credit, will also be made permanent from 2028.

But welcome and overdue though the changes to family welfare benefits are, the inevitable backlash will also be felt by tenants too. According to a recent survey, two-thirds of tenants already feel stigmatised by living in social housing – a figure which could rise in the fallout of this week’s economic announcements.

Inside the office…

A few announcements will affect how we do business as a sector. On pensions, the Chancellor introduced a £2,000 a year cap on the sum that can be contributed to a pension through salary sacrifice from April 2029. Salary sacrifice arrangements had allowed employees to give up part of their salary in exchange for paying the equivalent directly into their pension, providing NI savings for both employer and employee. Now, salary sacrifice above the £2,000 level will still be allowed but will be subject to National Insurance. The OBR forecasts this change will raise an additional £4.7 billion in National Insurance contributions in 2029. Employees will continue to receive income tax relief on pension contributions.

For social landlords, this may impact your ability to recruit talent into housing from other sectors. In the past, where we have been unable to match salary expectations in some other fields, we have been able to use salary sacrificed pension payments as a sweetener to attract the right people to work with us. HR teams will be keeping a close eye on the impact on recruitment and retirement savings among all staff.

The rise in the minimum wage is also likely to have an impact on the contractors we work with in the push for new development. Housing providers are already logging record costs in the supply chain, and with decent homes and energy efficiency work coming down the track, this could put pressure on the bottom line. Small contractors already struggling with the impact of changes to national insurance costs may be fighting to stay in business with a higher minimum wage to pay. Large outfits will certainly pass down the costs.

With more money being spent by low paid workers across the economy, Reeves has clearly decided that’s a gamble worth taking.

On the positive side, Reeves also committed £725m for the Growth and Skills Levy to support apprenticeships. Training for apprenticeships for under-25s will become free for SMEs as part of plans to boost employment and support growth in the construction industry.

The end of ECO

Reeves has confirmed that the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), originally designed to tackle fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions, will be scrapped from April 2026. A portion of the ECO’s funding will instead be redirected to reduce household energy bills by an average of £150 from April next year.

A range of charities and energy companies had urged the government not to cut the scheme, warning that doing so would slow progress towards net zero.

However, the government will invest a further £1.5bn through the Warm Homes Plan to tackle fuel poverty, supplementing the £13.2bn already allocated at the 2025 Spending Review.

Legions for the regions

The government has committed to devolving £13bn in funding for regional leaders to invest in skills, infrastructure and business support projects.

The money will come through integrated settlements from 2026-27 to 2029-30 in areas including Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire, North East, South Yorkshire and the Greater London Authority.

If you want more…

Our resident political journo Hannah Fearn appeared on the Big Budget Breakdown episode of the popular podcast ‘Oh God, What Now?’ this week, so if you can’t get enough of the Budget implications dive in here to hear more.

BEYOND THE BUDGET

AT RISK: What should we be worrying about now?

The Regulator of Social Housing has published its Sector Risk Profile for 2025, intended to help Boards have a better understanding of the risks organisations face in an increasingly complex and diverse sector. The document focuses on ensuring the provision of safe and decent homes, managing expectations around new supply, good data management, financial viability and, of course, reputation management.

We’re more than happy to talk to any Boards about assurance and managing reputational risk.

IN OTHER NEWS

In case you missed it…

The Building Safety Regulator will be transferred out of the Health and Safety Executive in January. The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) announced back in June 2025 that the regulator would have its functions moved away from the body and into a new executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the department.

The Renters’ Rights Act finally passed into law and implementation plans for the legislation were published earlier this month by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The new law will be implemented in phases, starting from 1 May 2026. At that point the ban on Section 21 ‘no-fault’ eviction notices, a leading cause of homelessness, will come into force. Tenants will also be able to appeal excessive above-market rent increases that try to force them out, and landlords can no longer unreasonably refuse tenants’ requests to have a pet. Also from 1 May, it will become illegal for landlords and letting agents to increase rent more than once a year, to ask for more than a month’s rent in advance, or to provoke a rental bidding war between prospective tenants for the same property. They will also not be able to discriminate against potential tenants with children or who claim benefit support.

The Northern Housing Consortium (NHC) has launched a call for evidence for its inquiry into regeneration and how to tackle the housing crisis in the north. NHC chief executive Tracy Harrison – who many of you will know – has urged social landlords based in the north of England to respond to help them influence future government policy on regeneration. Meanwhile, our friends at Seddon Housing Partnerships shared their thoughts in HQN’s latest online magazine on why estate regeneration should be central to the nation’s housing plans.

Housing associations are not predicted to have upgraded all their homes to an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of C or above until 2032, two years after the government’s deadline. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that less than a third of Scottish social landlords have made any provisions in their financial forecasts to meet their net zero obligations. There is a big challenge ahead for housing providers on both sides of the border.

THE HOUGH BELLIS DIGEST

Here’s what our brilliant clients and team have been up to over the last couple of months:

Cardo Group has reported a strong financial and operating performance for the last financial year, with an impressive 74% increase in turnover from £83.6m (FY24) to £145.2m (FY25).

MSV Housing has received approval to develop 212 new homes on the former Reno Nightclub site in Moss Side, which will provide quality, affordable housing for social rent. Meanwhile MSV’s employment and training service won the ‘Talent is Everywhere’ Award at this year’s Get the Nation Learning Awards. The award was given to Positive Futures for the success of its learning and skills support in Moss Side, Manchester. Congratulations!

This National Care Leavers Month, Procure Plus has highlighted its work with key organisations like Right Resolution, which supports young people transitioning from care to independence. Through Re:vision, its charitable subsidiary, Procure Plus has funded an initiative between Right Resolution and Board Horizons to deliver in-house therapy for care leavers aged 16-24.

The brilliant childhood cancer charity The Joshua Tree featured in this year’s Children in Need DIY SOS extravaganza. Well done to all involved!!!! You can catch up on iPlayer here.

We helped to organise a really insightful HQN event on hoarding, bringing together expert speakers who shared practical strategies, lived experience and best-practice approaches for supporting residents affected by hoarding behaviours. We have been busy organising some more great HQN events coming up in the new year, including one on “cuckooing” (where criminals take over the homes of highly vulnerable tenants to run illegal operations) and a two-day annual conference.

We attended an inspiring conference with the Housing Diversity Network, featuring some amazing speakers including the legendary journalist, author and academic Gary Younge. Our managing director Bobbie Hough got a chance to interview Gary ahead of his keynote speech.

That’s all for now. We’ll see you again in early 2026.

Merry Christmas from everyone at Hough Bellis!

Location: Manchester / Chester (hybrid working)

• A dedicated training programme built around you;
• Work on national campaigns and projects;
• Supportive culture with flexible working;
• No agency experience required;
• Ideal for a graduate or someone looking to start their career in communications.

A bit about us…

We’re an established and growing communications agency dedicated to helping people and organisations working for a fairer society.

We create great communications for projects that improve people’s lives.

Through our work we hope to create a society where:

• Good quality housing is available to all.
• Communities are places where everyone can thrive.
• People who are unfairly disadvantaged in society are given a voice.
• We take action to protect our environment for future generations.

Our clients include housing associations, local authorities, charities, contractors and public bodies across the UK. They are building homes, strengthening communities, tackling inequality and delivering services that make a genuine difference to people’s lives.

Our job is to help them tell their stories, navigate complex issues, influence opinion and build trusted reputations.

The opportunity

We’re not looking for someone who wants a job in communications. We’re looking for someone who wants to become an exceptional communications consultant.

If you’re naturally curious, love writing, enjoy understanding how the world works and want to build a career where you can make a lasting difference, we’d love to hear from you.

This role is ideal for someone in their first or second professional role after university or college.

You may already work in communications, journalism, marketing or public affairs.

Or perhaps you’ve gained experience through student media, campaigning, content creation, volunteering, politics or running your own social media channels.

We’re far more interested in your potential than where you’ve worked.

If you can think critically, write brilliantly and are excited by the opportunity to learn, we’ll help you become an outstanding communications consultant.

What you’ll do

You’ll work alongside experienced communications consultants, supporting clients across housing, local government, renewable energy and the wider public sector. You’ll:

• Write press releases, blogs, speeches, articles, newsletters and create brilliant social media content.
• Help deliver integrated communications campaigns.
• Research political, policy and sector developments.
• Monitor media and identify opportunities for clients.
• Attend client meetings and contribute ideas.
• Support stakeholder engagement and events.
• Build relationships with journalists, clients and stakeholders.
• Manage multiple projects across several client accounts.
• Continually look for ways to make our work even better.

What makes someone successful at Hough Bellis?

Our best people have a few things in common.

• You’ll care about making a difference.
• You’ll be curious.
• You’ll think like a consultant – always looking beyond the brief.
• You’ll take pride in your work.
• You’ll be ambitious – for yourself and our clients.
• You’ll be a team player.

We’d love to hear from you if you…

• Write confidently and communicate ideas clearly.
• Have strong content creation skills across digital and social media.
• Are naturally curious and interested in current affairs.
• Have an interest in politics, public policy or how organisations influence change.
• Enjoy understanding complex issues and explaining them simply.
• Can think critically and connect the dots between different issues.
• Have excellent attention to detail.
• Are organised and comfortable juggling multiple projects.
• Are eager to learn and keen to build a long-term career in communications.

What you’ll get from us

Joining Hough Bellis means joining a business that genuinely invests in its people – and gives you the opportunity to work on projects that make a lasting difference.

You’ll work directly with experienced consultants, receive mentoring and coaching, and be given responsibility from an early stage in your career.

You’ll gain exposure to senior clients, fascinating projects and some of the biggest issues facing society today.

Most importantly, you’ll be surrounded by people who want to see you succeed.

Interested?

This will be a permanent role with a salary ranging from £24,500 – £27,000 per year depending on experience. This is a remote role with one day a week working from our bases in Manchester or Chester.

We’re not like most communications agencies – so if you’ve had a bad experience elsewhere or are looking for a change, we might just be right for you.

To find out more or for a no-obligations chat, get in touch today at bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

SORRY, NO AGENCIES

Hi everyone,

How are we all holding up? As we settle in for longer nights and a dreaded prospect of turning the heating back on (note there’s a hard November deadline in the Hough household), we’re still recovering with a hot toddy from the busiest month in politics.

The party conference season finally closed on Wednesday with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch making a last-ditch bid to hold on to her job. By the time you read this on Friday, that ship may have already set sail.

Labour may be struggling to hold control of the narrative, but it does seem there is one thing Starmer’s government is getting done: turning housing policy into a genuine political dividing line. For the first time since the Thatcher era (she died 13 years ago, which is easy to forget when the Tories still seemed to have her as their headline act this week), housing policy is a battleground of ideas.

We might not welcome every new pitch out there, but it’s nothing but good news to see the issue being taken so seriously.

In our latest Round Up we’ve got all the latest news from on and off the stage during the conference season, including who’s coming out of their gatherings looking stronger and who is limping back to their constituencies.

We’ve also got coverage of all the other news you might have missed at the end of the summer and a brief look ahead to next month’s highly-anticipated big budget announcement – where there’s still everything up for grabs, but you’ll need to be increasingly careful how you ask for it.

It was great to catch up with so many of you in person at our own fringe event at Labour Conference in Liverpool (more on that below), and at Cardo’s now famous Cavern Club do at the Housing Summit, but if you haven’t dropped us a line for a while, do give us a call. And don’t forget to keep an eye out in your inbox for our post-budget briefing in late November.

See you then!

Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan, Emma and the HB team

PARTY CONFERENCES: THE BIG ROUND-UP

LABOUR

Keir Starmer entered conference season bruised by weeks of personal attacks from inside and outside his party, and the ever-present existential threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform taking a commanding lead in the polls. Hours before Labour’s Liverpool conference opened its doors, the prime minister attempted a high-stakes gamble by announcing his new policy on digital ID cards – a huge government commitment which was not mentioned in either last year’s election manifesto or his major speech to party delegates a couple of days later. It has since granted him the questionable accolade of possessing the “reverse Midas touch”; support for a national system of digital ID has plummeted since Starmer promised to deliver one.

But in other ways, Labour’s annual meeting served the PM well. The communications team in Number 10, once again reshuffled, appears to have improved its work, and he delivered an impressive and mostly convincing leader’s speech, which directly took on the threat of rising populism and warned against the danger of trusting in Farage and Reform. Starmer had the confidence to make a strong moral argument about the Britain he believes we are, characterising the next general election (still four years away, don’t forget) as a choice “between decency and division” and a “fight for the soul of Britain.” To which the general response was: “Finally!” He also talked a lot about “national renewal”, which is a big idea that nobody understands. Still a bit more to be done on the storytelling, but…he found some guts, stuck to core values, spoke for his people, and got his rewards. Something for us all to remember in strange times.

The PM used his speech (backed up by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her own speech, which also hinted at future tax rises) to turn his five rather botched missions into one overriding obsession: growth. This term risks becoming as much of a policy buzzword as “austerity”, and the PM may come to wish he hadn’t staked his premiership on one outcome, but here we are.

Meanwhile, the Labour deputy leadership rumbles on. Widely considered to be in the lead in that race is the Manchester MP Lucy Powell.

Powell has been framed as a proxy for Andy Burnham, whose own leadership ambitions are no longer a quiet whisper in the corridors of power, but more of a wailing siren. Her rival, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson MP, has been labelled as ‘team Starmer.’ Hough Bellis is adopting a slightly more grown-up view that this, in fact, is a contest between two talented women at the forefront of British politics.

Powell was right to dismiss the sexist framing of the battle to be the party’s second in command, but her lead demonstrates how much of the parliamentary party is dissatisfied with the current state of Number 10.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Greater Manchester used a fringe event at Conference to slam Starmer’s leadership for suppressing internal debate, but everybody knows those debates are ongoing – whether Starmer has legitimised them in public or not.

Either way, the immediate threat from Burnham seems to have passed. The timing of the conference fell fortuitously for Starmer: rather than weeks of corridor whispering, the chance to meet up face to face and talk it all out seems to have resulted in a promise to unify behind Starmer – for now.

Nevertheless, Burnham will be aware that this month Labour managed to hold on to a crucial council seat in Ellesmere Port, which it had been expected Reform would take.

It will be a signal to the Mayor that he would be able to avoid an embarrassing by-election defeat and a secure route back to Westminster if he does find a seat where he could stand (all eyes on what happens to Gorton and Denton MP, Andrew Gwynne, who is currently suspended from the Labour Party).

Housing at Labour

For housing leaders, though, there was plenty of policy debate to get stuck into away from the political soap opera.

The housing crisis is still front and centre of Labour thinking, with newly-appointed housing secretary Steve Reed using his conference appearance to announce that work on three of the 12 new towns promised by Labour will start before the next election, with sites confirmed at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Crews Hill in London and Leeds South Bank. These will include 40 per cent affordable housing, and around 20 per cent social – although we’re still waiting for the final numbers right across the country as the government finalises the Social and Affordable Homes Programme.

Reed’s turn as a MAGA-style baseball cap campaigner has, however, raised some eyebrows as he turned up sporting a red hat with the words “build baby build” on it.

It certainly grabbed attention, but there were plenty of questions raised over whether a splash of Trumpian campaigning was really what the doctor ordered at a Labour Party Conference given the perilous political state this country is in.

Others pointed out – most notably former Tory Housing Minister Michael Gove (who we can only assume was at the conference having gotten lost following a big night out on Mathew Street) – that while the mantra of building loads more houses is something everyone can get behind, the real solution is far more nuanced.

Gove was right in his assessment that it will never be in the interest of volume housebuilders, with a focus on ‘units’ and profit, to build our way out of a housing crisis.  It’s our job to make sure the government understands this – and the ability of social housing to deliver new homes of all kinds – as we get deeper into the parliament.

Still, there are reasons to be very cheerful. The Labour Housing Group had its first ever ‘housing zone’ at the conference, hosting dozens of fringe events tussling with the biggest questions facing housing. There was a real buzz around these sessions, with policymakers making it clear they were still very much open to practical solutions from the sector.

The Hough Bellis team was out and about at the conference, and supported the CIH’s widely discussed fringe event during which MP Amanda Hack urged her own government to prioritise building social housing, rather than high-end developments just to hit promised development figures. Salford mayor Paul Dennett echoed her concerns, fearing the government would funnel money into products such as shared ownership, which are inaccessible to low-income families. CIH chief executive Gavin Smart concluded that while Labour’s housing ambitions are positive, success now depends on delivery and collaboration across the social housing sector.

REFORM 

And so to Birmingham’s NEC, where Reform met for its annual gathering, which can at best be described as policy light and at worst as, well, unhinged. At every other conference, housing was a core debating point; here at Reform, not one aspiring minister of government thought to present a housing proposal. In fact, Britain’s acute shortage of affordable housing to both buy and rent was reframed as an immigration issue, and not the economic or structural domestic crisis it clearly is.

This is, nevertheless, a party that is ahead in the polls. So though there seemed to be little evidence of deep policy thinking in action, Farage cast himself as the prime minister in waiting, declaring himself and his party as “preparing for government”.

In so much as there is a plan in that preparation, the focus for his team is on immigration and law and order above all else. The party used the leader’s speech to reaffirm its hardline – many would say immoral – stances on these issues, including programmes of immigrant deportations. He even threw in the old trope of accusing some communities of eating swans.

A handful of other predictable yet controversial promises were also made, such as scrapping net zero obligations, deregulation and support for the fracking industry, and cutting local government waste. Perhaps the party should listen to the advice and experience of its own councillors in local government: in Kent, Reform representatives are warning that they may have to put local taxes up after all. It turns out that there wasn’t any slack in council budgets at all. Who could possibly have guessed it?

Reality bites for the leadership, too. Preparing for Number 10 the party may be, but there is still leadership tension visible within Reform. The suspended whip Robert Lowe continues to be publicly critical of Farage.

Note: The Roundup refuses to share a link to Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ impromptu Stars In Their Eyes performance of her self-written song Insomniac on the grounds of taste.

LIB DEMS 

The Liberal Democrats are the party set to do best out of the turmoil in Westminster and the country right now. Politically homeless Tories and disgruntled liberal Labour voters angry at the PM’s kowtowing to an anti-immigrant agenda are flocking to Ed Davey’s calm, measured promises that are rooted in long-held values. It feels like a breath of fresh air, and the latest polls show that the Lib Dems are likely to obliterate the Conservative Party at the next general election.

Upbeat though they might be about their own fortunes, the bigger picture is no less bleak. The focus of the party’s meeting was on resistance to Reform and defending the UK’s democracy and institutions against populists. Davey’s leader’s speech was righteously angry, placing himself and his party as the bulwark against extremism in the UK. “Don’t let Trump’s UK become Farage’s Britain,” he said.

He needed to do something: a More in Common survey which was seen by delegates, found that voters still remained unclear what the party stood for and that Davey’s reputation for carrying out crazy stunts for the press pics was starting to overshadow its substance.

Of course, unlike the other main challenger party, the Lib Dems came armed with a lot of policy ideas too, including a windfall tax on banks to tackle fuel poverty, an energy security ban to “halve energy bills by 2035”, and electoral reform with the promise of proportional representation. On housing there were no new policy commitments made, but the promise to build 300,000 new homes per year with wider planning reforms was reiterated.

CONSERVATIVES

Hardly anyone with even a vague interest in politics could be bothered to go to Tory Conference in Manchester, so we can’t tell you what happened.

Even those who did go don’t seem too sure what they witnessed. Nor do they seem to care.

The press coverage suggested that highlights included a display made up of some of Thatcher’s old dresses, a load of empty seats, and Robert Jenrick saying he didn’t see “another white face” when he was out in Birmingham.

Still, it’s an improvement on the Liz Truss era.

The psephologist John Curtice had a warning for the Tories: the electoral system, he said, now treats their party the way it once treated the Liberal Democrats. Their vote is no longer concentrated in winnable seats, and the Lib Dems will win more seats than them at the next general election.

Is there still time to stop that from happening? The one thing the Tories must do to save themselves from oblivion is make a serious commitment to younger people. Enter one shadow chancellor Mel Stride, who thinks he has the answer. He used the party’s annual conference in Manchester to unveil what he described as a “first job bonus” – a £5,000 National Insurance rebate for first-time buyers to be redeemed against a property purchase. This would be funded by – wait for it – a cut to benefits. Leaving the obvious unfairness aside (the majority of today’s first-time buyers have far more than £5,000 in family support to take that step), he seems to have missed a crucial point: the fastest rise in new benefit claims is from young people. This is not a measure to draw them back into the fold. The measure is part of a wider plan for more welfare reform, including restricting benefits for non-citizens. It’s a brutal vision of the future.

On the main stage, Kemi Badenoch showed no greater understanding of the size of the party’s alienation from the public. Her big offer to the public was scrapping stamp duty, a bung that can’t offset the reality of the Tories’ position in a climate where Reform are now outpolling them almost three to one. She also used the conference to announce plans for an ICE-style “removals force” to deport 150,000 people per year, using facial recognition checks.

Some commentators described her speech as a valiant attempt to hold on as leadership rival Robert Jenrick breathed down her neck. Combined with Farage’s stranglehold on the public imagination, her vision for the future of the country would be frightening if it weren’t so slapstick. It’s hard to take a party that spells this great country “Britian” on its marketing material very seriously whatsoever.

As the Tories went into the conference, less than a fifth of the public believed Badenoch was doing well, and that dial isn’t moving. Party members are fed up – 20 councillors defected to Reform during the conference – and increasingly they support a pact or merger with Farage’s party, fearing oblivion awaits if they don’t. The only serious figure still operating in the party is housing secretary James Cleverly. At a fringe session, he said the housing market had been “killed” and was currently incapable of responding to demand. He blamed the “difficulty, complexity and cost of getting anything built” and pledged to fix it. Unfortunately, he’s unlikely to be in that job for much longer.

GREENS

Under the new leadership of Zack Polanski, the Green Party are getting a fairer hearing and are rivalling the Liberal Democrats as a left-wing party of protest, actually overtaking them in membership numbers. In his first major conference as leader, Polanski delivered a combative speech attacking both Reform for its dangerous extremism and Labour for failing to tackle it.

The conference floor also debated a daft motion to “abolish landlords” – an unrealistic and unserious discussion at a time of crisis. More significant proposals on housing from the party include ending buy-to-let mortgage lending, business rates for empty homes and holiday lets and councils being granted first-refusal on sales of ex-council homes. Given the over-reliance on developers witnessed at Labour conference, a plan to create a state-owned house-building factory producing rapid pre-fab council homes is an interesting proposition worth discussing (feels like a concept a certain Labour mayor might consider borrowing and reframing with a touch of Northern-gloss in the not too distant future).

After the conference a YouGov poll suggested the Greens are understandably trusted more by the public on the environment than other parties, but are seen as weak on defence and managing a broad government.

BLOWING THE BUDGET

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is delivering her next Budget on Wednesday 26 November, which is somehow still technically Autumn. There’s still a lot of Whitehall wrangling going on around the contents, so arguments are still there to be won.

Tax increases are so widely expected that they now feel inevitable, but whether the Chancellor will have the confidence either to go for wealth taxation alongside the widely expected shake-up of property taxes, or indeed a rise to income tax across the board, remains to be seen. It’s anticipated that income tax thresholds will be frozen for longer, which will raise a lot of money, though will prove controversial with Nigel Farage in particular taking a strong stance on that.

A levy on rental income for private landlords is predicted, and the end of the two-child benefit cap may finally come to pass.

For housing, there’s a careful path to tread. It’s clear that the government feels (perhaps fairly) it has treated the sector very well: the rent settlement and a huge social development programme is confirmed, even if the details around allocating that funding are still under discussion.

The chances of any new pots of funding are pretty much zero. So the message from housing associations to the government needs to be around the detail – and what leavers can be pulled to make things happen quicker.

There’s space to make the case for specific requests when it comes to planning and development – and how to get the Social and Affordable Homes Programme funding out of the door at pace.

There’s definitely room for manoeuvre on how to implement building safety regulation, with ears open to listening about the way the gateway system works (the Lords inquiry is also ongoing).

With Reform lapping them in the polls, Labour needs something that shows results, fast – that means changes that can be delivered swiftly, don’t require years of legislation and can be delivered within the money that’s already been allocated. So, pretty straightforward.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Buying overhaul: Just after its party conference, the government announced plans to overhaul the homebuying procedure in England, a huge relief to anyone who has been engaged in that miserable exercise in the last decade. The plan, currently out to consultation, contains three key elements. First, it would require property sellers and estate agents to provide more information about a home upfront, saving money on the buying process and cutting out time sinks such as individual local authority searches.

Second, there is a proposal for a binding contract at an earlier stage in the process, if both sides agree, to prevent gazumping and other practices which lead to one in three transactions falling apart. Finally, there is a plan to offer more information to consumers about the work of estate agents, including a new code of practice and a set of professional standards to improve practice. All long overdue; other countries have shown this process can be easier, faster and cheaper for decades.

New faces: Three new ministers have joined the new-look housing department in Whitehall. Local government and homelessness minister Alison McGovern and building safety minister Samantha Dixon join the team, as does minister for devolution, faith and communities Miatta Fahnbulleh.

McGovern, MP for Birkenhead and the Wirral, was once an aide to Gordon Brown and chair of the centrist group Progress, now known as Progressive Britain. She also took over the local government brief from Jim McMahon, who was sacked in the post-Rayner reshuffle.

Dixon, MP for Chester North and Neston, moved over after Alex Norris was shifted into the Ministry of Justice. She was quick to get to work and has already introduced draft regulations on the Building Safety Levy to the Commons.

Fahnbulleh, who is the MP for Peckham, will be well known to some in housing from her previous role in DESNZ. Matthew Pennycook remains in his role as minister for housing and planning.

Prove yourself: The government has confirmed it will press ahead with a new set of mandatory professional qualifications for social housing staff, which it claims will “eradicate unprofessional attitudes” in the sector. The minister has directed the English regulator to bring in the new competency standard from October 2026. The government has also issued guidance on which staff will be required to hold professional qualifications, which confirms that all senior executives and housing managers must have or be working towards a qualification in housing management.

Seat at the Table: A new report by TPAS, which found that tenants from ethnic minority backgrounds are poorly represented in decisions about how their landlords are run, has been backed by housing select committee chair Florence Eshalomi MP. In her speech at the launch, Eshalomi said the report, authored by Kai Jackson, “will be seen as a starting point for changing the culture and stigma around social housing”.

WHAT WE’RE UP TO

• It was great to see so many clients, friends and stars of the sector at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool. Our thoughts go out to the conference organisers who had to wrestle with a complete overhaul of the government’s housing team on the eve of the summit (does nobody ever think of the PRs?!) It was a fantastic event with lots of debate and a real focus on delivery. We were attending inspiring sessions around procurement and social value, rebuilding housing’s reputation with politicians and tenants alike, investing in heating infrastructure, and tenant engagement.

• Els joined our client Cardo at the Buddy Bag Foundation packing event hosted by Places for People in Liverpool at the Labour Party Conference and in the historic and beautiful St George’s Hall. The Buddy Bag Foundation provides bags made up of essential items to thousands of children upon arrival in emergency accommodation. Buddy Bags help restore a sense of safety and security into children’s lives during a traumatic time, which is one of the first steps to recovery. They help to make this transition a little easier.
• It was great to see Claire Griffiths from Cobalt speaking with the Liverpool Echo. From her new role as Chair of Liverpool City Region Housing Associations to Cobalt’s Croxteth regeneration work, Claire highlighted how housing providers can step in where private landlords step out.
• We secured some great coverage for BTP Architects on their recent completions, including a story on BBC News on their project in Trafford, converting a car park into a housing development for homeless people.

• Hough Bellis is proud to be working with the team at the Housing Diversity Network. We had the great pleasure of joining their team away day earlier this month to discuss storytelling.

• We helped our client Cardo share the big news on its latest acquisition of CTS Projects, marking Cardo’s first acquisition on the island of Ireland and its fifth acquisition this year. Cardo’s chief executive Liam Bevan also featured in Inside Housing with a great interview on how resident engagement positively impacts communities.

• We’re continuing to support our clients with awards submissions – and Switch2 have just been shortlisted in two categories in the upcoming H&V News awards.
• We’ve been working with our friends at HQN to organise their upcoming event: Hoarding – from hidden crisis to proactive support, taking place on 6 November. We have some great speakers lined up, and the event will be chaired by Megan Karnes, founder of Hoarding UK.
• Finally, keep your eyes peeled for our friends at The Joshua Tree, with the children’s cancer charity set to feature on the special Children in Need episode of DIY SOS next month. The show will appear during the week of Children in Need, which is on Friday, November 14 this year.

That’s your lot for now! See you next month when we’ll provide all you need to know in our Big Budget Breakdown.

For more updates on all things housing and politics, you can find us on LinkedIn here.

There’s only one story in town today…!

During our last newsletter I wrote an ode to Angela Rayner as we welcomed the biggest injection of funding in social homes for a generation and a raft of progressive policy changes.

Now, she has stood down as Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister following an investigation into the amount of Stamp Duty she has paid on a home in Brighton.

For those of us embracing a period of stability within housing policy, this will come as a blow. But them’s the breaks.

In truth there was no other option for Rayner after ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus said she had broken the ministerial code.

So, what does this all mean for Keir Starmer’s government?

Another Housing Minister? Yep!

We already know that Steve Reed MP has been appointed as Rayner’s replacement as part of a wider cabinet reshuffle. The Streatham and Croydon North MP takes the role following a stint as Environment Secretary.

A local government heavyweight (former leader of Lambeth Council), Reed held the shadow housing brief for around 18 months from April 2020, and was said to be gutted to leave the post at the time.

Will the changes at the top of government clear a pathway to more right-leaning policies with the soft left’s biggest power broker sidelined? The appointment of Shabana Mahmood to the Home Secretary role suggests so.

There’s also the prospect of a messy Deputy Leadership election. There was some talk that Starmer might scrap the role altogether. Corbyn was planning that after all. David Lammy has stepped into that post for now.

Whatever happens next, any thought that housing might drift from the top of the political and news agenda has been quashed.

With party conference season around the corner, the budget just two months away and housing providers still digesting a raft of policy changes and consultation responses as we head into the Autumn, there’s plenty to think about as we start our new term.

We must not forget that for our residents and communities, these are difficult times.

Concerns around migration have spilled over into action on our streets. Plenty of residents may be feeling anxious about the wave of anti-immigration sentiment and tone of statements from politicians.

This is a time when the sector must stay true to its values. We have a role in helping people to feel safe where they live. It’s a role we are proud to play.

Across the sector, we do great work bringing communities together and building and creating neighbourhoods where people thrive.

It feels like an important time to be sharing those stories.

As always, you can read on for a round-up of the latest politics and policy news, a recap on the state of the sector as we get back to our desks after the summer and a summary of everything we’ve already achieved this term.

Welcome back. Let’s get to work!

Bobbie, Els, Will, Liv, Siobhan, Emma and the Hough Bellis team

WESTMINSTER DIGEST

Diary dates

The date has been confirmed for the Budget.

Block out your diaries for Wednesday 26 November, when Rachel Reeves – already under pressure due to a difficult few weeks on the bond markets – is expected to raise taxes to help fill the growing black hole in the government’s finances.

Property taxes are expected to be on the menu. Treasury bods are tossing up a range of options, including changes to stamp duty and a possible housing wealth tax to replace council tax.

These are huge changes that are unlikely to be implemented in the short term, but may change attitudes towards property as a financial investment. Private landlords are expecting to be hit with a national insurance charge on their rental income, which combined with the provisions contained in the Renters Rights Bill could see more choose to sell up and leave the market. The Budget should come with more detail about the affordable homes programme – and potentially confirmation of where England’s new towns will be developed.

Trouble at the top – Labour reset – take two

As mentioned already, we’re now in the middle of a major reshuffle following Angela Rayner’s resignation. As we write:

• Pat McFadden has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary
• Shabana Mahmood is now Home Secretary
• David Lammy has been appointed as the new Deputy Prime Minister, in addition to Justice Secretary
• Yvette Cooper is Foreign Secretary
• Lisa Nandy will remain Culture Secretary
• Rachel Reeves remains Chancellor

Early indications are that the foundations are being laid to drive through the policy agenda that the left of the Labour party have not been willing to stomach.

Of course, we’ll keep you posted as we hear more and what that might mean for junior ministers.

Just in case that’s not enough, you may remember that over the summer, homelessness ministerRushanara Ali also failed to survive the revelation that, as a private landlord herself, she had evicted tenants only to relist her property as available with a monthly rental of £700 more.

Within the rules, until this government changes them, but as the end of private tenancy is now a leading cause of homelessness, it never felt like her role was sustainable. She resigned over the affair, but the role – a crucial post given that a child in every British classroom is growing up in temporary accommodation – is yet to be filled. Names circulating as potential replacements include Jo Platt, Sarah Owen and Cat Smith – but that all might change now. We’ll keep you updated on whatever we hear.

Labour reset – take one (in case you missed it)  

Keir Starmer’s first attempt at a September reshuffle came earlier in the week. This one was less about fireworks and more about engineering.

With Reform UK riding high in the polls and Labour drifting, that particular shake-up of Downing Street was framed as a “reset” from phase one: laying foundations, to phase two: delivery.

We already know that Darren Jones is moving from the Treasury to become chief secretary to the prime minister, an enforcer for Starmer, and widely seen as a move which has weakened Reeves’ grip on the Treasury. Think Gordon Brown’s discipline with Tony Blair’s political management.

But it’s the economy where the real drama lies. Baroness Minouche Shafik, a heavyweight from the Bank of England and Columbia University, is parachuted in as chief economic adviser to No.10. That creates an awkward dual track alongside Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who retains formal control of the Treasury but suddenly finds another economic brain whispering directly into the PM’s ear.

The opposition are already spinning this as a sign that Starmer doesn’t fully trust his Chancellor – can he really make the call to lose his Chancellor and Deputy PM in the same week?

More interesting for housing is the arrival of James Murray into the Treasury role Jones left open. He is a former housing campaigner, a stalwart of north London labour politics and the former London deputy mayor for housing. He’s an advocate of pragmatic solutions to the housing crisis. Housing is a passion project for him, so while his brief will be much broader while working with Reeves, he’s got the interest and the understanding that bodes well for housing’s role in the big push for growth.

Inside Number 11, former Resolution Foundation thinktanker Torsten Bell has been moved into Reeves’ team as she prepares her November budget. A few months ago, that would have suggested that radical tax rises to support stronger public services and a better standard of living for poorer households might have been in the offing.

But despite his campaigning background, Bell has proven remarkably on-message since his election in last year’s general election and appointment onto the government benches. When disability benefit cuts were announced he gave a series of interviews which appeared to cut across the policies he had argued for as a lobbyist. Now he’s climbing through the ranks rapidly, will he advocate for change or swallow the government line?

In the comms team – which, let’s be frank, is desperate for an injection of skill – Tim Allan, the founder of Portland Communications and a big New Labour figure – replaces James Lyons. Starmer clearly realises that something has to change. All this comes as Nin Pandit, Starmer’s principal private secretary, departs, a sign the PM is re-wiring the machine at the top.

Starmer knows delivery is slipping, the polls are sliding, and the next few months with the autumn Budget front and centre, are make-or-break. This reshuffle is his attempt to put the right cogs in the machine. Whether the machine itself is fit for purpose remains an open question.

Where is the opposition? 

Over to the Conservatives. Remember them?

Not content with changing housing ministers 412 times while in power – and now wanting to be overshadowed by Labour’s own change – they’ve decided to continue the trend in opposition.

Kevin Hollinrake (a name that will win you a pub quiz in 2030) is replaced by someone you will have heard of: James Cleverly.

Cleverly’s appointment might mark a slight shift in Tory focus on housing. Hollinrake, who moves to become party chairman, had promised a citizen-led approach to housing policy and said the party needed to “rewire and reboot” its housing offer to voters. Cleverly has had a more brusque approach to the issue. When he was Home Secretary last year, a group of charities and organisations, including Crisis and the National Housing Federation, had to write to urge him to reconsider imprisoning and fining rough sleepers. But he’s got a big appetite for housing growth, apparently with the motto “build, build, build” (catchy).

Cleverly has appointed one new member to the shadow team: Gareth Bacon, MP for Orpington and an opponent of so-called “grey belt” development on designated green belt land, a key feature of the Labour government’s development plans.

Meanwhile, though Reform continues to surge in the polls and has a tight grip on the national political narrative, the party so far has little interest in the housing crisis as an issue it might be faced with solving in its local council areas or in the government it wants to form.

Under deputy leader Richard Tice, Reform still has no official housing spokesperson, and has not fleshed out its housing policy beyond positioning itself as broadly pro-landlord and anti-regulation.

Banking on Rees

In housing specifically, Homes England has a new face at the top. Former prison and probation service boss Amy Rees, a career civil servant, is taking over as chief executive, which includes overseeing the launch of the National Housing Bank, which aims to draw in £53bn of private investment into the sector.

She joins from the role of interim permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, where she led the department’s spending review negotiations – so is in a good position to lock down promised funding.

She will replace interim chief executive Eamonn Boylan, who is now working on the design of the giant Affordable Homes Programme.

THE BIG RECAP

As we move into autumn and party conference season – and your own period of budget setting too – we thought you might appreciate a round-up of where we are with government commitments right now. Here’s a very quick digest of the government’s policies and promises to make sure you’ve got everything covered.

Development:

• £39bn pledged for the Affordable Homes Programme, aimed at delivering 1.5m new homes this parliament – but still no detail on how this will be administered and divided up yet. That’s expected from Homes England this autumn.
• 10-year rent deal: social landlords can raise rents by CPI + 1% annually, giving stability for development.
• £4.8bn fund to boost private investment in housebuilding; part of £10bn for Homes England to back innovation.

Home ownership:

• Permanent mortgage guarantee scheme to help buyers with small deposits, replacing the expiring version, but critics warn this could inflate house prices in the same way Help to Buy failed on affordability.

Renting:

• The Renters’ Rights Bill is nearing its final stages, with the House of Commons to consider amendments made by the House of Lords in September 2025, potentially leading to Royal Assent and becoming law by mid-September 2025. Key updates include the abolition of no-fault evictions, the conversion of all fixed-term tenancies to rolling periodic tenancies, the introduction of a new Decent Homes Standard for the private rented sector, the creation of a private rented sector database and Ombudsman, and bans on rent bidding wars and discrimination against benefit recipients.
• In response to frozen Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates and rising rents, English councils spent over £31m in 2024–25 on incentive payments to private landlords – covering 10,792 one-off payments, sometimes exceeding £10,000 each. London councils saw a 54% increase since 2018.

Welfare and the cost of living:

• No movement on the two-child benefit cap, and significant disability benefit reforms, which have not been watered down again despite political pressure.
• Winter Fuel Payment restored for all pensioners; those earning £35k+ will repay via tax.
• £13bn Warm Homes Plan to upgrade housing stock to EPC C, fund heat pumps, solar panels and storage.

Planning and place:

• The Planning Bill is now at Lords committee stage; the Treasury promises faster delivery of housing and transport projects.
• New ‘place-based business cases’ for infrastructure planning.
• 25 “trailblazer” areas (mostly northern towns/cities) to receive up to £20m each for local projects.
• New towns: after more than 100 applications were lodged, an announcement is expected later this year on where new places will be created.

Homelessness:

• £1bn+ pledged to tackle homelessness, including £950m for councils to buy temporary accommodation.
• Commitment to rehouse people in migrant hotels into secure housing, with pressure to speed up relocation gathering pace due to community protests. The PM’s language on migrant support is becoming harder.
• Government to repeal 200-year-old law criminalising rough sleeping.

I EVOLVE BUT I DON’T….. DEVOLVE
(One for the Alan Partridge fans there). He’s not talking about it much, but the big political story of the next chapter of Starmer’s government will be devolution.

With development targets set to be spread out nationally, there’s much discussion in town hall corridors about the role of regions in meeting the government’s building targets and in shaping future placemaking projects. After 20 years in the shadows, regeneration is back in fashion. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands Combined Authority are demonstrating how the use of local powers could be instrumental in meeting housing’s aims for creating new, safe and supportive communities.

Next week, a group of small cities – from Oxford and Swindon to Exeter – are set to lobby government on the case for greater devolved power and funding, and more control over how their areas are organised, including extending their local development boundaries, which hamper growth.

Meanwhile a new report from the charity Re:State made a case for Homes England to be abolished entirely, with its functions and responsibilities devolved to mayoral strategic authorities (which are of course set to grow in number) in every area possible – a “devolve by default” approach. That would include local responsibility for delivery of the affordable homes programme.

The paper is authored by some of the most senior names in local government, who are lobbying hard for a genuine transfer of power from the centre. It also suggests passing down responsibility for ensuring quality and sustainability of new homes, which may be a less convincing argument given the national impact of issues such as poor quality and the damp and mould crisis.

PARTY CONFERENCE SEASON

Party conference season is upon us again! A chance to hear from and influence those who will set the policy agenda for the next year.

We’re delighted to be supporting the Chartered Institute of Housing in the build-up to this year’s Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

Labour has put housing at the heart of its approach to government. Over the past year, the Chartered Institute of Housing has been working collaboratively with government to drive the changes and spending commitments that have laid the foundations for a new era of social housing.

Now, we must turn that ambition into action. Join us as we discuss how the government’s housing ambitions can help deliver a decade of national renewal.

Monday 29 September 1.15pm – 2.45pm

Plus Dane Housing 2nd Floor, Atlantic Pavilion, Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 4AE

(This event is located just a few meters outside of the secure zone on the Albert Dock. Those without passes to the main conference will be able to attend)

You’ll hear from:

• Florence Eshalomi MP, Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee (invited)
• Baroness Taylor, Under-secretary of State – Lords Minister for Housing and Local Government (invited)
• Amanda Hack MP
• Paul Dennett, Mayor of Salford and Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester (invited)
• Francesca Albanese, Executive Director of Policy & Social Change, Crisis
• Ian Reed, Chief Executive, Plus Dane Housing
• Gavin Smart, Chief Executive, Chartered Institute of Housing (Chair)

OTHER SUMMER NEWS
Private interests: A quarter of private developers are considering investing in a for-profit social housing provider, according to a report by law firm Winckworth Sherwood. It polled 86 executives representing registered providers, developers, financiers and local authorities, and three-in-five said they had already entered a for-profit strategic partnership. Interestingly, this came as Notting Hill Genesis decided to put its £1bn private rented sector business up for sale, indicating a lot of movement in the sector.

Out of office: Councils and housing charities are lobbying the government to revoke legislation that allows office-to-residential conversions without planning approval. Critics warn these policies have wasted time and money, costing the social housing stock 28,000 new affordable homes over 11 years and, where they have been pursued, resulting in substandard properties lacking proper infrastructure and building safety.

Safety warning: Figures published by the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) this quarter revealed that nine children under the age of 11 died after falling from windows or balconies in social rented homes in the past six years. Researchers at the University of Bristol analysed the data and found that 92% of the falls occurred from windows or balconies in flats where safety measures, such as locks or restrictors, were either absent, not working or not in use. An Inside Housing analysis on this issue found that repairs services were failing to focus on the issue. The NCMD figures were released as the Housing Ombudsman – who wrote to all landlords last year on this issue – also named and shamed 16 landlords for “inexcusable” cases of complaints related to windows.

COMMS MATTERS NOW!

This autumn is a crucial time for comms teams in housing. Housing remains in the political spotlight. The policy debate remains wide open in a range of areas that matter to our communities.

There are huge opportunities to take advantage of – and plenty of risks to manage.

It’s a fast-changing media and policy environment. Everyone should have a strategy to make sure comms land well, and a plan in place for if they don’t.

It has become easier to tell our stories again, but also harder to sell them into journalists. The media is facing a massive retrenchment with lay-offs now widespread, and the radical impact of AI on what journalists actually want means we need to think differently and more creatively. (Clue: SEO is over; journalists are now commissioning articles that they believe have the highest chance of training AI models to reference their stories and cite their sources.)

Remember, too, that goodwill can be easily lost. Not so many years ago, we had one Sir Michael Gove firmly on the side of housing, but weeks later he was launching a campaign calling on social tenants to publicly shame their landlords.

With new investment comes the roving eye of the spotlight.

If you want to find out what that means for you, we’d love to come and talk to you.

Get in touch with Bobbie or the rest of the team and let us know what you need.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

Our team continues to grow as we welcome Liv Garland to Hough Bellis. Liv has joined us as Account Manager, bringing lots of PR and media experience along with fresh ideas as we take on new clients and exciting challenges.

The HB team is looking forward to seeing everyone at the Housing Community Summit next week in Liverpool. We’ve got clients speaking throughout the event to debate all of housing’s key issues and challenges. Of course, we’ll be joining our friends at Cardo Group for their now famous reception at the Cavern Club.

You might have seen our friends at The Joshua Tree – who do amazing work with children and families during and post cancer diagnosis – on the BBC recently. They have been chosen to have DIY SOS come and build them a new centre at their headquarters in Cheshire as part of this year’s Children In Need. We’re really proud to work with such a brilliant charity.

We also held a volunteering day at KidsBank (organised by the lovely Els) and supported the amazing team there with tasks such as packing toiletries bags, putting together bundles of newborn essentials, and cleaning up.

Campaigning for change

The team have been supporting BTP Architects with a campaign around building safety, including facilitating their response to the ongoing Lords inquiry into the Building Safety Regulator.

We are also working with Stepping Stone Projects, progressing with our campaigning work with them and developing an influencing strategy to engage with government on plans to end homelessness in the North of England.

After launching its pathway for ex-military women to become qualified gas engineers in just six months with Brookhouse Training, Women and Manual Trades (part of Procure Plus) has celebrated its first success. Procure Plus has had some great coverage with this case study, Laura’s story can be found here. We’re looking forward to welcoming ministerial visits to some of their schemes later in the year.

We want to share our congratulations to Cobalt chief executive Claire Griffiths, who has been appointed Chair of Liverpool City Region Housing Associations. Claire shared her thoughts in Inside Housing, calling for bold regeneration in places private developers often overlook.

We’ve been doing lots of work in the heat network market over the summer months and the industry gets set for new regulation (although the January 2026 deadline now feels hugely optimistic). We secured an exclusive opinion piece for Heat Trust in Utility Week, responding to OFGEM’s fair pricing consultation, while you can read a thought leadership double page spread from Switch2’s Richard Harrison in H&V Weekly’s July/August issue, talking about the future of smart metering.

Our friends at MSV have submitted exciting plans to transform the former Reno nightclub site in Moss Side, Manchester, with more than 200 new affordable homes in the pipeline. The story has been picked up across Manchester’s biggest titles – from the Manchester Evening News to I Love Manchester – celebrating the scheme’s community roots and bold vision.

Leading the housing debate

We’ve helped host some great events for HQN, including around ASB and the always popular Best Practice Groups for their Estate Services Hub and Housing Management Network on the evolving role of the housing officer. We’ve got an upcoming event on cuckooing and a very important event on challenges around hoarding in November, with some great speakers lined up. You can sign up to attend this event here.

That’s all for now. We’ll be back in October to give you the full details of what went down at the party conferences this year, and again to help you unpick everything you need to know from November’s budget.

Thanks for reading.

For more updates on all things housing and politics, you can find us on LinkedIn here.

The Roundup  – Spending Review Special

When the new Labour government came to power last July, we briefed that housing was right at the top of its agenda. Yes, public services across the country were broken – rail contracts falling apart, prisons overflowing, schools facing financial crisis and social services crumbling – and there were endless calls on the country’s strained finances. Yet, we had been assured that the depth of the housing crisis was fully understood by the government and would be a priority.

In the week before the Chancellor stood to deliver her comprehensive spending review on Wednesday, many of the major commitments on defence, energy and transport were trailed early. Given Rachel Reeves’ dogged commitment to her self-imposed fiscal rules, that meant cuts would have to follow elsewhere. There was an understandable anxiety that, despite commitments to new housing development, the wider ministry – which includes responsibility for local government – would bear the brunt of those.

Thankfully, there’s Angela Rayner.

It is a rare thing for a senior cabinet member to have been brought up in social housing. And a precious gift to have a Deputy Prime Minister who has a deep understanding of the consequences of the housing crisis, having raised her own children as a social tenant. Rayner reportedly held out until Sunday evening before making her department’s settlement with the Treasury, and can take huge credit for the collective sigh of relief we’re breathing now.

Almost everything this country needs to fix our broken housing system is expensive, requires complex legislation or will take so long to deliver that the electorate realistically won’t see the benefits within this parliament.  It is a testament to Rayner’s dogged commitment to her cause and the hard work and careful lobbying of those at the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation (who continue to make the wide and compelling case for housing investment) that the government recognises that without fixing housing we cannot fix health, education, social care, welfare, inequality or even the economy.

So, this week the government doubled down on its commitment to social housing. This is a landmark moment for the sector.  A counterweight to George Osborne’s gutting of housing finances a decade ago.

But understand, there will also be a trade-off for the trust placed in us.

We must now deliver.

We must build new homes. We must lead on regeneration.

For those of us passionate about housing, communities and equality of opportunity, we must seize this rare (and, given the state of world affairs, possibly fleeting) opportunity to prove ourselves capable of making the change we promise happen.

Sleeves up, it’s time to get to work!

Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan, Emma and the HB Team.

Spending Review 2025: the digested news

The big news first: 

Reeves has pledged £39bn in funding for the affordable homes programme, to be spent by councils, developers and housing associations.

This is a huge increase on the previous government commitment, and comes with it a demand for rapid house building so the government can meet its target for 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament.

That target is still a stretch, but it’s a much more achievable one now that the funding has come with it.

The Chancellor also confirmed a 10-year rent settlement with the sector, allowing social landlords to raise rents by the Consumer Price Index inflation rate plus 1 percentage point each year over the decade. This was a crucial, long-standing demand made by sector representatives; without it, there would be insufficient stability to encourage housing associations to take risks on development, particularly while still facing the high and growing costs of meeting new building safety regulations and addressing disrepair.

The investment is so large that it was described by Mairi MacRae, Shelter’s director of campaigns and policy, as a “watershed moment in tackling the housing emergency”.

She noted that it was an opportunity to reverse decades of neglect of housing, and social housing in particular, and we couldn’t agree more. London Councils, which represents the authorities arguably bearing the brunt of the housing crisis, had previously said the rent settlement was urgently needed to ensure that the capital’s affordable housing market could be sustained at all. It seems there is a listening ear in government.

Meanwhile, the spending review also contained a £4.8bn fund to boost private investment in housebuilding, part of a wider £10bn pledged to encourage innovation and new approaches to development. This shows a level of trust in the sector and its relationship with the wider commercial housing industry that should not be taken for granted; it has not always been this way.

The expertise of our clients is finally being recognised and acted on, and we couldn’t be happier.

Affordability: 

The government used the Chancellor’s speech to confirm that it will introduce a permanent mortgage guarantee scheme to support buyers who have small deposits from July, to replace the existing scheme, which comes to an end later this month. This will be welcomed by aspirant first-time buyers, but the long-term impact of David Cameron’s Help to Buy – the first of these schemes – was simply to raise house prices for all. Is this the best use of government funding? Perhaps now isn’t the time to be churlish.

Homelessness: 

Elsewhere on housing, there was a pledge of more than £1bn extra to tackle homelessness – a fast-rising problem and obviously the cause of huge additional costs at the sharp end of the housing crisis given the cost of providing emergency housing, which is now at risk of bankrupting many local authorities. This figure includes £950m for councils to buy temporary accommodation, helping to end the reliance they currently have on private landlords, many of whom are leaving the market or choosing to let their properties through agents working with higher-paying projects such as the Home Office migrant rehousing scheme.

Talking of migration, the government’s commitment to rehousing all those people still facing terrible conditions in migrant hotels into secure, suitable accommodation is a very welcome pledge.

Finally, an under-reported promise on homelessness came at the same time as the spending review. The government will repeal a 200-year-old law which continues to criminalise rough sleeping. Another moment of humanity in an often very technical set of commitments aimed primarily at economic growth.

Making good quality places: 

On Tuesday the Planning Bill passed its third reading in Parliament. Alongside this new legislation, the Treasury used the spending review to confirm its new approach to appraising new projects, which it claims will make it easier to deliver new housing and transport to the regions and improve place-making.

The findings of the Green Book review – a close look at the methodology the Treasury uses to assess the cost and benefit of new infrastructure and development projects – is now published in full. It recommended big changes, including new ‘place-based business cases’ bringing plans for different projects together to show how an area can be improved in full.

This is the government’s answer to the Tory (empty) promises of Levelling Up. There’s also funding to help launch this new way of working, to be allocated to 25 “trailblazer” areas in which funding of up to £20m per place will be spent on local infrastructure both big and small – right down to local playgrounds, new libraries and other accessible spaces. These trailblazers are mostly in the north, including Stockport, Stoke, Leeds, Sefton and Barrow-in-Furness.

If you’re in one of these areas, this is a great opportunity to think about how you can get involved with your area’s bid for cash and benefit from new local funding.

Energy costs:

We know that customers are still struggling with the high cost of energy, and while the government has made major commitments to secure and renewable UK energy sources, the benefits of these investments will take a generation to be felt in our monthly bills. Some reprieve for older tenants as the government has committed to reinstate the Winter Fuel Payment for all pensioners, with those who have an income of over £35,000 expected to refund it through the tax system.

More than £13bn remains in the Warm Homes Plan, to be spent over four years up to 2029-30 to “cut bills, tackle fuel poverty and accelerate to net zero”. More details are expected in October, but much of this fund is expected to be funnelled through the social housing sector to help move social housing stock up to the promised EPC C standard for energy performance. The fund will also be spent on projects including heat pumps, solar panels and battery storage. Those exploring heat networks could also benefit.

Welfare and benefits: 

So, what was missing from Reeves’ speech? Despite discussion about whether it might be removed, we heard nothing on the two-child benefit cap, and nothing acknowledging the likely large rebellion the government is facing over its planned cuts to personal independence payments for people living with disabilities. We know both of these disproportionately impact social tenants, so it was disappointing to see little acknowledgement of the impact they are having.

However, for parents there is some reprieve. Free school meals will now be extended to all children with a parent on universal credit, which means huge savings on weekly family food costs for many of your customers. A rollout of breakfast clubs so they are being provided by all primary schools will also help assist some tenants back into work.

Bits and bobs:

While overall the commitment on housing is very welcome, the wider MHCLG is expected to make 1 per cent efficiency savings over the term of the spending review, which is likely to affect the delivery of local public services. How these cuts are implemented locally will vary, but there is likely to be real impacts in your communities. Protecting those services that your work depends on may require extra local lobbying effort.

The Spending Review has also confirmed plans to increase funding by £4bn for adult social care in 2028-29, compared to 2025-26.

What else happened this month?

We’re hurtling towards the summer recess, but that doesn’t mean things are slowing down for the housing sector. Here’s our digest of the latest developments you need to know about

More on planning

Just before the spending review, the MHCLG set out its latest paper on planning reform. It gave a clear steer on some of the department’s priorities over the next period of development and investment – all the more useful now we know how big the financial commitment to go with that really is.

There’s a huge amount to digest, so have a read of the paper for yourself, but the highlights include:

• Supporting the growth of small and medium-sized developers to work on small sites and infill spaces, which is something that we’ve been shouting about for a long time. It’s great to see the government sees the benefit of working with small, local construction firms, both in terms of bringing investment back into the community and tackling the issues that over-reliance on large firms can bring when planning new schemes. We saw how the large developers’ share prices reacted to the news that the government is investing to build: let’s see some of that business confidence come right back down into our places

• Encouraging large sites to be built with a diversity of tenure and – crucially – a much higher share of affordable housing. We know that when developments have more affordable housing, they are built more quickly, so this is just good news for everyone (especially the more than 1 million households on the social housing waiting list)

• New compulsory purchase order powers for local authorities: this is long overdue, but welcome now that it’s finally here. It’s part of the government’s wider commitment to preventing hold-ups in their big infrastructure plans, but even smaller projects will benefit from this

• New penalties for delays. Will this add extra costs for developing landlords working with construction firms who are constantly balancing risk? Perhaps. And perhaps it’s a price worth paying for action
• Encouraging large, strategic sites to be built with greater tenure diversity, delivering higher shares of affordable housing. Where developments have more affordable housing they get built faster!!!!!!!!

A new national tenant body? 

The Housing Ombudsman released a strongly-worded report, ‘Repairing Trust’, which Richard Blakeway launched with robust comments about the need for urgent improvement in the social housing sector.

In case you haven’t had time to read it yet, here are some of the highlights from the study.

• There has been a 474% increase in complaints regarding substandard living conditions between 2019-20 and 2024-25, with 72% attributed to poor practice
• Despite a record £9bn spent on repairs in 2023-24, £3.4m in compensation was ordered for poor living conditions in 2024-25
• The Ombudsman has urged the establishment of a national tenant body to amplify tenant voices and a comprehensive review of funding practices to address systemic issues
• Recurring issues affecting the whole sector include: temporary fixes instead of permanent repairs; lack of property records (and we know this includes safety records such as electrical testing); missed health needs of tenants; and, a reliance on reactive repairs, rather than a predictive model which helps sustain good housing conditions
• A need for more empathetic communication and transparency with tenants – which is a pause for thought for the whole sector. The report calls for a cultural transformation so that tenants are treated with dignity and respect

You can read the full report here: Housing Ombudsman: Repairing Trust

Temporary accommodation: 

Also on standards, a report by the Shared Health Foundation charity made recommendations for government and the sector to improve the living standards of the large numbers of people living in temporary and emergency accommodation. That includes a record 165,000 children – a rise of 14 per cent in one month earlier this spring. The report found that 74 children had died in TA, with their accommodation a factor in their demise, since 2019. Of those, 58 children did not live to see their first birthday.

The report called for regulation of all housing used for TA to ensure that it is appropriate for children, with assessments including hygiene and maintenance standards, timely repair processes to prevent childhood accidents and safe communal spaces that all residents can use.

Preventing homelessness:

In Scotland, social landlords and charities can apply for the newly launched ‘Upstream Homelessness Prevention Fund’ to help prevent homelessness. The scheme will offer cash funds for individual payments, capped at £1,300 per applicant. The Scottish government has earmarked £1m to spend on the scheme, which is aimed at helping explore new ways to sustain tenancies and prevent recurrent homelessness.

Meanwhile a report on Housing First by the charity Commonweal found that homelessness in England’s countryside has risen by 40 per cent in five years. Only 8 per cent of rural homes are affordable, compared to 17 per cent in urban areas: a huge challenge for the sector as it secures development funding through the Affordable Homes Programme.

New towns:

The New Towns Taskforce, which is considering where to build “up to 12” new places promised by the government, has issued a report citing Milton Keynes and Leeds as the council areas that are best suited to the first new schemes as they launch.

The study used a series of measures to assess the viability of areas, including public acceptance of new development, land availability, proximity to existing local growth hubs, affordability and the potential for an uplift in land value. Using this assessment, a desktop exercise, the study found that these two places had the highest levels of development acceptances at 59% and 58% respectively. If you’re in those local authority areas, start your conversations now.

Sustainability:

The latest report on the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing found that (across the 1.9 million properties assessed), more than three-quarters already achieve a B and C or better rating on their EPC. This is great news for the sector as it seeks to bring all properties up to that standard.

What we’ve been up to

We’ve been a busy bunch at Hough Bellis this month. If you’ve found it hard to track us down, here’s why. Don’t forget to let us know if there’s an upcoming project you’d like our support on, especially now we’ve finally got the government’s attention  – we’re all ears!

Energy dilemmas

Together with Heat Trust and a range of leasehold groups (including the National Leasehold Campaign, Shared Owners Network and the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership) we’ve been helping to raise the issue of leasehold legislation across government – including asking the important question about who is going to pay to upgrade the nation’s energy infrastructure if freeholders are absent and uninterested.

Meanwhile, Lincolnshire Housing Partnership marked a huge milestone in their retrofitting work by hosting a visit from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Representatives from the Whitehall team checked out local sites and properties, observing the landlord’s innovative decarb work.

Are Asbos back?

We’ve been helping to organise an event for the Housing Quality Network on important issues around anti-social behaviour. We’ve got some brilliant speakers lined up and timely topics to cover. You can find out more about the event and sign up here.

Getting you noticed

We’ve secured some great coverage for housing software specialist Mobysoft in support of their excellent whitepaper, From Data to Decisions, with features on the issues it covers appearing in both Inside Housing and Housing Digital.

BTP Architects’ latest completion, Plas Alltran – a previously at-risk building transformed into a landmark affordable housing scheme – has made it into lots of publications including  LABM and the  Welsh press.

We’ve also been busy securing media opportunities and helping shape Switch2’s response to new energy market regulation, all while supporting their new G10 Smart Metering Hub product launch.

People power

Our MD Bobbie Hough has started working with Petty Pool’s non exec team, supporting their amazing work fostering growth and learning opportunities for young people with learning disabilities and difficulties.

Our client Procure Plus’ Women and Manual Trades (WaMT) programme launched a new initiative with Brookhouse Training, offering a new pathway for ex-military women to become qualified gas engineers in just six months.

A throwaway comment

Before we go, can we help your tenants with green waste? The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food waste every year, so it’s more important than ever that housing associations encourage their tenants to recycle by composting. Our client Garden Organic is helping to do that at its growing number of compost demonstration sites, where the charity’s ‘master composters’ provide important life skills to communities and help to explain why recycling waste is so important.

Under the Environment Act 2021, upcoming changes in waste legislation will require all councils to collect food waste separately by 31 March 2026, this will impact your tenants who will have to sort this waste separately. Encouraging them to home compost instead is the most environmentally friendly way of dealing with unavoidable food and garden waste. Garden Organic run 13 specialist composting education sites in locations around the UK providing hands-on advice and training for residents, organisations and businesses – and more are planned.

Thanks for reading.

For more updates on all things housing and politics, you can find us on LinkedIn here.

• The Spring Statement included a £2bn funding boost for affordable housing, injecting extra cash into the Affordable Homes Programme. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said this sum would directly contribute to the development of 18,000 affordable homes by the end of this Parliament.
• Get bidding now! If you’re based in Manchester, Liverpool, Thanet, Sunderland or Swindon, get bidding now for the next round of development funding. These locations were all mentioned in the statement.
• Good news and bad news: Reeves also handed down welfare cuts of £4.8bn, including a significant tightening of the support available to disabled people (young people have their entitlement removed altogether), while also increasing the basic rate of Universal Credit rises from £92 a week to £106 a week by 2029-30. Not much comfort to those claiming personal independence payments, who are set to lose up to £6,000 a year.
• The statement confirmed that councils will have development targets – hurrah! – and can set their own planning fees. It also found a helpful £600m for training up to 60,000 new construction workers to tackle the skills crisis in the sector.
• The new planning rules also confirmed the role of a new category – ‘grey belt’ – in meeting new development targets. A huge debate about land values and ecological protection has started, with some predicting a new generation of Swampy-style guerilla protests which may hold up big infrastructure projects.
•  Badenoch ally Kevin Hollinrake has been appointed shadow communities secretary. He’s been quiet so far, but watch out for him as the Tories attempt their post local elections rebuild and Labour get tied up in knots over benefit cuts.
• In Wales, housing secretary Jayne Bryant said her government is committed to building 20,000 new homes by the end of the Senedd term next year. A new homelessness bill also will be introduced before the summer recess.

One element of my job that I love is coaching people. The chance to get to know someone, to help them unlock their potential and – if I’m mentoring too – to share some of my experience and knowledge. It’s interesting, satisfying and often fun.

People come to me for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they’re preparing for the next step up. Sometimes they’ve already moved up a step and want a helping hand to guide them through. I’ve coached people who wanted to branch out in a new direction, clients who’ve wanted to regain enthusiasm for their jobs, people who were struggling with a big project or a tricky work relationship, and people looking for new ways of working.

All these people had something in common – the answers were within themselves, they just needed the time and space to talk through the issues.

Work is hectic and people rarely get the chance to step back and assess things with someone who doesn’t have an agenda or a vested interest. A coaching programme is a series of structured conversations. The aim is to encourage understanding – of yourself, others and the situation you find yourself in; during the sessions, you generate options and determine your actions.

Some people are surprised they’ve been selected for coaching and suspect that it might be a negative comment on their performance. In my experience, a company is unlikely to invest in someone they think isn’t performing well. It’s usually the case that they want their employees to reach their full potential, and they see coaching as a way to achieving that.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been coached by some fantastic people over my career, and I’ve got a lot out of it. If you think coaching could be what you need, contact us at hello@houghbellis.co.uk and let’s talk.

Sue Fox is a qualified coach and mentor and the author of the chapter on housing association communications in the book “Promoting Property”, published by Routledge.

We’re celebrating another year of our brilliant partnership with the team at Studio 91.

Together we create video content that brings stories to life for projects that improve people’s lives.

For the past three years we’ve been working with the team offering cutting-edge production services that turn concepts into polished and professional content.

Video is no longer a nice to have when it comes to storytelling – audiences demand it.

The latest data from Ofcom shows that as many people now get their main news from social media video platform TikTok as do from the Guardian. Almost 70% of people say they want to hear about services via video rather than text.

So, whether it’s for campaigns, community engagement or internal comms, drop us a line today to find out how we can bring your stories to life.

By Bobbie Hough, MD at Hough Bellis Communications

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Tenant Satisfaction Measures have been a good thing for social housing
Yes. They aren’t perfect.

Varying collection methods are problematic. Reports suggest surveys over the phone or via email deliver better results than online.
The results don’t take account of demographics. Will services and tenant expectations differ for people living in London high-rises and rural communities in the north? Of course.

We can kid ourselves that TSM results aren’t going to be turned into a league table to measure performance nationally – but it took all of five minutes to drop a list of LAs and HAs data into an Excel spreadsheet and press sort.

Landlords at the bottom of the list will cry foul and say we aren’t comparing apples with apples. That results are just a snapshot in time and things are improving.

They’re probably right.

But that won’t be the story. For those in that situation there will need to be some time dedicated to developing a clear and honest message for tenants around when they’re likely to feel that services are improving.

There’s no point in saying we’ve fixed the problem if it’s not being felt by people at their front door.
And that’s where we’re seeing TSMs changing the focus of organisations.

If what get measured gets done, then what gets reported and regulated gets done properly (usually). And in a world where we’re governed by perception, how people feel and therefore how we talk to people and treat them gets brought to the forefront of everyone’s thinking.
It’s with those who spend the most time face to face with tenants where I’ve felt the biggest change.

Two years ago, when we talked to estates teams and housing officers, the conversations focused on how to make services better, but often from a practical starting point – what length are we cutting the grass to? What’s service chargeable and what’s not?

Today, almost all conversations start with tenants. Yes, there are lots of discussions on delivery, but there’s a much clearer link between those decisions and the impact on people’s lives.

Teams debate the best ways to put tenants at the centre of decisions around procurement and service design. As a rule, teams feel more empowered. It’s reassuring and refreshing.

We’re also seeing teams becoming much more engaged in the importance of quality communications. In making sure that behaviours, the language we use, and the tone we talk in are consistent and reflect the values of organisations.

They know from their everyday experience this really matters to tenants – and that it drives dissatisfaction when it goes wrong.

They also know that, for tenants, comms isn’t just the newsletter or the posts on social media. It’s much deeper than that.

This is something we’ve been working with organisations on for some time – creating a golden thread for communications from the boardroom right to the front door.

When it’s done well, tenants are more satisfied with their landlord. If people feel a landlord is authentic, has empathy and can deliver what it says it will, then these are good foundations for a trusting relationship.

For leaders, this might mean a rethink about where communications sit within your structures.

Do your best communicators and strategic brains have control or even oversight of how comms is delivered in homes? Of the letters we send out each day?

Great communications should empower and connect teams to create a more consistent and authentic experience.
It should be the guardian of values and call out behaviours that have no place in our sector.

That doesn’t happen overnight and can only happen if the right people have the right influence.

The people that work in communities understand the link between great comms, happier tenants and better services better than any of us.

Empowering them with the skills and tools to deliver will bring rewards for everyone.

By Bobbie Hough, MD at Hough Bellis Communications

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

The Roundup

…from Hough Bellis Communications

A plug before we get to the budget…
Open Outlook ✔️
Open Microsoft Teams ✔️
Open ChatGPT ✔️

My wonderful colleague Will Sherry has written a few thoughts on the impact of AI on communications. You can find out more here.

Can’t get no (Tenant) Satisfaction
In his latest blog for HQN, Bobbie argues that Tenant Satisfaction Measures are encouraging leaders to rethink where communications sits within our organisations.

He asks whether our best communicators and strategic brains have control or even oversight of how comms is delivered in homes and the letters we send out each day. You can read more here.

The budget headlines
This was one of the biggest and most significant budgets in generations. If we were questioning whether Labour had really arrived in office before, this is the moment when any doubt was quashed. We saw big tax rises, a spending boost to public services, loosened borrowing restrictions and a huge new capital programme, which the Chancellor hopes will finally turn our beleaguered country around.

We’ve also seen a big rise in the Minimum Wage from £11.44 to £12.21 an hour from April 2025. This unexpected 6.7% increase will be worth an extra £1,400 a year for an eligible full-time worker.

But it was also a highly risky budget both politically and because of the bet that it places that the measures announced will return our country to meaningful levels of economic growth. It requires people not just to understand the trade-offs that are being made, but to really feel that they were worth it.

Analysis by the Resolution Foundation says we could be seeing the lowest increase in living standards under any Labour PM since records began in 1955. They warn that real-terms wages could have grown by just £13 a week between 2008-28.

Taxing times
The top line is that taxes have been increased by £40.1bn with health and education receiving the lion’s share of the money that will be generated. The NHS will receive a boost of £22.6bn in day-to-day spending and £3.1bn for capital. There will be £6.7bn in capital funding for schools along with investments to HS2 and compensation for the victims of the infected blood (£11.8bn) and Post Office (£1.8bn) scandals.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says that the budget delivers an almost £70bn annual increase in spending over the next five years. State spending will hit 44.5% of GDP by 29/30. This is a huge, monumental shift from what came before – but will it work?

The OBR also warns that the policies announced in the budget will only “temporarily boost” growth before making little impact over the course of the next five years. Labour will hope that when combined with their other policies, it makes a bigger difference.

Paradoxically, although the size of the state is dramatically increasing, the Chancellor also confirmed the government will press ahead with a 2% “productivity, efficiency and savings target for all departments to meet next year.” Sounds like we’ll be hearing more about this later.

About those tax rises
A whopping £25bn will be raised from an unprecedented hike in the rate of employer National Insurance contributions (following hot on the heels of 2 cuts to the employee rate under the previous government). Contributions for employers will rise by 1.2 percentage points from next year. The secondary threshold at which NI for businesses is paid is also being lowered from £9,100 to £5,000, but for small businesses the employment allowance will increase.

It’s inevitable that a tax on the cost of employing people will reach the pay packets of employees, despite Labour’s repeated argument that there would be no new taxes on working people. Forecasters are arguing that workers will bear the brunt of 76% of the cost in lower wages.

For the organisations that we work with, it’s also an unexpected business plan buster, leaving our colleagues in finance scrambling around for some extra funding as we enter the 2025/26 budget-setting period.

While businesses and charitable organisations will have to find funds to pay the increase, the public sector will not. This means that the amount of a tenant’s rent going straight to the taxman will vary depending on whether they are in a council or a housing association home. Seems unfair to me.

In addition to the NI changes, there was a big hike in the rate of Capital Gains Tax from 10% to 18%, with the higher rate rising from 20% to 24%. The OBR reckons that will bring in £2.5 billion a year by 2029.

There were also increases in Inheritance Tax, tobacco duty, vaping and alcohol duty. Although there were cheers as the Chancellor announced that a huge 1p will be cut from the price of a pint of beer, bringing a drink in London down to just £9.99.

But it wasn’t all bad news! From 2028/29, income tax thresholds will finally begin to rise again in line with inflation. Just in time for the next election – what a coincidence.

Actual investment in social and affordable housing
Under the previous government, it was common for these events to pass with housing only featuring in the footnotes, if it was mentioned at all. Things couldn’t be more different this time, with a range of significant changes announced for the sector and further changes hinted at in the near future.

As Nick Aitkin argues in Inside Housing, investing in new homes is one of the biggest no brainers in the world of economics. He quotes the evidence confirming that every £1 in grant helps housing associations unlock £4 of private investment. Plus, social housing saves tenants £9bn a year compared to private rentals and saves the government £6bn in welfare costs.

Ahead of the Budget, the Chancellor confirmed a £500m boost for the affordable homes programme, which will help to deliver up to 5,000 new homes and brings the total investment in new housing supply to more than £5bn. This has been deemed a “down payment” by some and “a good start but far short of what is needed” by others.

Backing the builders
In addition, Rachel Reeves announced that the government will “provide £3bn worth of support in guarantees, to boost the supply of homes and support our small house builders.

“And we will provide investment to renovate sites across the country, including at Liverpool Central Docks where we will deliver 2,000 new homes and funding to help Cambridge realise its full growth potential.”

The Budget reports say that the £3bn referred will go on “additional support for SMEs and the build-to-rent sector, in the form of housing guarantee schemes, to support the private housing market.”

The Warm Homes Plan
After a spell of uncertainty for retrofit and net zero funding, the Chancellor announced an initial £3.4bn for Labour’s Warm Homes Plan to transform 350,000 homes. SHDF Wave 3 was announced in September with no funding announced and it seems that this is where the money will come from – applications are due to open soon.

The Labour manifesto pledged £6.6bn to the Warm Homes Plan over the course of the Parliament, so we can expect further news to follow about how and when the rest of the funds will be allocated.

Building safety
The country once again stopped and remembered the tragic and preventable Grenfell disaster recently, following the publication of Phase 2 of the inquiry in September. The new government pledged to finally tackle the unsafe cladding and other issues that still plague so many buildings and the Budget signalled the start of that with a £1bn investment over the next year.

The chancellor did not say how landlords will be able to access the fund and more detail is expected to follow.

Long-ish term rent settlement
There was a slight sense of disappointment after the government seemed to trail a much-needed 10 year rent settlement, but instead only announced a five year plan. This has been set out in a consultation, which was launched as the Autumn Budget was delivered.

The government wants views on a proposed five year settlement, as well as longer-term ones, that would allow landlords to raise social rents by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus 1% each year from April 2026.

Councils say even a 10 year settlement will leave them with a £7bn shortfall.

In the consultation documents the government seems to rule out re-introducing social housing rent convergence because of concerns about the impact on tenants.

Fight for the Right to Buy
As was previously trailed, significant changes to the Right to Buy were announced with discounts being significantly reduced, greater protections for newly built social housing and confirmation that councils will finally be able to keep 100% of receipts.

Inside Housing reports that local authorities are expected to save nearly £1.2bn by 2029/30 from Right to Buy reductions and being able to retain full receipts from sales. Just imagine if where we’d be now if this had always been the case.

Bad news for private renters
I was really disappointed to see a Ministerial Statement confirm that Local Housing Allowance rates will be frozen next year. The LHA determines the amount of support that private renters in receipt of benefits can be awarded and varies in line with each local area.

Despite a small boost last year, it still falls pitifully short of the market rate in many areas in the country and in parts of cities like London and Manchester it will not meet the costs of any homes at all. The Big Issue describes the move as “deeply worrying”.

Increase to homelessness funding
After announcing the LHA freeze – a move which will leave people struggling to put a roof above their head– the government has also announced a £233m fund to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping. The most recent figures reveal a record 324,990 people in England are now homeless, including a staggering 151,630 children who are currently living in temporary accommodation.

Household Support Fund extended again
The government’s Household Support Fund and Discretionary Housing Payments will be extended, with an additional £1bn funding from next year.

The Household Support Fund enables councils to support families through initiatives like foodbanks, warm spaces, and food vouchers. The fund has now been extended until the end of March 2025. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – we really need the funding to be made permanent so that Councils can plan properly.

An additional £421m has been provided, which the government said will “provide certainty to local authorities across England over the winter months.”

The remaining portion of the £1bn will go toward Discretionary Housing Payments, available to those eligible for housing benefit or the housing element of Universal Credit who require extra support with housing costs.

Other welcome changes for the most vulnerable
The Chancellor introduced welcome changes to debt repayments for households receiving Universal Credit, something long called for by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Trussell Trust and others.

The maximum debt repayment deduction will be reduced from 25% to 15% of a household’s monthly Universal Credit allowance. Reeves told us that “this means 1.2 million of the poorest households will keep more of their award each month, lifting children out of poverty, and those who benefit will gain an average of £420 a year.”

The weekly earnings limit for carers will rise from £151 a week to £181.

What did the opposition say
In one of his final Dad jokes, outgoing Conservative leader Rishi Sunak said “if they can’t see they’ve broken their promises to the British people, then they need Lord Alli to buy them some more spectacles.” A crap joke, but a political dividing line that is likey to follow Labour around for some time.

Are they ever going to pick a leader?
YES! It’ll finally all be over on Saturday morning when we’ll find out whether Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch will be the next Conservative leader.

NEW HOUSING MINISTER KLAXON
Just when you thought it was safe to read this email without having to learn the name of yet another Housing Minister, Rushanara Ali relinquished her responsibilities for Building Safety while remaining a Minister. This took place after she attended conferences sponsored by Saint Gobain, the parent company of Celotex, who faced huge criticism in the Grenfell Inquiry.

Alex Norris MP, a fellow Minister in the Ministry of Housing, Local Government and Communities has now taken on the building safety brief.

A risky business
The Regulator of Social Housing has published its 2024 Sector Risk Profile –never a fun read but always a really important one. Some of the main takeaways are:

• Big emphasis on the importance of communication and engagement.
• Clear link between poor communication/engagement and damage to reputation.
• Failure to deliver quality housing services and failure to engage are put on an equal footing.
• Anticipated scrutiny from all quarters is emphasised.
• Failure of an organisation to engage is seen as damaging to the whole sector.
• Openness with tenants and taking their views into account when decision making is expected as a normal part of operations.
• Clear articulation of strategic direction – at board level – is expected.
• Where difficult/unpopular decisions have been made, Boards are expected to have reputation risk mitigation strategies in place.

The general tone is that there is a long way to go in improving engagement and communication.

Procurement Act delayed
Our ace client Procure Plus was quoted in this Inside Housing piece confirming a welcome delay to the Procurement Act 2023, which was initially scheduled for 28 October, but has now been pushed back to 24 February 2025.

Out and about
It’s been a busy few weeks for the HB team attending various conferences and events. Bobbie gave a keynote speech at the Northern Housing Festival in Durham, speaking alongside CIH chief executive Gavin Smart and Patrick Murray from the Northern Housing Consortium – you can read the write up here if you are a CIH member. He also spoke at the LGComms Academy in Wigan talking to councils about the impact of housing regulations on local authority communications.

We were really proud to team up with Tpas Cymru for a crisis comms masterclass in Cardiff. These sessions offer a really practical guide to some of the crisis scenarios we see in our work, along with expert advice on the plans and processes landlords can put in place to prevent a crisis from escalating. Drop us a line if you’d like us to arrange one for your team.

You can find a write up from our event at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool here. A huge thanks to CIH, Plus Dane, Grand Union, Cornerstone Place, Cardo and Procure Plus for working with us on this.

Setting a higher bar for tenant involvement
The fantastic Jenny Osborne of Tpas has put together a really important comment piece for Inside Housing, challenging social landlords to look beyond the regulatory minimum when engaging with tenants. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

Community advice on food growing and composting
Our friends at the sustainable gardening charity Garden Organic have teamed up with Rugby Borough Council to show local volunteers how to protect nature by growing organic food and flowers. This new climate action partnership is aimed at championing “the organic way” in the borough.

The partnership will provide support to volunteer Community Champions, who will offer training and advice to residents about growing their own food, composting, preventing waste and using natural methods to promote healthy, productive and sustainable gardens and green spaces.

Garden Organic works in partnership with housing associations and local authorities around the country to support organic growing and waste management.

Thinking about your next away day?
Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions for senior leaders and boards on understanding and managing reputational risk.

We can create space for honest and open conversations about the challenges the sector is facing and whether your organisation is ready to stand up to intense media and political scrutiny. We’ve got great speakers and a few fun (coughs) activities to put you through your paces. If you’re interested in finding out more contact bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

CommsFest
A massive thanks to everyone who attended CommsFest 2024 in Manchester. It was great turnout and we had a brilliant day! Special thanks to our speakers Amanda Coleman and Hannah Fearn – I presented too, but thanking myself feels a bit much even for me.

We’re planning more events looking at crisis comms throughout 2024, so watch this space, or drop us a line if you’d like us to come and do some work with your comms team.

Open Outlook ✔️
Open Microsoft Teams ✔️
Open ChatGPT ✔️

It’s astonishing to think that ChatGPT launched just a little over a year and a half ago.

Since the introduction of OpenAI’s intuitive large-language model in November 2022, AI tools and software have become an integral part of many of our working lives.

You need only look at the widespread global news coverage when the chatbot faces outages for even 90 minutes to gauge the reliance some now have on the tool.

With Apple announcing a partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT’s official integration into Apple products, it’s clear that AI is here to stay. It will be an inseparable part of our lives as technology advances

However, anyone who has spent any time using these tools will know that their shortcomings are glaringly obvious. The range from amusing to outright dangerous, with Google’s new ‘AI Overview’ product making headlines for suggesting that eating rocks can be good for you, and that glue can be used to thicken pizza sauce (don’t try this at home!).

Though not without their risks, a whopping 83% of surveyed comms agency teams are already utilising AI tools routinely, so the industry is one of many which is starting to see the benefits.

Streamlining tasks

One of the most immediate benefits of AI to comms is its ability to handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

While the writing style can be immediately obvious to spot, tools like ChatGPT can help draft templates for social media posts (I’m looking at you, LinkedIn), and email pitches at impressive speed…. though of varying quality.

While human input is still clearly necessary the tools will allow more time to focus on more strategic activities.

AI-powered scheduling tools can optimise the timing of social posts, ensuring that content reaches the intended audience at the most effective times. This can improve engagement rates and overall campaign performance without the need for manual adjustments.

Media monitoring and crisis management

One of the things that AI excels at is the processing and analysis of large volumes of data quickly and accurately. Providing the tool used has access to real-time data, this can be invaluable in media monitoring, where teams need to keep track of numerous media outlets, social media, and other information sources all at once.

Sentiment analysis through AI ‘social listening’ and continuous monitoring can provide real-time trend analysis and insights into public perception of a brand or campaign. By identifying trends early, teams can respond proactively to potential issues or capitalise on emerging opportunities.

What’s next?

There are of course ethical considerations when using AI, not least whether companies should disclose the use of AI tools in their work.

Looking ahead, as in every industry, the role of AI in comms is likely to expand further as technology continues to evolve.

OpenAI’s new AI model, GPT-5, is slated to arrive later this year (rumoured to be over the summer), with CEO Sam Altman suggesting the new model may work like a ‘virtual brain’, no doubt bringing with it a whole new set of capabilities and inevitably, issues.

Advanced AI systems such as this could offer even deeper insights into audience behaviour, predictive analytics for campaign outcomes, and more sophisticated content creation.

However advanced the technology, the ability to understand nuanced human emotions, cultural contexts, and ethical considerations cannot easily be replicated. For organisations who want to be authentic and empathetic humans (thankfully) will still have a big role to play.

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Hi everyone,

The kids are back at school, the weather is getting cooler, the MPs are back in Parliament and everything is still terrible. Public finances are worse than anyone thought and any hope of a honeymoon period for the new government has long since faded. The new PM has warned us that “things are going to get worse before they get better,” which would be fine if it wasn’t a line I’ve been hearing from governments for almost my entire adult life.

As Parliament returns for a brief sojourn before breaking up again for party conference season, we’ll try to unpack what the next few months might hold. As usual, we’ll also cover the other big stories impacting all of our work and some exciting news from us at Hough Bellis.

As ever, if you have any questions or want to pick our brains on anything below, please drop us a line and we’ll do all that we can to help.

Take care and speak soon,

Ben, Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan and the Hough Bellis team

P.s. We’re co-hosting what promises to be the best evening get-together at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool on Monday 9^th September. Scroll down for more.

Another dark day for housing and our country
Phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report was published this week and while it stretches to 1,700 pages, the Inquiry Chair Martin Moore-Bick summed it up in just 12 damning words:

“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable”.

Seven years on from the tragedy, much of what took place was already in the public domain, covered best in Peter Apps’ outstanding, must-read book Show Me The Bodies. But some of the details contained within the report still had the power to shock, as did seeing its very forceful conclusions set out in black and white.

I’d advise anyone who is connected to or passionate about housing to read the sections of the report that are most relevant to their work. The list of missed opportunities, negligence, failure and dishonesty is almost endless and there are lessons for all of us.

What are the key findings?

• The report concluded that “decades of failure” by governments of all stripes had led to the tragedy. The “red tape challenge” of the coalition government which led to widespread deregulation drew particular focus.
• Companies who made and sold some of the panels and materials used on the tower were attacked for their “systemic dishonesty”.
• London Fire Brigade’s training and response was heavily criticised.
• The landlord, an ALMO overseen by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was slammed for its “persistent indifference to fire safety” and for relations with tenants “characterised by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger”.

Lessons for landlords
The homes were managed by a Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), which was an Arms-Length Management Organisation (ALMO) of Kensington and Chelsea Council.

In scenes that we’ve seen before, vocal activists raising concerns about their homes were characterised by their landlord as “troublemakers” and their views were not taken seriously enough. Extracts from the report tell the story better than I could:

“The TMO lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide.

“However irritating and inconvenient it may at times have found the complaints and demands of some of the residents of Grenfell Tower, for the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.”

What happens next?
While this is an important milestone in what has been a seven-year quest for justice, so far nobody has been held criminally responsible, companies named and shamed are still making profits and as the recent fire in Dagenham showed, far too many of our buildings are still not safe.

Keir Starmer promised MPs the government would respond fully “within six months,” but despite the level of detail in the report will face pressure to act much more quickly. Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has since said that it will “hopefully be far sooner”.

Pennycook has also promised that we’ll soon see details of an accelerated remediation plan for unsafe buildings. We’ve heard similar promises before, but this time there will be much more pressure to act.

Meanwhile, the Met Police have warned that it could still be another 18 months before we see the first criminal charges.

Everything is still terrible
In a dance as old as time, a new government is making “difficult decisions” and blaming the mess the last lot left them in. Labour seems to have reason to complain about their inheritance, with broken public services, an empty bank account, a sluggish economy and an additional “£22bn” black hole that nobody knew about.

Any hopes that Labour might come in and sweep away harsh realities with a wave of good vibes have been quickly dashed. As well as planned changes to Winter Fuel Payments (more below), Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced funding cuts of £5.5 billion this year and more than £8 billion in the next. This will include asking already cash-strapped government departments to find 2% in efficiencies. It also seems to have dashed any hopes of the controversial two-child penalty being removed from the social security system any time soon.

Winter woes
The decision to remove the Winter Fuel Payment from all pensioners who don’t receive Pension Credit or other means-tested benefits was a massive shock. The annual payments are worth between £100 and £300 and are currently awarded universally to everybody of state pension age, from those on the lowest incomes to millionaires.

While there have been concerns expressed from many quarters about handing out taxpayers’ money to the wealthiest pensioners each year, there is a huge amount of concern that restricting the payments to just those on benefits is too narrow a group. It’s well worth reading commentary from the indefatigable Martin Lewis.

One thing that is perhaps less well-known is the sheer amount of money that the scheme costs. At £2bn annually, it’s £400m more expensive than the entire revenue budget of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

But while there is a clearly an argument about whether to exclude some from this payment, the worry is how many people with real need could miss out…

Get people signed up to Pension Credit
The government has recognised that up to 880,000 pensioners who might be entitled to Pension Credit don’t currently receive it and has launched a campaign to change that fact. I’m sure many of the people reading this email will also be pushing their own organisations to get as many customers as possible signed up.

But when you take that 880,000 figure and couple it with those who are by no means well off but fall just above the threshold, you end up with more than a million people who are going to be badly impacted by this policy. Whether through tweaks to thresholds, tapering, discretionary funding or all three, it is difficult to imagine the Chancellor not using the budget to ease the pain.

Household Support Fund survives
In better news, the Household Support Fund, which councils use to provide a range of discretionary support to people struggling financially has been extended until April 2025. This is great news and provides some much-needed certainty, but I’d also hope that a longer-term solution will be reached, as currently the work to beg for an extension begins as soon as the last 6-month announcement is made.

Strong and stable
We’re not used to stability in the world of housing, and as if the blessing of continuity among the Ministry of Housing team wasn’t enough, there are also strong rumours of a ten-year rent settlement in the October budget. The suggestion is that a cap on annual rents of CPI+1% will be rolled over for the next decade, allowing housing bosses to do strange things like actually plan for future investment in new and existing homes without a massive question mark hanging over them.

The move has drawn some understandable criticism from tenants and campaign groups for locking the sector into above-inflation increases for the long term. Of course rents have fallen in real terms over the past decade, with some pretty serious consequences for the sector, and I’d gently point out to all who will listen that the CPI+1% figure is a maximum, not a minimum.

We’ve got to fight…. for the right…… to notttt buyyyy
Strong rumours in the press suggest that Deputy PM and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is considering scrapping the Right to Buy on new social housing and reforming the discount on existing homes.

If Labour is serious about delivering 1.5 million new homes, all barriers will need to be removed and there is no doubt that the Right to Buy causes serious issues for viability.

About that budget
It’ll take place on 30 October 2024. If you want to make a submission to the government, which will definitely 100% get read by the Chancellor herself, there’s a handy form here. The deadline is 10 September, so get in quick.

The government is actually doing stuff
After years of paralysis and infighting, the new Government is starting to get very busy delivering on its promises. Since the election we’ve seen threats to jail failing water company executives, kicking out hereditary peers, progress with setting up GB Energy, plans to nationalise the trains, plans for new workers’ rights, mandatory housing targets, reforming the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), a target to build 1.5m new homes and much much more.

Leading the conversation
Our MD Bobbie Hough held a session with the Chartered Institute of Housing this week exploring what the new Labour Government might mean for the housing sector.

We covered the challenging political and policy landscape facing the new government, and the opportunities for landlords across the country to engage with more than 350 new MPs to help them understand why the new government sees investment in housing as crucial to fixing the long-term deep-routed challenges the country faces.

Whether at an away day or on a Teams call, we’re more than happy to talk to anyone about strategies to engage with politicians at all levels, or campaigns that can bring to life the issues that matter to you.

Keeping you up to speed
We’ve been busy this month with a series of workshops and briefings for clients. We held our latest crisis communications masterclass for our wonderful friends at Stepping Stone Projects, and were proud to team up with the journalist Peter Apps for a briefing session ahead of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report. Peter remains a powerful and important voice covering the tragedy at Grenfell Tower, and is more than happy to come and talk to Boards and leadership teams to discuss what the latest inquiry report means for landlords and others in the sector.

Do you listen or do you hear?
Our ace Senior Consultant Sue Fox has put together a brilliant blog highlighting the importance of active listening and its role in effective communication. As well as the need to have deeper and more meaningful conversations with customers to better understand their needs and potential problems. Read it here.

Come and see us next week
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the Housing Community Summit next week. Bobbie will be speaking on digital engagement at a housing in practice session at 3.55pm on Monday, while Ben will also be at the conference talking all things politics and campaigns.  Make sure you take time to drop in and see HB clients BTP, Mobysoft, Procure Plus, NetZero Collective, Grand Union, ForHousing, Watmos, Wirral Methodist and Cardo Group who will all feature at the conference.

We’ll see everyone who is attending at the Cavern Club on Monday night as we team up with Cardo to host an event at the world-famous Cavern Club on Matthew Street from 7pm. Bring your dancing shoes and drop us a line if you want to get on the guest list.

We’re in Labour
Once again, we’ll be working with our friends at the Chartered Institute of Housing and from across the sector to host a special fringe session at this year’s Labour Conference in Liverpool. ‘Housing as a Driver for Growth’ will be hosted at Plus Dane HQ, Atlantic Pavilion, Royal Albert Dock on Monday 23 September from 15:00 – 16:30, followed by networking and refreshments.

You don’t need a ticket or conference pass to attend, so please come along!

Join Housing Minister Matt Pennycook MP (invited) and representatives from CIH, Grand Union, Plus Dane, Procure Plus, Cornerstone Place and more at what promises to be an important occasion for the sector.

Talking all things crisis
Our next crisis comms masterclass will be held for Tpas Cymru members on Monday 14 October at the Unite Building in Cardiff. We’re proud as always to team up with crisis comms guru Amanda Coleman for this session. We’ll also be joining the LGComms Academy in Wigan on 11 October to discuss all things comms, local government and housing.

Organic September – play your part
This month the team at Hough Bellis is supporting Organic September, a campaign dedicated to encouraging everyone to grow organic, buy organic and undertake organic and sustainable practices.

Those working in the housing sector are particularly well placed to affect positive change. Estates Teams can stop using harmful pesticides and weed killers and plant a wide range of native plants to attract wildlife. Tenants can be encouraged to create community gardens and compost their fruit and veg peelings.

You can grow some of your own organic food and stop using single use plastics.

Check out the latest blog from our wonderful Senior Consultant Pam McCann to learn more about how you and your team can play your part in making a positive impact on the planet.

Thinking about your next away day?
Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions for senior leaders and boards on understanding and managing reputational risk.

We can create space for honest and open conversations about the challenges the sector is facing and whether your organisation is ready to stand up to intense media and political scrutiny. We’ve got great speakers and a few fun (coughs) activities to put you through your paces. If you’re interested in finding out more contact bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

CommsFest
A massive thanks to everyone who attended CommsFest 2024 in Manchester. It was great turnout and we had a brilliant day! Special thanks to our speakers Amanda Coleman and Hannah Fearn – I presented too, but thanking myself feels a bit much even for me.

We’re planning more events looking at crisis comms throughout 2024, so watch this space, or drop us a line if you’d like us to come and do some work with your comms team.

I used to think that there was little that I as an individual could do to have an impact on the huge environmental challenges facing our country, and our world.

Listening to the news about the catastrophic extent of insect and bird decline, the state of our rivers, the huge plastic problem in our oceans and in our soil, the major threats from pollution, fertilisers and pesticides made me want to bury my head in the sand.

But then I started to work with sustainable charity Garden Organic, and came to understand that in reality, small changes made by an individual, community or organisation could actually make a big difference.

Those working in the housing sector are particularly well placed to affect change. You have the ability to change your own ways but also those of your estate’s teams and your tenants.

If the whole housing sector made a pledge to embrace organic and sustainable practices this Organic September spectacular results could be achieved.

Here, we’ve set out a few simple things you, and your organisations, can do to make a positive impact and protect our environment and communities for future generations.

What can you do?

Stop using single use plastics – plastic residue is clogging up people’s arteries, soil, rivers and seas. So, no more take away throw away coffee cups! Take your own container or better still make your own drink at home or at work – it will save you money too!

Grow your own organic food – whether it’s in a garden, backyard pot, balcony or windowsill.  You will benefit from reducing your pesticide consumption (many fruits and veg contain multiple pesticide residues) and reduce food miles.

Collect rain water – install a water butt or collect rain water in containers. You can reduce your water bills and help conserve a finite resource. You will also be laughing if we finally get some dry weather and hosepipe bans are enforced!

What can your estates teams do?

Avoid using harmful chemicals such as pesticides and weedkillers – these can have a devastating effect on bees and other pollinators and leave a harmful residue in the soil. Instead leave wild patches of land or plant wild flowers to attract beneficial insects.

Plant a wide range of native plants and create habitats for wildlife – wood piles, small ponds banks and hedges will all provide homes, shelter and food for wildlife.

Use natural resources – use wood and plant-based material rather than plastic, and source locally to reduce miles travelled. Only buy peat-free compost or access local authority green waste to provide nutrient rich compost for planting areas.

What can your tenants do?

Create community gardens – encourage tenants to work together to create community growing spaces and grow their own organic food. It’s a great way to promote positive engagement with your tenants, to improve their health and wellbeing and their access to fresh fruit and veg. Garden Organic’s Growing Buddies scheme can provide practical support.

Compost fruit and veg peelings – housing providers can help by providing community compost bins. The compost can be used on the community garden, tenants’ own gardens or be donated to the estates team.

Plant as wide a range of flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetables as possible – growing a range of varieties in gardens, plant pots and on balconies that flower across the year will provide prolonged food for beneficial pollinators and help to conserve our precious biodiversity.

So, what are you waiting for? Take the pledge and go Organic.

Pamela McCann is a senior communications consultant with Hough Bellis working with housing associations and the charity Garden Organic.

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Hi everyone,

It’s been a month since we last put one of these together and so much has changed. We have a new government, a bajillion new MPs, a new Housing Minister (obviously) and a King’s Speech containing 39(!) Bills for the new parliamentary session.

In this edition, we’ll take you through what to expect from the new government, other big stories impacting all of our work and some exciting news from us at Hough Bellis.

As ever, if you have any questions or want to pick our brains on anything below, please drop us a line and we’ll do all that we can to help.

Take care and speak soon,

Ben, Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan and the Hough Bellis team

P.s. We’re co-hosting what promises to be the best evening get-together at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool on Monday 9^th September. Scroll down for more.

We’ve got lawssss, they’re multiplying
Black Rod had the door slammed in her face, Government Whip Samantha Dixon MP was held hostage in Buckingham Palace and the King sat on a golden throne in front of ermine-clad Lords to announce 39 new laws in another great display of normal life in our normal country.

We don’t yet know exactly when the new laws will be introduced and the devil will be in the detail, but from the information released so far, it’s clear that this is a government determined to hit the ground running.

Ctrl+F: “Housing”
I’ve been control effing every speech and announcement in the past few years with a one-word search term and more often than not, I’ve been disappointed. You can imagine my palpable joy when King Charles announced no fewer than three new laws focussed on housing.

What is more, they all actually look kind of good too. It’s not yet clear exactly when they will be introduced to be debated and amended by the Commons and the Lords. We’ll keep you updated as they progress.

Renters’ Reform Bill
Michael Gove seemed to do his best, but he never quite managed to get his private rental reforms through a landlord-heavy parliamentary party. Labour has revived and revamped his draft law, promising “greater rights and protections” to include ending no-fault evictions, an “end to rent bidding wars”, the right to challenge rent hikes and an extension of Awaab’s Law to the private rented sector.

Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill
Although the previous government passed a leasehold law in its dying days, it was heavily watered down and once again, Labour is seeking to succeed where Gove could not. This includes extending leaseholders’ rights to buy their freehold and allowing them to more easily take over building management functions. It also seeks to restrict the sale of new leasehold flats and to reinvigorate the commonhold tenure – this is all very technical and I’m happy to provide more detail if anyone wants it.

Put simply, leasehold, which affects 5.3 million households is a pretty unusual set-up by global standards. In the vast majority of countries, the role of a freeholder landlord simply does not exist. The system in this country has been open to abuse and far too many people have achieved the dream of home ownership, only to find that they do not truly own their home. On a purely personal level, I’ve campaigned on this issue for years and I’m really pleased by what I see.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill
This new law is the one that will prove most controversial at a local level, as it aims to trash the current planning system with the aim of making it much easier and quicker to deliver new housing and major infrastructure projects. In short, it’ll make it much harder for councils to refuse planning permission and much easier for Ministers to intervene if they do.

This all sounds brilliant until the field at the end of people’s street is being eyed up by developers, but the truth is that it will be impossible to deliver the new homes that we desperately need without something changing.

So about that election
You won, Keir. Enjoy the votes, I hope they make you very happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life. You ruined my night completely, so you could have the majority. But I hope now you use it to pass some laws on grace and decorum, because you have all the grace of a reversing dump truck without any tyres on.

(If you don’t watch Come Dine With Me, none of that will have made any sense…)

It was weird wasn’t it?
I’m not going to write loads about this, because we all know what happened and at this stage, I can add little but sarcasm to the discourse. Ultimately, the result was exactly what we expected for a long time and delivered a stonking majority to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Labour won one of the biggest majorities in history with the lowest vote share for governing party since the First World War.

Labour did badly in some areas and lost 7 seats while gaining a ridiculous 218 elsewhere. The Conservatives saw the biggest fall in vote share of any political party in UK history. Two out of every 5 people saw the most exciting election ever and didn’t even bother to vote.

Ed Davey got the Lib Dems best ever result while seemingly taking part in an episode of Takeshi’s Castle for the whole campaign.

Who are the housing and energy ministers?
Angela Rayner is now the Deputy Prime Minister and continues in her opposition brief by becoming Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. The new Housing Minister is Matthew Pennycook, the Greenwich MP who also held the brief in opposition for a number of years.

While there have been a few changes in the junior roles within the team – with details of responsibilities still being decided – this continuity is incredibly welcome. Angela and Matthew have demonstrated a really strong understanding of some of the key policy areas and are well-equipped to hit the ground running in tackling some of the significant challenges that we face.

In the Energy Security and Net Zero team, Ed Miliband takes up the Secretary of State role that he held under Gordon Brown in 2009, and has appointed a team with a mix of experience and brand new MPs bringing knowledge from their professional lives. Again, we’re still waiting for the finer details, including the critical question of who will take responsibility for heat networks.

How do we deal with new MPs?
There are LOTS of new MPs to get to know. Just 300 MPs were re-elected from the 2019-24 Parliament, with 335 people becoming MPs for the first time. A further 15 retreads are becoming MPs again after a gap in service.

This means that there’s a strong chance that you will be dealing with some new MPs covering the patches where you work. Now is a great chance to build a relationship and develop some influential new partners (or work out how to manage difficult characters).

To get things started, you should write to them to introduce yourselves and let them know how to get in touch if they have casework from their constituents. If you have any exciting projects or developments to show them, give them an invite (remembering that they are only usually in the constituency on Fridays) and show them how brilliant you are.

If you want a template letter to get you started or want us to look over what you have put together – give us a shout.

New MPs with housing interests
The new influx of MPs has brought in plenty of new friends of the sector, who should be strong advocates in the coming months and years. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s an early list from the new intake:

• Andrew Lewin (Lab, Welwyn Hatfield) – Previously Comms Director of Clarion Housing Group
• Gideon Amos (Lib Dem, Taunton and Wellington) – Chartered architect and former town planner
• Torsten Bell (Lab, Swansea West) – Former Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank
• Alan Strickland (Lab, Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor) – Former Haringey Planning and Housing Cttee member and director of external affairs at Southern Housing Group
• Emma Foody (Lab Co-op, Cramlington and Killingworth) – Former employee of the National Housing Federation
• Luke Murphy (Lab, Basingstoke) – Former Head of IPPR’s energy, climate and housing policy unit
• Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Lab, Suffolk Coastal) – Previously worked for the Built Environment Communications Group
• Antonia Bance (Lab, Topton and Wednesbury) – Former Head of Campaigns at Shelter
• Mike Reader (Lab, Northampton South) – Director at Mace, former architectural consultant
• Nesil Caliskan (Lab, Barking) – Former leader of Barking Council with key campaign pledge to build more affordable housing
• Lee Dillon (Lib Dem, Newbury) – Former Manager at Sovereign Network Group housing association
• David Smith (Lab, North Northumberland) – Former Chief Executive of Oasis Housing Group
• Rachel Blake (Lab Co-op, Cities of Westminster and London) – Worked on planning policy as an HMT advisor, has worked on housing strategy at various local authorities
• Dan Tomlinson (Lab, Chipping Barnet) – Former Principal Policy Advisor at the Jospeh Rowntree Foundation, ending housing crisis is a key campaign pledge

A few updates from us
It’s been a busy time for the gang at HB.

We’re really pleased to welcome our newest team member Siobhan Cheung, who joins us as an Account Executive. We’re glad to report that Siobhan brings loads of experience in PR, campaigns and events. She has also massively bought into our commitment to quality coffee and work snacks – always a guarantee you’ll have a long and bright future in comms!

We also pass on our congratulations to the brilliant Els O’Keeffe and Will Sherry, who have been promoted to Senior Account Manager and Account Manger in recent weeks.

HB Hub 
After eight years as the cool pioneers of remote working, we have finally decided to take our own office space!

We’ll continue championing the power of flexible working (nobody is being asked to work from an office 9-5, Monday to Friday), but we’ve now opened our own HB Hub in the centre of Chester, to make it easier for our team to come together, collaborate and engage in lengthy debates on ideal coffee strength.

We’ll be hosting meetings and workshops from the HB Hub, and we also love a good chat, so if you’re in town, come down and see us any time.

Apparently Ben’s Under 40
(This bit was written by Bobbie, as I refused to write about myself.)

A massive shout out to our very own Ben Powell who was named in Inside Housing’s 40 Under 40 list at the Housing 2024 conference in Manchester last month. Ben made the list for his commitment to campaigning for policy change on housing issues and his work on various boards over the years.

We’re very proud of Ben for the incredible achievement… but we still don’t believe you’ve done all of this by the age of 37!

Plans for the Labour Party Conference
Once again, we’ll be working with our friends at the Chartered Institute of Housing and from across the sector to host a special fringe session at this year’s Labour Conference in Liverpool.

A big thanks to Plus Dane who will be hosting the session from their offices on the Albert Dock just a few meters from the conference itself.

The event will be called ‘Housing as a Driver for Growth’ and will be on Monday 23 September from 15:00 – 16:30, followed by networking and refreshments. We’ll be issuing a formal save the date soon.

We loved being sent to Coventry 
We were invited to host a workshop at the Tpas Annual Tenant Conference in Coventry this month. It was one of the most enjoyable sessions we’ve hosted in a long time, with around 50 tenants in the session with ages ranging for people in their 20s to someone in their 90s. We talked about digital engagement and the power of social media to build and destroy trust.

Our friends at Tpas will be sharing the slides if you want them.

Summit up
We’ll be teaming up with our friends at Cardo Group to host a drinks reception at a very famous venue in Liverpool at the Housing Community Summit on Monday 9^th September. Invitations will follow… but watch this space.

Kwajo and HQN’s Annual Conference 
It was a brilliant day yesterday at HQN’s Annual Conference! Thanks to Alistair, Lydia, Jon, Chloe and all the team for a really well run event.

There was a challenging debate on whether a Royal Commission was needed on housing, and we heard from Kwajo on the current state of housing ahead of the launch of his new book.

Getting Councils building
Our brilliant friends at the CIH have worked with Saville’s to pull together a crucial piece of research which shows “why councils are underinvesting in housing and how an updated debt settlement could put that right”. We hope that the new government is listening.

How Rochdale Boroughwide Housing’s new leadership is delivering change
Housing Today published a really impactful look at how new RBH Chief Executive Amanda Newton is driving change in Rochdale. The piece ends with its most important line: “We can think that we’ve done all the recovery planning we want, but until our customers tell us that, we’ve not done our job.”

Thinking about your next away day?
Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions for senior leaders and boards on understanding and managing reputational risk.

We can create space for honest and open conversations about the challenges the sector is facing and whether your organisation is ready to stand up to intense media and political scrutiny. We’ve got great speakers and a few fun (coughs) activities to put you through your paces. If you’re interested in finding out more contact bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

CommsFest
A massive thanks to everyone who attended CommsFest 2024 in Manchester. It was great turnout and we had a brilliant day! Special thanks to our speakers Amanda Coleman and Hannah Fearn – I presented too, but thanking myself feels a bit much even for me.

We’re planning more events looking at crisis comms throughout 2024, so watch this space, or drop us a line if you’d like us to come and do some work with your comms team.

While going through a pile of everyday dull admin, it struck me yet again how often things are organised for the convenience of organisations, and not for the customer.

I loathe having to navigate through hundreds of “press this button for” options (why do none of them ever match my particular issue?), it’s hard to ask a question (the FAQs are usually wide of the mark) and often impossible to speak to a human being.

Yet as soon as any minor transaction takes place, you’re bombarded with surveys asking how well your parcel was delivered or how delighted you are with your recent purchase of a mop.

Getting a nation to write down their problems using a tiny keyboard on a tiny screen is only ever going to scratch the surface of issues.

Advertising Tycoon David Ogilvy summed it up when he said consumers “don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think and don’t do what they say.”

The approach of the majority of organisations relies on people being able to explain their problems, in writing, accurately and succinctly. It also assumes that organisations are asking the right questions.

Conscientious organisations follow this up with a phone call (thank you, my GP surgery).

Others just hazard a guess and answer an entirely different question (I’m looking at you, my phone provider) – and many more just don’t bother to reply (hard stare at my gym).

Sometimes problems are complex and messy.

Sometimes customers want to tell us about things that hadn’t even occurred to us.

Deprived of the opportunity to have a proper conversation, customers’ needs are often not met.

Housing associations and councils are now being measured on how well their landlord listens to and acts on tenant views, and on how well they handle tenants’ complaints.

This means landlords will need to buck the trend of business and enter into deeper and more meaningful conversations with tenants about the problem that needs solving. And more than that – they will need to have the skills to bring out exactly what the issue is, listening to tenants and asking the right questions to get to the bottom of issues.

I’ve spent a big chunk of my career working with ombudsmen. And ombudsmen (who handle complaints once the organisation’s own procedure has been exhausted) know that poor communication often lies at the heart of the problem.

Not listening in the first place, not addressing all the points the customer has made, and not keeping them informed of what’s being done to resolve the issue.

Understanding that we need to know customers and have a relationship with them has always been at the heart of what social landlords stand for. This new set of measures simply reminds us of the importance of that relationship.

It’s a lesson that other organisations could usefully learn.

Do you want to improve your customer communications? Contact us on hello@houghbellis.co.uk for a chat about what you could do. We promise we won’t ignore you!

Sue Fox is a senior communications consultant with Hough Bellis. She is also a qualified coach and mentor, and the author of the chapter on housing association communications in the book “Promoting Property”, published by Routledge.

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Hi everyone,

This time in three weeks, it’ll all be over and we’ll know who our Prime Minister will be.

But what will the parties actually do if they win? Our MD Bobbie was in the room in Manchester as Keir Starmer unveiled his manifesto and chatted to the great and the good to gauge how it went down among the party.

We’ve studied the speeches and picked through the manifesto documents, so you don’t have to. While there is plenty that we still don’t know – including the order in which anything will actually be done – we now have a much better idea about what we can expect for the next five years.

As ever, if you have any questions or want to pick our brains on anything below, please drop us a line and we’ll do all that we can to help.

Take care and speak soon,
Ben, Bobbie, Els, Will and the Hough Bellis team

P.s. Because we love this stuff, we’re also working with our friends across housing again later this year to make sure the sector is represented at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

Any organisations who would like to get involved can drop us a line to talk about our plans. Slots do fill up very quickly though so let us know asap if you’d like to get involved at hello@houghbellis.co.uk

How is the campaign going?
It remains a two-horse race, but one of the horses has got lost, left the racetrack and is currently wandering around an industrial estate somewhere near Swindon. In truth, if it was all but certain at the start of the campaign that Keir Starmer would be the next Prime Minister, any lingering doubt seems to have been removed.

The re-emergence of Nigel Farage has led to serious talk that the Conservatives might face a complete wipeout leaving the Lib Dems as the official opposition after the election. Conservative ads are now warning of this very possibility in a desperate attempt to convince their remaining 17 voters to stay on side.

It’s been genuinely extraordinary to consider that Rishi Sunak chose to have this election now, on purpose.

My personal hunch is that the polls are overblowing things slightly and while we will still see a Labour majority, it wont be quite on the scale predicted. But I’ve also been wrong many many times before!

Labour’s manifesto launch
We were chuffed to have been invited to co-op HQ in Manchester as Labour unveiled their “pro-growth, pro-business, pro-worker” manifesto. We can confirm that the optimism and expectation in the room was as palpable as you would expect from a party that has spent 14 years away from power.

We’ve been working hard both behind and… in front of the scenes to campaign on behalf of the sector for a much more progressive set of policies on housing. While there are some notable omissions and big questions about how things will be delivered, our view is that there is plenty to be pleased with.

Starmer’s speech was teed up by Daniel, who rents a one-bedroom flat along with his partner and two children. He spoke emotively about the very real impact of the housing crisis and looked to Labour to provide the change that he desperately needs.

After being largely absent from Labour’s missions, first steps and major speeches, housing finally got some attention in the manifesto – but what does it say?

What will Labour do on housing?

• Build 1.5 million new homes over the course of the next parliament – an average of 300k each year. This would be a massive change from recent years, with the number of new home completions currently languishing at half that rate. They tell us that the key to unlocking this will be a comprehensive reform of the planning system. This all sounds good, but the tensions will become very real once local communities see the planning applications go in.
• There is reference to the “biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation,” which is great, but there is a real lack of clarity about how this will be delivered or funded. To see building new social homes actually mentioned is really welcome – but we’ll need to see much more detail before we get our hopes up too much.
• £6.6bn is pledged for a Warm Homes Plan to be delivered over the next five years, which is a lot of money, but also loads less than we’ll need if we are serious about decarbonising some of the oldest and coldest homes in Europe. It’s a downgrade from Labour’s original green energy plans, but also an upgrade on the status quo.
• Labour has promised to finish the job on private rent reform by scrapping s.21 “no-fault evictions”, extending the scope of Awaab’s Law and giving tenants the power to “challenge unfair rent increases.”
• Labour has also pledged to “finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end” by banning the sale of new leasehold flats, making commonhold the default tenure and enacting the 2020 Law Commission proposals in full. What is missing is any mention of reducing ground rents to a peppercorn, which Michael Gove previously promised and failed to deliver. But it’s hard to see how the “feudal system” can end if ground rent remains a problem for leaseholders.
• On building safety, the manifesto promises to “take decisive action to improve building safety, including through regulation, to ensure we never again see a repeat of the Grenfell fire.”
• Labour has also pledged to make homelessness a “cross-government priority”, which we expect to take centre stage in a new Office of the Deputy Prime Minister led by Angela Rayner.

What’s missing
Phew! You have no idea how good it felt to almost bore myself by having to write up so many promises on housing after a few years of forlornly pressing “ctrl-f” and typing “housing” and finding no results in speech and documents. But it’s not all good and there is plenty missing from Labour’s plans.

First is money. This is very much a UK problem rather than one specific to Labour, but there is only so much that can be achieved with reforms, prayers and vibes. We want more than anything to see a new generation of social homes and a comprehensive retrofit plan, but it’s still not yet clear how we’ll pay for it. If Labour does plan to leverage prudent borrowing for capital projects, perhaps they are wise to play their cards close to their chest and avoid political attacks.

Second is hope for some of the most disadvantaged people in the country. Starmer has said that Labour cannot afford to scrap the two-child benefit limit, despite leaving more than enough money unallocated “prudently” in the party’s spending plans. There is also no plan to back the essentials guarantee and ensure that the basic rate of Universal Credit should at least cover the cost of essentials like food, household bills and travel costs.

Third is clarity on where the axe will fall, with widespread real-terms spending cuts currently sitting in government forecasts following the budget.

But perhaps this is harsh – if they win, as expected, Labour will inherit a situation where just about everything is broken. The scale of the task facing them is immense and they will have all of my prayers and vibes if and when they take office.

What about the Conservatives
The bit on the Tory manifesto will be a shorter section for two reasons: 1. they almost definitely won’t win and 2. there isn’t much to report.

• Hilariously, the Conservatives have planned to deliver 1.6 million new homes, 100k more than Labour. But there is even less in terms of a concrete delivery plan than Labour has offered, besides scrapping “defective the EU laws” that they have inexplicably failed to scrap while in office.
• There are only two mentions of social housing, and neither of them are good. They merely reiterate plans to expand “local connection” rules and introduce a new “UK connection” rule – a policy which is somewhere between a dog whistle and a dog’s dinner.
• There is a plan to introduce the level at which first-time buyers pay Stamp Duty from £300k to £425k, a recognition of rising house prices which is notably absent when it comes to private rent. There is also a return to a Help to Buy style scheme, which would at least probably get the market moving again, albeit at the cost of inflated house prices.

That’s pretty much it. I’m not trying to be partisan or score points. It’s just that the thing that we really care about isn’t really a priority for the Conservative party, which is what it is.

What about everyone else?

• The Lib Dems have promised to deliver 380k homes per year (1.9m over the Parliament). Notably, this target includes 150k homes for social rent each year and giving councils power to end the Right to Buy in their areas. In the unlikely event that they become the official opposition, they will be able to put pressure on Labour to up their game.
• The Green Party has also promised to deliver 150k social rent homes per year and has also said that it would scrap the Right to Buy entirely. This is really welcome, but is also like me personally pledging to scrap the Right to Buy, in that I won’t be in government next month either.
• Plaid Cymru has argued that everyone in Wales should have an affordable has said that Local Housing Allowance should cover the bottom third of rents.
• Reform UK has published a “working draft document” rather than a Manifesto, reminiscent of the number of files I have titled “final FINAL USE THIS ONE v2.3”. On housing, they pledge to scrap the Renter’s Reform Bill (which has actually already been scrapped lads), to use the tax system to “encourage more smaller landlords” and blah blah blah all kinds of other rubbish.

***AWAY FROM POLITICS*** What’s next for WhatsApp?
Ever since twitter became X and descended into culture war chaos, we’ve had a news-shaped gap in our social media channels. We’ve explored other platforms but still haven’t found our fix.

Now there’s a new kid in town. WhatsApp Channels (find it via the Updates button) was launched at the end of last year. We all know it’s foolish to predict the future of anything – especially the success or otherwise of social media apps – but it’s worth taking a look at this.
Check out our latest blog and download our handy guide here.

Don’t panic! FOI for housing is absolutely fine
A reminder for anyone who missed it that you can download our guide to the government’s consultation on the new Access to Information scheme here. 

It’s not just Warren G that Regulates
You can all blame Bobbie for that slightly obscure 90’s rap reference. We’re working with a number of landlords on their comms plans around the Consumer Standards as the new regulatory regime kicks in. It includes things like ensuring that all of the information that the Regulator wants to see is in the right place.

Drop us a line if you’d like a chat about this or if you have any comms concerns ahead of inspection.

Thinking about your next away day?
Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions for senior leaders and boards on understanding and managing reputational risk.

We can create space for honest and open conversations about the challenges the sector is facing and whether your organisation is ready to stand up to intense media and political scrutiny. We’ve got great speakers and a few fun (coughs) activities to put you through your paces. If you’re interested in finding out more contact bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

CommsFest
A massive thanks to everyone who attended CommsFest 2024 in Manchester. It was great turnout and we had a brilliant day! Special thanks to our speakers Amanda Coleman and Hannah Fearn – I presented too, but thanking myself feels a bit much even for me.

We’re planning more events looking at crisis comms throughout 2024, so watch this space, or drop us a line if you’d like us to come and do some work with your comms team.

Ever since twitter became X and descended into culture war chaos, we’ve had a news-shaped gap in our social media channels. We’ve explored other platforms but still haven’t found our fix.

Mastodon proved to be clunky and complicated. Threads is lovely but vague, with overlong posts and crucially missing the breaking news element we crave.

TikTok is fun (anyone following the Lib Dem election campaign will testify to this) but has a question mark over its trustworthiness. Instagram is great for niche viewing (cats? cleaning? comedians?), and for watching videos several days after they’ve appeared on TikTok. But it’s not great for fresh news.

Now there’s a new kid in town. WhatsApp Channels (find it via the Updates button) was launched at the end of last year. We all know it’s foolish to predict the future of anything – especially the success or otherwise of social media apps – but it’s worth taking a look at this anyway.

WhatsApp is hugely popular – it’s the most used social network among UK internet users. People like it because they enjoy sharing content with groups of people they know or share an interest with. And we know that “people like me” are seen as one of the most trustworthy sources of information.

So how does it work? WhatsApp Channels is a one-way broadcast platform. It offers limited engagement – people can respond with emojis (from a given selection) and forward posts to friends and family, but that’s it. There’s no need for moderation, and posts are deleted in 30 days.

It’s great for organisations with large, dispersed audiences. A quick browse through the main players show there are a lots of media organisations and football clubs among the early adopters. And local authorities, regulators and charities are also finding it useful.

Content is trial and error at the moment, and analytics are sadly lacking. But it’s ideal for sending out news messages and announcing something that’s about to happen. Memes, photos and polls go down well, which means it could play a role in place-shaping and community building.

Granted, users have to get into the habit of using the new platform. My energy supplier set up a channel to inform customers of their energy-saving hours, which were announced last minute. I hadn’t set up any notifications, and often found out too late. But I learned.

The search engine is not exhaustive, so you need to promote your channel actively to alert your potential users, and accessibility seems to need development. But it’s early days yet.

Take a look at what it can offer you as a user, and what it could offer your customers. If we use it well, it could be a handy way of filling that news-shaped gap.

You can also download our handy guide to WhatsApp Channels here.

Susan Fox is the author of the chapter on housing association communications in the book “Promoting Property”, published by Routledge.

Would you like some help with your communications? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Hi everyone,

It’s happening! After years of instability, the country will finally head to the polls on 4th July to choose our next government.

We’ll bring you up to speed with the state of the parties and everything that has been promised when the manifestos drop in the next couple of weeks. For now, we’ve tried to set out everything that you need to know about how the election period might impact your organisation.

Even though it feels like nothing else will be discussed until polling day, the world continues to move on and there are some significant changes for the sector worth taking note of. The Leasehold Reform Act 2024 managed to scrape through on the last day of term, bringing with it a raft of new responsibilities for landlords and freeholders. An important new consultation has also been launched on access to information in social housing.

As ever, if you have any questions or want to pick our brains on anything below, please drop us a line and we’ll do all that we can to help.

Take care and speak soon,

Ben, Bobbie, Nicola, Els, Will and the Hough Bellis team

What is going on?
The General Election will take place on Thursday 4^th July. Nobody thought that this was going to happen, and nobody is quite sure why the Prime Minister has made it happen, but here we are. Over 20 points behind in the polls and staring an almost certain defeat in the face, all that Rishi Sunak had left in his armoury was the element of surprise – and I was indeed surprised.

And so, on Wednesday last week, he stood on the steps of Downing Street, drowned out by “Things Will Only Get Better” and almost drowning as things could only get wetter. His big pitch was that only he had a plan for the British people, as he very visibly did not plan for the British weather.

Who will win?
At this stage in the campaign, a Labour victory seems all but certain and only the scale appears to be up for debate.

But a lot can change in General Election campaigns and if the past few years have taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. When the 2017 election was called, initial polling suggested that the Conservatives would win over 400 seats, with Labour on little over 150. When the votes were counted six weeks later it was 317-262.

That being said, it’d take an even bigger change in fortunes this time given the scale of Labour’s current lead. It is very likely that Keir Starmer will be our next Prime Minister.

We’ll send out another roundup before polling day with a more comprehensive take on what we can expect to see on 4^th July and what the main parties have included in their manifestos.

What do we need to do?
As the media kicks into overdrive and social media is aflame with excitement, those of us with leadership or communications positions feel like we need to do something. We ask ourselves where our plan is. We question whether we should be inviting candidates to visit or writing our own manifesto. We panic about what we are actually allowed to do.

The truth is that as exciting as things are, you probably don’t need to do anything special and you’re probably not prevented from doing much. But obviously, things are a bit more complicated than that, so here are some top tips covering everything from the pre-election period (purdah) to boundary changes.

Pre-election period of sensitivity
We are now in the ‘pre-election period of sensitivity,’ commonly known as ‘purdah’. It is a time when there are restrictions on what the public sector can and cannot do, and there is ‘heightened sensitivity’ around publicity and balance.

Normally, there should be no new government/local government consultations, advertising, news releases etc that could be seen as partisan. The House of Commons Library and Local Government Association have great briefings.

While these rules impact what some of our public sector partners can do and say, it’s important to stress that these rules do not apply to housing associations. You can continue with business as usual and you can still publicise the great work that you are doing.

Any meetings with council officers can go ahead as normal. Strictly speaking, meeting with councillors can continue as normal too, but be aware that they are likely to be very busy working on their party’s campaign.

However, to avoid reputational damage, housing associations need to avoid the risk of appearing linked to one party over another. So, if a visit is arranged for a candidate of one party, the same opportunity should be made available to others. Photographs or social posts which appear to endorse a particular candidate should be avoided on corporate accounts.

Basically, ask yourself “how does this look?”

If in doubt – give us a shout and we can provide some advice.

Media priorities will be completely different
While there is nothing to prevent you from issuing press releases as normal in most cases, be aware that there will be big stories coming out of the election every day and it will be that little bit harder to cut through. This is particularly the case in regional and national news outlets. Things are a little bit different in the industry press and it’s well worth continuing to engage.

The main thing to note is that if you are planning on a major launch where you are hoping to engage key stakeholders and secure broadcast media coverage, it might be worth putting it back until after the election.

There are no MPs
From tomorrow (30 May) when Parliament dissolves, there will be no MPs until after the election. Sitting MPs who plan to recontest their seats will become candidates and any MPs stepping down will no longer be in the role from this point.

If you regularly work on casework for local MPs, this work can continue, but they will not be able to use their parliamentary email address during this period and any correspondence should reflect the fact that they are a candidate, not an MP.

New boundaries
Parliamentary constituency boundaries will change at this election, in an effort to equalise the number of electors in each constituency. This means that even where an MP that you deal with regularly gets re-elected, the patch that they cover might still change significantly. It might also mean that part of your operating area now falls into different constituencies. A really helpful guide to the new boundaries can be found here.

What happened to the Bills before Parliament?
When a General Election is called and particularly where one is called much earlier than expected, there are suddenly only a few days left to deal with all of the business that Parliament was considering. This means that Bills that are not well-progressed will no longer proceed, while any other Bills can only become law if a deal is done between all parties to allow them to proceed.

On this occasion, it sadly meant that the Renters Reform Bill was abandoned. This means that really important provisions like a ban on s.21 evictions will not come into force unless the next government decides to reintroduce them.

Until the eleventh hour, it looked like leasehold reform was going to suffer the same fate. But after a huge amount of lobbying and campaigning (including by me), a deal was made to save the Bill, albeit in a watered-down form, and the Leasehold Reform Act 2024 has been added to the statute book.

Leasehold Reform Act 2024
Even if it doesn’t contain everything that was initially promised, the new Act is still a landmark moment for campaigners and will introduce some new responsibilities that freeholders need to be aware of.

Here are a few key highlights included in the Act:

• The standard lease extension term has been increased to 990 years, up from 50 years for houses and 90 years for flats.
• The sale of new leasehold houses is now banned, except in exceptional circumstances, ensuring that every new house in England and Wales will be freehold.
• Owners on private and mixed-use estates are entitled to standardised information on service charges, making it easier to challenge the reasonableness of these costs.
• Leaseholders can extend their lease or buy their freehold immediately upon acquiring the property, without having to wait two years.
• The limit for “non-residential” floor space has been increased from 25% to 50%, allowing more tenants in mixed-use properties to qualify for collective enfranchisement or the Right to Manage.

IMPORTANT: Access to Information is (STILL) nothing to fear
Given we’ve all been struck down with a bad case of election fever, you could be forgiven if you’ve missed a hugely important consultation on the government’s proposed Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements.

Firstly, a tip of the hat to the civil service team who clearly spent hours trying to shoehorn the policy into the acronym, STAIRs.

The proposals have been promised as part of the Social Housing Act’s commitment to increased transparency and to provide better access to information for tenants.

They are essentially a trimmed down version of the Freedom of Information legislation local authorities currently have to follow, but are specifically for housing associations (and potentially a few other groups).

While it’s likely to take some time for STAIRs to become law, there’s lots to do to prepare.
You can check out our blog on what the consultation means for landlords, along with our handy guide to the proposals and the difference between STAIRs and FOI here.

Board away day sessions – could your organisation deal with a media storm? 
Landlords are in the spotlight like we’ve never known, and that scrutiny is only likely to intensify again after the election in July.

We’ve been working with lots of landlords and charities over the last year to make sure that they are well prepared to respond to a crisis that may bring a media or political storm, and have the right processes and systems in place to spot and address issues before they make headlines.
As you plan topics for your Autumn away days you might consider putting the management of reputational risk at the top of your agenda. It could be one of the most important things you do.
We’ve got plenty of speakers and engaging exercises to challenge leaders and ask tough questions:

• Hannah Fearn, national journalist – How the newsroom has changed and why housing became a national story
• Ben Powell, Hough Bellis – Engaging with politicians and reframing housing’s narrative post-election
• Amanda Coleman, crisis communications specialist – Preparing for the worst – how can we identify and mitigate reputational risks across our sector
• Andrew Carapiet, media trainer – How we respond when the cameras are rolling
• Pete Apps, journalist and author – Lessons from the Grenfell tragedy

Drop us a line at hello@houghbellis.co.uk if you want some help planning your day.

Date for your diary: Grenfell Tower enquiry
The Grenfell Tower Enquiry Phase Two report will be published on Wednesday September 4.
Phase 2 of the Inquiry examines the causes of the events, including how Grenfell Tower came to be in a condition which allowed the fire to spread like it did.

Hi everyone,

As the dust begins to settle on a big week of elections, we wanted to give our take on what the results are telling us about the state of the nation. This was the last big stop on the road to the next general election and generated plenty of headlines.

We’ll also give our usual take on some of the big stories impacting our clients and the work that we all do. It’s become a cliché to say that these are uncertain times, but with a government desperately seeking to improve their position and an ascendant opposition with grand plans of their own, we’ll see a huge amount of change over the next year. Major pieces of legislation are still making their way through Parliament, while other recent laws are being brought to life through new regulations.

Finally a plug: if you’re planning your next board or leadership team away day and wondering how to navigate these big issues while safeguarding the reputation of your organisation, we can help. Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions on understanding and managing reputational risk, with some fantastic speakers from the media and housing. Read more here.

Take care and speak soon,

Ben, Bobbie, Nicola, Els, Will and the Hough Bellis team

***2024 LOCAL ELECTION SPECIAL***

Top Lines
It was pretty much as bad as it could have been for the Conservatives – again. They are now in control of just 6 of the 107 councils up for election.  They lost 474 councillors, a parliamentary by-election and every mayoral election other than one. They also came in third place in terms of council seats won, winning just 515 to the Liberal Democrats’ 522 and Labour’s 1,158.

The results are another strong indication that Keir Starmer will be the next Prime Minister and Labour will have had a long weekend of celebrations… but it wasn’t all plain sailing. The full results are here.

Having a Mayor
Labour won ten of the 11 elections for Mayors. While their unexpected victory against Andy Street in the West Midlands captured most of the headlines, it’s the results in the newly created East Midlands, and York and North Yorkshire areas that will be causing most concern for the Tories. Both of these areas are packed full of the kind of constituencies that Labour will need to win to form the next government, and they won with big margins.

Labour’s Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram, Oliver Coppard, Tracy Brabin, Paul Dennett and Sadiq Khan all retained their seats comfortably – although there were briefly some wild, unfounded rumours suggesting a struggle for Labour in London.

In the Tees Valley, Ben Houchen did manage to secure a solitary victory for the Conservatives, but he was defending a stonking 73% vote share from 2021. Although Labour will be disappointed to lose, the 16.5% swing that they secured bodes well for the general election.

Strong and stable
Somehow, despite leading his party to their worst set of election results since 1996, Rishi Sunak’s position in the Conservative party now seems more secure. Hanging onto Tees Valley seems to have done just about enough to hold off any prospects of yet another leadership election. The rebels seem resigned to their fate – with Suella Braverman telling the Times that “we must not change our leader.”

She also wrote “the hole to dig us out is the PM’s, and it’s time for him to start shovelling,” suggesting very limited understanding of the mechanics of digging.

The results also seem to have killed off any prospect of an early election, if that was ever likely. It looks like we can all relax for the summer and look forward to putting our big coats on when it’s finally time to vote.

Labour worries
Despite a brilliant set of results and some big wins in areas where Labour has traditionally struggled, they also saw a significant loss of support in many urban areas, linked to their stance on Gaza. Despite the Conservatives losing 474 Councillors, Labour only gained 186 and suffered some notable defeats.

Labour’s vote share actually went down in the West Midlands Mayoral election, as independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob picked up 11.7% of the vote campaigning on the Gaza issue. Labour lost control of Oldham and Kirklees councils and saw the Greens become the biggest party on Bristol City Council.

The Green party gained 74 councillors overall, most of which were taken from Labour. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain also picked up four seats, including two in Rochdale. Their candidate in the Longsight Ward in Manchester unseated deputy leader of City Council Luthfur Rahman.

However, Labour would argue that winning across so much of the country despite this challenge puts them in a very strong position in the general election, when tactical voting tends to be more likely.

What does all of this mean for housing?
It was notable that many of the victorious Labour Mayors put social housing at the heart of their campaigns.

New West Midlands Mayor, Richard Parker attacked Andy Street’s record on social housing delivery and promised to do better.

Meanwhile, Andy Burnham followed up his victory by pledging to deliver at least 10,000 new council homes and to suspend the right to buy on new properties.

While Labour can rightly be criticised for holding their cards close to their chest on policy, one striking area of difference from the Conservatives is their explicitly pro-development stance. For many years, NIMBYism has been a default position for political challengers, seeking to use concern about new developments to secure a few extra votes. Hopefully, it has now had its day.

Labour leader Keir Starmer also recently set out plans to build 1.5 million homes in the first term of a Labour government. This would in part be achieved by new rules, which would require councils to prioritise building on brownfield sites and poor-quality areas in the green belt, described as the “grey belt”.

***NOW BACK TO YOUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING***

Back to business
Desperate to somehow revive their fortunes, Ministers will be out and about announcing and reannouncing as much stuff as possible. Yesterday’s big announcement was a £64 million pilot in 15 areas of England, which will see physiotherapists and mental health counsellors used to help the long-term sick back to the workplace.

This followed another recent Government announcement attacking what the Prime Minister described as “sick note culture.” Key policies include consultations on whether responsibility for issuing fit notes should move away from GPs to unspecified “work and health professionals” and whether Personal Independence Payments (which replaced Disability Living Allowance) should be overhauled and significantly cut back.

The proposals have a distinctly nasty feel to them, and have been attacked by several charities, one of which accused the Government of launching a “full-scale assault on disabled people”. The Prime Minister followed the announcement with a Sun on Sunday article announcing the party would retain the two-child benefit limit after the general election.

Things can only get better
The economy has also shown some signs of stabilising, with CPI inflation falling to 3.2% in March, down from 3.4% in February and well down from the peak of 11.1% in October 2022. The figure for April is set to drop further still, as will include the recent cut in the energy price cap, which saw the typical annual bill for a household fall by £238, to £1,690.

There is some hope that the Bank of England will cut interest rates on Thursday and that Friday’s GDP figures for the first quarter of the year will show that the U.K. is out of recession.

Rent settlement rollover
There was some welcome certainty provided for the social housing sector, with the government announcing that the existing rent settlement will be rolled over by a further year until April 2026. This means that annual rent increases will continue to be capped at CPI plus 1% for 2025-26.

The government’s homelessness policy stinks
The Government attracted a furious response from the housing and homelessness sector after announcing plans to criminalise homelessness in the Criminal Justice Bill, with punitive measures against people who are “nuisance rough sleeping”, including the threat of a £2,500 fine or a prison sentence.

A widely discussed line in the Bill suggested giving police the power to take action against rough sleepers for “excessive smell”, a measure which Ministers now appear to be rowing back on. Even in our culture war infested, bottom of the barrel scraping political sewer, this was a new low.

Insurance hikes
Inside Housing has published an analysis showing the significant impact of insurance hikes for high rises on social landlords. A survey of 143 blocks by the Association of Residential Managing Agents (ARMA) found that renewal premiums rose from £7.8m in 2019-20 to £29.1m in 2020-21, an average increase of 374% per block. In addition to the increase in costs for high rises, the Social Housing survey found hikes in housing associations’ leasehold insurance of between 100% and 300%, and in property insurance of between 10% and 70%.

Housing laws make progress
The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill continues to make its way through Parliament, but recent amendments mean that leaseholders will continue to pay ground rent for up to 20 years, which is a significant step back from Michael Gove’s original pledge to scrap ground rent. However, it has been reported that the Government will announce that annual charges levied on leaseholders will be capped at £250.

The Renters’ (Reform) Bill also continues to be debated, with progress having stalled on the proposed ban on Section 21 “no-fault” evictions. New analysis by Shelter found that nearly a million renters have been issued with s.21 notices since the Government first promised to abolish them more than five years ago.

Every garden matters
Our wonderful client Garden Organic was featured on BBC Midlands Today discussing what we can do to combat the dangerous drop in levels of birds, insects and wildlife across the country. Garden Organic’s new research report, Every Garden Matters shows that even small actions taken in urban gardens can play a major role in restoring lost wildlife. Catch the section at the 2min 50 mark on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ydcp

New homes in Cheshire
Weaver Vale Housing Trust has enlisted M&Y Maintenance and Construction to resume building affordable homes in Winsford after a previous developer’s administration halted progress. Supported by £1.9 million from Homes England, the scheme will bring a total of 73 affordable rent homes to Winsford and revitalise this picturesque riverside location into a welcoming and accessible space for local residents to enjoy.

A sweet away day
A big thanks to Pete Apps and Alison Inman, who worked with Hough Bellis to deliver a fantastic team away day for our friends at Sweet Projects. Pete spoke to Sweet’s senior team and delivery partners working on major national infrastructure projects about his book Show Me The Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen. While Alison facilitated a conversation on how teams could explore new ways of working, collaborating, procuring services and measuring outcomes to ensure safety and quality remained at the heart of their work.

Thinking about your next away day?
Hough Bellis is working with landlords across the UK to develop sessions for senior leaders and boards on understanding and managing reputational risk.

We can create space for honest and open conversations about the challenges the sector is facing and whether your organisation is ready to stand up to intense media and political scrutiny. We’ve got great speakers and a few fun (coughs) activities to put you through your paces. If you’re interested in finding out more contact bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

CommsFest
A massive thanks to everyone who attended CommsFest 2024 in Manchester. It was great turnout and we had a brilliant day! Special thanks to our speakers Amanda Coleman and Hannah Fearn – I presented too, but thanking myself feels a bit much even for me.

We’re planning more events looking at crisis comms throughout 2024, so watch this space, or drop us a line if you’d like us to come and do some work with your comms team.

The social housing sector has had a few years now to get used to the idea of increased transparency and better access to information for their tenants. So the proposals in the Government’s consultation should come as no surprise. Nattily named STAIRS (Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements – see what they did there? – but let’s not quibble over the difference between an R and an S), the proposals are likely to be welcomed by many landlords.

Essentially a trimmed-down version of Freedom of Information, at the heart of the proposals lie a few key principles

1. the requirement to publish and promote a publication scheme, detailing information a housing association will publish as a matter of course
2. identifying what other information they hold that might be of interest to requesters
3. the requirement to help the requester to get the information they’re asking for.
4. access to redress if the housing association refuses to provide it.

As always, of course, the devil is in the detail, and those housing associations who used the last few years to get their file plan in order will be grateful that they’ve done it.

Easy access to accurate information is a starting point. Good minute-taking and record-keeping skills will need to be on the training plan.

But it’s going to take more than a tidy file plan to get you through. A mindset change, where the presumption is to disclose information, rather than control it, will be your biggest asset.

Social housing has been in the spotlight recently, with very public tragedies still fresh in our minds.

While the access to information proposals are more limited than those under the Freedom of Information Act, they allow tenants to request information – or those designated to act on their behalf.

No doubt journalists, lawyers and campaigners already have plans to request information ready to go.

Many housing associations will already be doing what’s required. There are challenges of course: clearly written policies aren’t always readily available, not all housing associations proactively publish their planned maintenance schedules, and the desire to get things legally checked can slow things down. But colleagues in Scotland and ALMOs have been doing this for a while.

Housing associations could see this as an opportunity to clear some cobwebs.

You can download our Hough Bellis easy guide which explains the proposals in more detail and provides top tips on what you should be doing to prepare, here.

Susan Fox is the author of the chapter on housing association communications in the book “Promoting Property”, published by Routledge, and of “Freedom of Information: is it changing the way we do PR?” in Chartered Public Relations: Lessons from Expert Practitioners, published by Kogan Page.

Would you like some help understanding what the access to information scheme might mean for your organisation? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Hello all,

In the wake of the budget, we’ve pulled together a newsletter, which will hopefully distil some of the key elements for our organisations.

If you’ve already seen and heard enough about Jeremy Hunt, we’ve also included the usual wider sector roundup below, so click here if you can’t stand the thought of reading anything more about the economy.

Hope you’re all doing well,

Ben, Bobbie, Nicola and the (growing) Hough Bellis team

A tale of two countries
“Today’s controversial budget has imposed tax hikes of 21% and devastating cuts to public services over the next two years”.

That was the news from Birmingham City Council’s budget the night before Jeremy Hunt told us that “the plan is working”, taxes are being cut and public service budgets are being protected.

Contrasts like this are why there was a strange sense of unreality about some of the Chancellor’s remarks yesterday, so detached did they seem from the stories that we see and hear each day.

We can see that our local councils are nearing bankruptcy, our local services and partnerships are being scaled back or withdrawn, customers and service users are finding it harder to cope, homelessness is growing, the NHS is crumbling, high streets are emptying, and the housing crisis keeps getting worse.

We can’t just wish it away with blind optimism, or by knowing that in 2032, it’s predicted that we’ll have the second highest GDP thing in the thing compared to the other thing.

There were welcome measures in the Budget, of course there were. But there was so much missing too. Not even a mention of council budgets. Not a word on social care. Silence on homelessness. Nothing significant on delivering the social housing we desperately need.

It was a tale of two countries. The one the Chancellor wants us to believe that we live in and the one that we experience every day.

The good news for our organisations
Going into the budget, we already knew that benefits would be increased by 6.7% in April, which will help some of the poorest people in the country to slightly catch up with the cost of living. The wait between this first being announced last year and filtering through to payments will have felt endless, so it’ll be a very welcome relief when it’s finally felt in a few weeks.

The Household Support Fund, which was due to stop at the end of March has been extended by six months, which is a massive relief. It has provided £2.5 billion of welfare support via local authorities to help vulnerable people with food, water and energy bills since it was introduced in September 2021. What happens when the six-month extension finishes is still up in the air, but at least there is some breathing space to lobby for a successor scheme.

People on Universal Credit who have taken out Budgeting Advances will see the repayment period doubled from 12 to 24 months. This will make a huge difference for people who are struggling, as they will be able to reduce the amount taken from their benefits by spreading repayment over a longer period.

The Chancellor also announced that he was abolishing the £90 charge for getting a debt relief order, a measure that the Citizens Advice Bureau has lobbied for. This was a barrier, which stopped people in the most difficult of circumstances from accessing help – but we obviously wish more could be done to stop people from reaching that point in the first place.

What were the other key measures?
The headline measure is another 2p in the pound cut in Employer National Insurance, which will put a bit more money into the pockets of our teams. This is on top of the 2p announced in the Autumn Statement, and both cuts combined will take £20bn out of our public services.

That’s almost double the amount that the Government invests in housing development each year.

I’m also old enough to remember when National Insurance was going to increase to sort out the crisis in social care. Luckily, I’m not old enough to need social care yet, as it definitely hasn’t been sorted out.

We’re now told that Rishi Sunak views the whole concept of National Insurance as unfair and wants to phase it out altogether.

But who was the Chancellor who introduced the previously planned NI increase, calling it ‘progressive’? Rishi Sunak.

Full child benefit will now be paid to households where the highest-earning parent earns up to £60k – the current limit is £50k. Child benefit will be tapered away between £60k and £80k. This helps to mitigate the current unfair situation, which sees a single parent earning £51k lose some of their child benefit, while a couple earning a combined £99.9k could retain all of theirs.

However, it’s not all good news for the workers, with the IFS arguing that for every £1 given back to workers by the NICs cuts, £1.30 will have been taken away due to “fiscal drag” between 2021 and 2024, with this rising to £1.90 in 2027.

What about housing?
Good news if you want to sell your second home! The higher rate of Capital Gains Tax paid on profits from selling property has been cut from 28% to 24%. Apparently, this will lead to a higher tax take, as more transactions will take place as a result. The world will have moved on by the time we work out whether that was true.

In housing delivery news – the Chancellor announced, “a new £20m fund for community-led housing schemes, supporting local communities to deliver the developments they want and need”. There isn’t yet news about how this will work in practice. I’m sure it’ll be useful, but it is obviously a drop in the ocean.

A more significant investment of £242m was allocated to deliver new housing “in Barking Riverside and Canary Wharf, which together will build nearly 8,000 houses”.

The “Long Term Plans for Towns” will also see funding provided to 20 new places, with the Chancellor namechecking Darlington, Coleraine, Peterhead, Runcorn, Harlow, Eastbourne, Arbroath and Rhyl. The towns will receive £20m of funding to invest in community regeneration over the next decade.

Why there (probably) wont be a May General Election
Maybe the biggest news is that you need to strap yourselves in for the longest, most tedious political year in history because yesterday’s budget all but rules out a May general election. It was only half the scale in spending terms of the Autumn Statement and lacked anything significant enough to suggest an imminent announcement.

All of this leads to a very strong probability that the Conservative Party will keep on waiting for something to come up to reverse their fortunes.

And you can almost see their thinking. The economic indicators are forecast to improve, with the OBR predicting that CPI inflation will fall below 2% target by the end of June, falling to 1.5% next year. The National Insurance cuts will have made their way through into people’s pay packets. *Something else* might come up to make things better.

But on the other hand, Council Tax is going up by 4.99% in most areas and more in others. Public services face further restraint. Every day, more people move onto new fixed-term mortgages. Most social rents are going up by 7.7%, private rents by more. Lower inflation won’t reverse price rises, it’ll only slow them. *Something else* might come up to make things worse.

But there will still be local and mayoral elections in May in many areas (Wikipedia has the details of what is happening where).

The light at the end of the tunnel (is the light of an oncoming train)
Finally, a quick reflection on how any kind of tax cuts are possible if the economy is struggling as much as we are told.

They are balanced against future – unspecified – public service “efficiencies” to be implemented after the next general election. The budget red book confirms that there will not be a spending review before we elect a new government. In other words, it’s a problem for future us.

According to the IFS, unprotected services (most areas other than the NHS), will need to make cuts of around 3.3% per year. While this is smaller than the average cut of 6.1% per year between 2010 and 2015, it feels like there is a lot less left to cut.

Away from the budget…
…if you’ve made it this far, well done! Here is our usual roundup of what we and our clients have been up to, as well as issues affecting the sectors in which we work.

Heat network customers left out of price cap
We supported our client Heat Trust with coverage in The i and MSN News where they highlighted the fact that homeowners and tenants with communal heating systems are not protected by the falling energy price cap. This leaves the country’s 500,000 heat network households exposed to high levels of variability in their energy prices.

Tpas back research project to make landlords more representative
We helped our wonderful client Tpas to secure an Inside Housing news story and blog to highlight a research project to make landlords more representative of their diverse communities. We’d encourage all landlords to take part in the new research – more details can be found here.

Amnesty International highlights housing crisis
Olivia Coleman has starred in a new ‘mini-drama’ to back a social housing campaign for Amnesty International.

Coleman stars alongside Hustle actor Adrian Lester in Before Our Eyes, which takes the form of a trailer for a supposed new drama as part of a stunt designed to capture the public’s attention. The film thrusts viewers into the heart-wrenching reality of a young mother trapped in a broken housing system. Evicted and then re-housed in temporary accommodation that’s riddled with black mould resulting in the baby’s death.

Dial C for Consumer
The Regulator of Social Housing has set out its new Consumer Standards for housing associations and local authorities in England.

The new ‘C’ grading will come into effect from April 1, with landlords set to be inspected every four years on the conditions of homes and how they treat tenants. The first judgements are likely to be published in the Summer. Jonathan Walters, deputy chief executive at the regulator, has told Inside Housing that landlords still had “a way to go” to comply with the standards.

Northern Housing Consortium appoints new policy boss
Congratulations to Patrick Murray who has joined the Northern Housing Consortium as director of policy and public affairs. Patrick is vastly experienced and joins the group from Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Welsh Government social housing updates
Welsh government has set aside an extra £5m in social housing grant funding in its latest budget. The announcement means funding for 2024/25 rises to £370m. Meanwhile, Welsh parliament has launched an inquiry into housing supply in Wales and plans to build 20,000 low cost, low carbon homes. A call for evidence is open until 19 April.

Your new job??
Staying in Wales, the good folks at ClwydAlyn are recruiting for an Executive Director of People, Culture and Communications. This is a fantastic job with a great organisation focused on ending poverty. You can find out more here.

JV North marks huge milestone
Congratulations to our friends at JV North. The consortium has just marked the delivery of their 10,000^th home and passed £1bn in investment with Homes England.

MSV shares its work on tackling racism
Our friends at MSV have been speaking to Inside Housing about their anti-racist task force, which has been set up to make sure it engages in the right way with its diverse tenant base. This is really excellent work and something that everyone in the sector can take something from.

Procure Plus go from strength to strength
Our ace clients Procure Plus are in Local Authority Building and Maintenance this month to highlight the fact that they have helped to facilitate over £120m worth of installations through their industry-leading retrofit Dynamic Purchasing System.

We’re expanding our team!
As we continue to grow our client base, we’re continuing to grow our all-star team. We’re currently recruiting for a new Account Executive – if you know anyone who fits the bill, please encourage them to apply.

As this newsletter goes to press, we’ve also just finished the process of recruiting a new Intern, continuing our partnership with the University of Chester. Pretend it’s transfer deadline day and follow our socials for an announcement sometime in the next couple of weeks!

Check out our shiny new website!
We’ve come a long way at Hough Bellis and our service offer has expanded far beyond practical comms support and guidance to partnering with leadership teams and Boards to tackle strategic challenges and reputational risks. We realised that our old website didn’t really reflect the organisation that we’ve become, so we’re proud to launch our new presence and we’d love your thoughts.

Plumbing apprenticeships in the spotlight
Heating Plumbing Monthly caught up with our client Liberty’s plumbing apprentice, Georgia, for National Apprentice Week; a year since they first interviewed her.

ForHousing delivers new homelessness project
Our client ForHousing has completed seven new homes in Huyton, Knowsley, for those who would otherwise be at risk of homelessness. The homes are part of the Government’s Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programme and are part of ForHousing’s longstanding commitment to tackling homelessness and inequality.

Sign up to Garden Organic’s Growing Buddy scheme
Our green-fingered clients at Garden Organic run a fantastic ‘Growing Buddy’ scheme, where they partner with housing associations and councils to engage their tenants in developing growing clubs to create sustainable gardens and cultivate food from a range of cultures.

As their ‘Growing Buddy, Garden Organic will offer tenants and landlords face-to-face and online organic gardening workshops and certified training, packs of seeds, booklets and growing instructions as well as ongoing advice on composting and waste reduction.

We’ve seen some great outcomes so far – ask your teams to take a look.

CommsFest is back and this time it’s (in) person(al)
With housing continuing to be in the spotlight like never before, we’re partnering with our client HQN to deliver a masterclass in Manchester on 25^th April.

We’ll be covering:

• The work landlords need to do to identify reputational risks and prevent them from turning into national headlines.
• The changing media landscape and how we should work with modern journalists who are writing about housing issues.
• What the coming elections will mean for housing and how landlords should be working with politicians.

The Hough Bellis team will be joined by top national journalist Hannah Fearn, and the excellent Amanda Coleman who literally wrote the book on crisis comms.

With early bird tickets from just £150 for an all-day training event, this represents great value for your teams and we’d love to see you there.

Words from another Bob with far more linguistic flair – though my understanding of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 is (probably) better than Dylan’s.

It’s been a busy start to 2024. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time working with plenty of folks, helping them to set plans and craft the stories that will lead their organisations into future.
These sessions are one of my favourite parts of the job.
Shuffling through some old vinyl and stumbling across Dylan’s track My Back Pages got me reflecting on some of those conversations.
The song is about a person looking back on his younger self. He’s angry and frustrated about all the things he didn’t know; about how wrong his world view was.
He’s saying, the older we get, and the more we learn, the less sure we are of anything we once knew. 60 years on, the words feel familiar.

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Bob got me thinking about our relationship with the past – as people and as organisations.

How, in a busy world where we’re all racing to write the future, it’s easy to lose track of where we’ve come from.

At times, and especially recently, it has felt like we’re programmed to look back in time through cynical eyes.

To be angry at what we weren’t, not celebrate what we were. To mourn missed opportunities, not celebrate successes.

To reflect on the bumps in the road, rather than the reason we started the journey in the first place.

As people and businesses, we get older and, hopefully, wiser.

We have better data and processes to mitigate risks. Better IT and life admin and HR. More cash in the bank to ride out tough times, and an abundance of world-weary life coaches to steer us away from danger.

From a purely rational perspective, we get better.

The danger is that we lose something along the way. In our pursuit of marginal gains we can, slowly and unconsciously, lose our identity, our personality and the values that have defined us.

They get buried under and avalanche of systems and transformation. We turn a bit beige.

That’s why origin stories are so important. They connect us with the souls of our organisations and can help recalibrate us when we get out of line.

They stop cultural drift and provide a good opportunity for the long, hard look in the mirror that we sometimes need.

They turn ‘optimal service delivery’ into a culture where people know its okay to operate outside the box if it means doing the right thing for the business, a client, a tenant or society.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” goes Simon Sinek’s TED Talk with 60 million views and counting.

We’re still much more comfortable talking about service offers and functional benefits than building emotional connections that last a lifetime.

We love helping people and businesses re-connect with their why and help them bring that to life.

But that story almost always begins with a much younger version of a person or a business.

One that was rationally sub-optional but emotionally bountiful. What we lacked in logic, we made up for in magic. In our ability to imagine a better future.

The ability to knit those two versions of ourselves together allows us to tell our best possible story.

We can be kinder to the younger versions of ourselves. And as plan for the future for ourselves and our organisations, let’s tune in and hear what they would have had to say. In lots of ways they were right and we are wrong.
They might just remind us what it was that started us on this path in the first place.
And as for Dylan? Sorry, Bob, we’ll have to disagree.
And anyway, I always thought the Byrds version of the song was better.

Bobbie Hough
managing director, Hough Bellis Communications

Just as you thought it was safe to open your Hough Bellis News Roundup, once again the world of politics has been turned upside down. With another Housing Minster, the return of Cameron, revolt in Labour, and a looming Autumn Statement, once again we are left wondering whether our business plans need a redraft.

With a world as frenetic as this, who better to deliver training or bring some insights to your Board or Exec Away Day than one of our all-star team of staff and consultants? From Orwell Prize-winning journalist Peter Apps offering his thoughts on Grenfell and building safety to our own Bobbie Hough on safeguarding your reputation – we’ve got you covered. Scroll down or click herefor more and get in touch if you want to discuss options.

Take care and thanks for reading,

Ben, Bobbie, Nicola and the Hough Bellis Team.

Another reshuffle
In uncertain times, there’s something comforting about the more mundane and predictable aspects of life: the setting of the sun, rail replacement buses, the grim British weather, the announcement of a new Housing Minister.

Lee Rowley has become the 16^th Housing Minister in 13 years. If you struggle to remember all sixteen, you’d be forgiven for not recalling that this is his second time in the job after serving for all of 49 days last time.

He replaces Rachel Maclean, who lasted a comparatively epic nine months and seemed to have finally got her teeth into some of the key issues. But apparently, that may have been her downfall, after unease among Tory ranks about strong positions on development, private rent reforms and leasehold. So pretty much all of the good stuff that was going on.

Another mind-boggling week
The reshuffle was sparked by the inevitable sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary after she did basically everything within her power to achieve that end. Despite definitely being sacked, she still sent what resembled a furious resignation letter (you can’t sack me, I quit), which seems to have sparked a new civil war among the smouldering remnants of the Conservative Party.

It hasn’t been plain sailing for Labour, with 56 MPs rebelling against the party line on Gaza, with eight Shadow Ministers having to resign from their roles.

In other very normal news, David Cameron has made a shock return to politics as Foreign Secretary, and Nigel Farage is in the jungle, where he’ll be eating rather than talking bollocks (or maybe both). Esther McVey has also returned to public office, as the Minister for Common Sense – surely her first job will be to sort out the housing crisis – or is that too sensible?

Autumn Statement Week
The Autumn Statement will take place on Wednesday 22 November – just over a year on from the last one under Liz Truss, which passed by without much incident…

There was some rare, good news for the Government last week, when it was confirmed that Rishi Sunak has achieved *one* of his five pledges. CPI inflation was 4.6% in October — down from 10.7% when he promised to halve inflation in January.

But rumours of this impacting the polls are somewhat optimistic for the PM, because PRICES ARE STILL RISING, just more slowly, and people will continue to feel the pinch. In the Mirror, Labour research said a block of cheese is up £1.73 in four years. In the Times, Lib Dem stats compare inflation to a 3p hike in income tax.

What does the Chancellor have planned?
Fresh from the news on inflation, Jeremy Hunt seemed to unleash his inner Boris, telling Sky News “there is so much defeatism, declinism about the British economy. I think we have turned a corner.”

So, what worthy social cause could receive the fruits of any dividend – if rumours are to be believed, it could be a cut to Inheritance Tax, which only the very wealthiest will ever pay.

Or, perhaps as The Sunday Times claims, cuts to income tax or national insurance are being considered, with the inflationary pressure of such a move offset by squeezing welfare payments, which only the very poorest will ever receive.

Bloomberg claims that £2 billion could be slashed from the welfare bill by raising benefits with today’s new lower inflation figure of 4.6%, instead of September’s 6.7%.

ITV News also reports that Local Housing Allowance rates could finally be unfrozen, which would be a long-overdue and welcome step.

What does this mean for rent setting?
So far, we’ve only seen the idea of using the October inflation figure for benefits, but it’s easy to see how the same leap could also be made for social housing rents.

If Hunt was to use the October figure of 4.6% for rent setting, that could see a cap of 5.6% rather than the September cap of 7.7% based on CPI of 6.7%. And this assumes that CPI+1% will be used this year, which is far from certain at this stage.

Landlords will all have their own calculation of what each 1% of rent will mean for the bottom line – 2.1% or even 3.1% less than expected would have huge implications.

What else is going on in politics?
The HB team were at both the Labour and Conservative conferences, soaking up the atmosphere and complimentary room-temperature wine.

Despite an admirable effort from the sector, housing was something of a footnote at the Conservative conference, barely receiving a mention in the big speeches. Meanwhile, the Labour event was buzzing with energy, but perhaps lighter on substance.

We were pleased to work with our friends at the Chartered Institute of Housing, Grand Union and others on an event where the Shadow Homelessness Minister argued that the affordable housing definition should be linked to income.

I was also pleased to join colleagues from the National Housing Federation, Northern Housing Consortium and the Shadow Climate Minister to debate the pressing need to retrofit our housing stock.

Risky business
The latest Regulator of Social Housing Sector risk profile has been published and as usual is a very difficult read – one that perhaps the Chancellor should sift through before making any rash decisions about rent.

To give just one extract:

“Providers continue to face a difficult and uncertain economic environment. Persistently high-cost inflation, a tight labour market, and contractor failures and supply chain issues are delaying works and increasing costs for providers. An ongoing housing market downturn poses risks for development sales income.

“Rental income has been constrained by the 7% rent cap for 2023/24, while costs for stock investment programmes have continued to rise. Interest rates have risen markedly in response to high inflation, resulting in materially increased provider borrowing costs. These economic factors have weakened the sector’s financial position and reduced its capacity to manage downside risk. Sector interest cover has continued to fall and on a social housing lettings basis is already below 100%.”

…as you can tell, it’s best enjoyed with a stiff drink.

Greater Manchester Private Rent Emergency Declared
We’ve been working with four leading Greater Manchester homelessness charities who have declared a ‘Private Rent Emergency’, highlighting the fact that a crisis in the private rental sector is exacerbating homelessness.

The aims of the group have had backing from Labour, with Shadow Leveling-Up Secretary Angela Rayner telling ITV News that “irresponsible landlords are getting away with turfing people out of homes”. She said Labour was putting them on notice that the party plans to ban Section 21 eviction notices.

They might also score their first big victory if Local Housing Allowance rate are unfrozen in this week’s Autumn Statement.

Culture is key to engaging tenants
We love this Inside Housing blog from the brilliant Jenny Osbourne at Tpas, which argues that a commitment to tenant engagement means nothing if your organisational culture isn’t right. In the powerful piece, she asks: “Are your involved customers reflective of the diversity of your tenant base, or are they just the easiest people to reach?”

Blue Peter turns to housing estates
Please take a few minutes out of your day to watch this video from our friends at Garden Organic and HQN, which highlights the work that former Blue Peter gardener and shared owner Chris Collins has been doing to improve green spaces in housing blocks and on estates.

It really highlights the impact of empowering tenants.

Energy Act now in place
Well done to our friends at Heat Trust after many years of lobbying – the Energy Act 2023 has now received royal assent. This means regulation is coming down the track for heat networks – most landlords will be affected – it’s time to get prepared.

Ombudsman Annual Complaints Review
The Housing Ombudsman saw a 27% increase in the number of complaints it received in 2022/23, with the main complaint types focussed on property condition and
complaints handling. The Review also highlights that investigations have seen a steady increase in the proportion of cases with maladministration findings, rising from 48% of cases in Q1 to 61% in Q4 2022/23.

Meanwhile, six complaints have been made to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) about the Housing Ombudsman’s “maladministration rate” used to assess and rank social housing providers on their quality of service to residents.

BTP Architects goes from strength to strength
Our friends at BTP Architects have appointed five new directors, as the company continues a period of expansion.

Disability pay gap
Non-disabled workers earn around 14.6 percent more than disabled workers, a higher pay gap than a decade ago, TUC analysis finds.

One year on from Awaab’s Inquest
The tragic death of Awaab Ishak from a respiratory condition caused by mould in his Rochdale Boroughwide Housing home was an appalling incident, which should never have happened. It shone a light not just on RBH, but on some of the failings within the sector more widely to properly deal with issues around damp, mould and condensation.

One year on from the Inquest, a huge amount of work has taken place to ensure that such a tragic incident can never occur again.

Awaab’s Law is now active, giving landlords an obligation to ensure that tenants understand their rights and that effective processes are in place for tenants to raise concerns about damp and mould. Further requirements relating to the timeframe for repairs and expectations that providers take into account the diverse needs of tenants will be subject to future consultation.

Finally… Hough Bellis can help with your board or exec away day
As trailed at the beginning of this Roundup, we’re reminding out network that we can help with speakers for your Board or Exec Away Day, as well as bespoke training for your teams. Speakers include:

• Orwell Prize-winning author and former Inside Housing Deputy News Editor Peter Apps, who can share his expertise about Grenfell and building safety.
• Star freelance journalist Hannah Fearn, who writes for the Independent, the I, Guardian, Inside Housing and others can share her knowledge on storytelling and improving your perception in the media.
• Hough Bellis Managing Director Bobbie Hough has handled some of the most challenging issues in social housing throughout his career and can share his insights on crisis comms and protecting your reputation.
• Finally, I (Hough Bellis Account Director, Ben Powell) can bring my experience as a former Westminster advisor, local Councillor and award-winning campaign strategist to talk about political engagement, stakeholder management and getting your voice heard.

If you want to know more, email bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk for a chat.

WISH Scotland is playing an active role in supporting women to shine in their housing careers, says Nicola Douglas, Account Director at Hough Bellis Communications and newly appointed WISH Scotland Board member

I caught the housing bug about 15 years ago when I cut my teeth in the busy Shelter Scotland press office in my first proper communications job.

Ever since then, I have passionately believed no one should be without a safe place to call home.

My relatively short time there showed me first-hand what it meant if you didn’t have that safety net that most of us take for granted. It also impressed on me the crucial role social housing providers play in society.

I have held communications roles in a housing association, the third sector and local government since then – but that understanding that home is the foundation of everything has always stayed with me.

Fast forward to the present and I’m now a working mum of two children with a long-term health condition, Crohn’s Disease, that has its ups and downs.

Over the past six years I’ve gone from being a freelancer at Hough Bellis Communications to Account Director and becoming part of the leadership team.

I’m really proud of the work we do at Hough Bellis to create great communications for projects that improve people’s lives.

My career here has, in part, been made possible by the supportive, flexible working culture we’ve had in place since long before COVID-19 hit.

Everyone, no matter their parenting or caring responsibilities or disability, should have the opportunity to thrive in their career.

But more widely in society, the reality is that women still face barriers to career progression that men do not, and that was what inspired me to join the Board at WISH Scotland.

While positive progress has been made over the years, women are still underrepresented in leadership roles in businesses globally and in the housing sector.

This is in part because the burden of childcare and caring responsibilities, still largely falls to women. A recent study from the Centre for Progressive Policy found this “disproportionately impacts women and exacerbates workplace inequality”.

Yet, including women in decision-making processes at the top table is better for business. Women bring different perspectives and skills to bear. A study by McKinsey & Company, supports this assertion – their research found organisations with greater gender diversity in their executive team are more likely to be profitable.

In the famous words of one of my favourite authors Jane Austen, in the novel Sense & Sensibility – “It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

Employers across the housing sector need to take steps to address workplace inequality and create an environment where women can break that glass ceiling.

While this won’t happen overnight, starting that journey is so important. This is a deep-rooted issue where unconscious biases that we may not be aware of are having a negative impact.

Being open to acknowledging and addressing these biases is a crucial step towards building a culture of equality.

Women of all ages and backgrounds should have equal opportunities to fly in their careers. WISH Scotland is here to champion women working in housing and together we can challenge the barriers to true gender equality in the workplace.

Housing presents a multitude of brilliant career opportunities for women in roles making a positive impact on people’s lives. We need to shout about these, especially to the next generation.

By providing a supportive membership network and a range of events and learning opportunities with inspiring speakers, we are supporting women across Scotland to progress and shine in their housing careers.

As WISH Scotland marks its first anniversary later this month, I am proud to be a part of that.

Visit WISH Scotland for more information here.

Nicola Douglas
Account Director
Mob: +44 (0)7759 835244

CommsFest 2023. What a month that was! 80 delegates, eight sessions, and more than a dozen speakers covering all aspects of communications and housing.

As ever, the conference was a much-needed opportunity to step away from the day job. To learn from the past and look to the future.

Going through 10,000+ words of notes, there were some key themes coming through. Both from our practical sessions on, for instance, crisis management and in our more reflective networking spaces.

Words like transparency, honesty, empathy, clarity and openness appear time and again.

This is reassuring for a sector preparing for Access to Information, under increased media scrutiny and gearing up for regulation linked to perception via the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.

But it is trust – and the need to rebuild trust with tenants in the social housing sector – that provided the golden thread for the conference.

We’ve talked about trust a lot over the past 18 months with clients…. but what is it? How did we lose it? And how do we get it back?

The Trust Triangle from Frances Frei and Anne Morriss is as good a place as any to start on the subject.

The Trust Triangle argues that when trust is lost, it can usually be traced back to a breakdown in one of three drivers: authenticity (I’m experiencing the real you), logic (I believe you can deliver, and your judgement is sound) and empathy (I believe you care about me).

Delve into some of the recent media coverage on the sector and these drivers might feel very familiar.

There is a multitude of internal and external factors that impact each of those areas – but the need for high quality communications sits comfortably across all three.

Yet, often, the role of comms teams is so narrowly defined that our communications professionals have limited ability to have anything other than a peripheral impact on each of these drivers.

For leaders across housing who are passionate about rebuilding trusting relationship with tenants, lifting communications onto a far more strategic footing – and the training and upskilling that comes with that – is a sound starting point.

Throughout the conference, we heard from some incredible peers about when effective communications works well. When an open, healthy culture shines through.

We also reflected on how harmful, and ultimately fatal, it can be when the story we tell about our organisations does not match up with the experiences of tenants, peers, politicians and other partners.

We can put together the most powerful and engaging stories in the world (and we often do), but if they don’t represent people’s real experiences, then at some point down the line this will have consequences.

Communications teams are responsible for the story we tell the outside world, but they are also the guardians of our culture and the champions of the behaviours and language that bring that culture to life every day.

As we were reminded in a fascinating internal comms session, culture and communications go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other.

There is much to reflect on. And that’s why it’s important for us to remember that we are part of a wider community. The roles of communications teams are changing…. and change is difficult. So we must keep learning from each other.

CommsFest is always a good reminder of that.

So, let’s keep connected. And let’s continue to work towards new and more trusting relationship, built on authenticity, empathy and our ability to deliver.

Hough Bellis has set up a WhatsApp group where comms professionals can connect, ask questions and share experiences. To join email bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

Do you work in a housing association or council? How often do you put yourself in a tenant’s shoes? Not just when it comes to your specific service or business area. But thinking about every interaction they might have with your organisation?

For a moment, consider just how many touch points someone living in one of your homes might have with the organisation in any given month. Everything from signage and posters in their building to everyday conversations with housing officers or repairs teams. They might receive printed letters and documents. Perhaps they also follow the organisation on Facebook or are in a community group.

When we zoom out and consider tenant experience like this, often it exposes our blind spots.

How confident are we that everyone who comes into contact with our organisation gets a consistent experience which aligns with the values and principles we’ve spent a great deal of time honing at Board and Executive level?

Do they experience a similar tone of voice? Are they being asked the same questions several times from different departments? Do they feel listened to or are they completely out of the loop?

It’s a lot to consider and when I’ve raised this in the past with landlords the questions and potential next steps can feel unwieldy and overwhelming.

We’re at a point where the whole housing sector has been held accountable for failings in communications with tenants.

It has never been more important to offer a seamless service to tenants, operating as one joined-up organisation which cares about and genuinely listens to the people living in your homes.

The Regulator of Social Housing has laid out its vision for housing associations. It expects them to be more transparent and open. Tenants should, quite rightly, have access to information and the easy ability to hold landlords to account. And tenants will be asked to assess how well they think their landlord is communicating with them.

Communications, then, can no longer be see as something purely delivered by the comms team.

It isn’t just polished documents or social media posts. This is about the whole organisation and every touch-point or conversation someone may have with it.

Strategic, consistent and highly professional communications are essential for delivering excellent customer service and high satisfaction. But, I get it. Where on Earth to start?

How can we identify areas for improvement? How do we begin transforming our culture so that tenants can always trust information and know their experiences and opinions are valued and acted upon

We have partnered with HQN to develop the Communications Audit Toolkit. Amalgamating decades of experience working with hundreds of housing associations and councils, the toolkit is a step-by-step, practical and comprehensive guide to assessing whether you have the right foundations in place to deliver excellent communications with tenants.

It highlights actions and next steps in a logically ordered and achievable way.

Once organisations have invested the time to go through the whole process, they will be highly equipped and prepared to transition into a more open, transparent and tenant-focused culture.

It will also highlight the business-critical nature of communications and why effective comms should be prioritised and invested in accordingly.

It’s not easy having the spotlight shone on us and being publicly critiqued for our failings. But let’s turn a tough lesson and a moment of reckoning into a new era for the housing sector.

Let’s commit to approaching the micro and macro through the eyes of our tenants. Then, the excellent satisfaction will naturally follow.

Join us on Wednesday, November 23 for our In their shoes event with HQN where we’ll be exploring how we can see communications through the eyes of tenants.

For a copy of our Comms Audit Toolkit please email bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk 

I nearly fell off my chair when I heard Liz Truss say the words ‘heat networks’ and ‘equivalent support’ in her first speech as PM.

For many, this was a minor point in a wider plan to deal with spiralling energy bills that were driving up the cost of living. But for the team at Hough Bellis, it was the culmination of ten months of sustained campaigning in the media.

It meant that around 500,000 homes in the UK living on heat networks – who were set to be amongst the worst affected by the energy crisis – would get the financial support they needed.

What happened?

As people were enjoying the calm of the week between Christmas and New Year, the government quietly announced its intention to regulate the heat network market. This was huge news for our client Heat Trust, the consumer champion for the sector.

Without regulation, consumers currently have had no protection against poor customer service and inaccurate billing (unless their energy provider signs up to the Heat Trust scheme).

This also means households are not protected by Ofgem’s price cap, meaning their bills have been spiralling uncontrollably as the wholesale cost of gas soared.

The campaign

Since the start of the year, we’ve been supporting Heat Trust with its campaign to:

• Make sure that these people – who were facing bills of up to £1,000 per month during the winter – were not forgotten by government support packages,
• Speed up the move to regulation, giving households access to consumer protection in line with other parts of the energy market.

Top tips

Being at the start of my communications career, working on a campaign to get these two outcomes on the agenda has been a steep learning curve. Here are five valuable insights I’ve learnt from working on this campaign:

1. Map out your timeline

For us, this meant knowing when Ofgem was announcing and bringing in new price caps, when the Queen’s Speech would be and the dates the Energy Bill was being debated in Parliament, and working around that.

By hooking our campaign to key dates we were able to get Watchdog’s Matt Allwright speaking about the problem on The One Show and secure coverage across the national press.

2. Allow for unexpected opportunities in the changing news agenda

It’s vital to move quickly to react to what is happening in the news, either because the news cycle has come back around or because you now know when something will be announced.

Ofgem don’t always publicly share when they will announce the upcoming price cap, and it could be just a week before. We used our knowledge of the sector to make an educated guess and were prepared with our response.

Similarly, when we realised that the National Housing Federation (NHF) had sent a similar release, we followed up with journalists and the NHF. We achieved coverage on the BBC’s homepage and are now coordinating with the housing body.

3. Understand your audiences and tailor your message

It pays to tease out what the industry needs to know versus what impacts consumers.

Dealing with a complex and yet too little-known issue has meant that I have had to really break down the issue for journalists and their readers. Even energy journalists have admitted to me they are not that familiar with how heat networks work..!

But doing this has meant we have secured coverage in media as diverse as Energy Live News, The Mirror and You and Yours on BBC Radio 4.

4. Quick turnarounds

More often than not, press journalists and broadcast producers have a tight deadline for statements or an interview. Although this is unpredictable, it helps to know your client’s or tenant case study’s availability and helping them prepare with notes or possible questions.

5. Nurture your key contacts

I kept our important journalist contacts updated so they knew who they can come to for reliable help with their stories.

It meant that when a national journalist was unsure of what Liz Truss’s support package would mean for families on communal and district heat networks in her first ever announcement as PM, guess whose inbox she dropped into?

Planning ahead – combined with HB Account Director Ben’s first-hand knowledge of Parliament’s inner workings – has been invaluable and resulted in us getting the support these tenants vitally need.

But with regulation still a way off (if not on the rocks after Jacob Rees-Mogg’s recent revelation), there’s more to be done. Who else is going to fight the corner of heat network tenants if not us?

To speak to Hough Bellis about a campaign you’re passionate about, contact us.

By Catriona Gilmore

It all started because I didn’t want to wear shoes. Now I’m seemingly being blamed – in part at least – for the nation’s economic downfall and obesity crisis.

When we started Hough Bellis nearly six years ago, we wanted to challenge conventional thinking around the way we worked. To remove the systems and traditions that made little sense in the modern world.

What If we could find a way to get rid of the nonsense working practices that locked people out of jobs (or made them unbearable) – and forced carers, and parents and people with health conditions to choose between the career they wanted and the life they needed?

Then we would have done some good.

From a personal perspective, there were two parts of working life I wanted to confine to Room 101:

1. Wearing shoes – I have arthritis in my ankles. Shoes hurt my feet. I now have one pair that get dusted off for formal occasions (I still can’t put the team through the embarrassment of turning up to awards ceremonies in my Nike Air Max).
2. The commute – I’d just had a baby. I wanted to see him grow up. I take him to school most mornings and pick him up most afternoons. I couldn’t have done it driving back and forth to an office in Manchester every day.

Back in 2016 we were vocal about our decision not to take an office and offering staff the flexibility to work where they want, when they want. It wasn’t the done thing at the time, but we knew it would bring loads of benefits and unlock the potential of huge parts of the workforce.

We blogged. We spoke at events about our approach. Plenty of folks lined up to point out we were wrong.

It took a global pandemic to prove we might be right. Fewer than one in ten now want to return to the office full-time according to the Office of National Statistics. Around half of office workers in the UK would rather resign than permanently return to an office building.

Yet, the Ministers and commentators seem to have put returning to the office at the centre of their culture war.

The Bank of England’s policy on home working was blamed for spiralling inflation, Jacob Rees-Mogg has been put in charge of getting us all back around the watercooler, while Boris Johnson seems to think the workplace revolution correlates directly with his cheese intake.

It feels remarkably interventionist for government, and a Conservative government at that, to be telling me how to run my shop.

It also feels like a bizarre put down for a cultural transformation that offers a genuine opportunity for levelling up in red wall communities, the flagship government priority.

So, with home working back in the national spotlight here’s our take on what we can expect from the future of work, and our learning from six years of offering staff freedom and flexibility.

1. There’s a difference between flexible working and working from home

Flexible working doesn’t mean people being sat at home chained to their kitchen tables 9-5.  It doesn’t have to mean isolation for staff and it’s not the end of sharing ideas or ‘watercooler moments.’ It just requires a different approach.

It’s about giving people the freedom to work how they want, where they want, when they want. Sometimes that might mean working from home, others working from a co-working space or coffee shop.

We’ve held meetings on rooftops in Barcelona and in office blocks in Edinburgh.

It’s about allowing people to work in ways that best suit them and then bringing people together in new and interesting ways.

2. Cultural reform is needed to unlock the benefits of flexible working

The average daily commute in 2018 was nearly 59 minutes (both ways combined). For those now having to commute to their home office, we’ve been gifted around a day of our lives back each month.

So, what do we do with that extra time? Well, most of us work. Some of us relax, or go to the gym, or help the children with their homework. This has got to be good for a nation that needs to be healthy and happy to be creative and productive.

We need to make it okay for people to have more flexibility in their working choices and give them more freedom over their time.

3. New leadership and management styles are needed

Modern leadership means being the way you want the company to be. You need to be active in providing a positive culture with clear expectations. If we are less visible, then every interaction counts.

Creating a high trust culture is so important – as is acting swiftly when trust is broken.

We also need to learn to manage by results – setting aims and supporting staff to achieve them.

Those who like to manage by control, propped up by a big office machine, are unlikely to be fans of flexible working.

You have to work a bit harder at creating good working relationships, for example, and find creative ways to get a team buzz. But the flip side is that flexible working fosters creativity, independence and reliability.

We’re focused on what we want to get done (personally and professionally) – and when we do get to spend time together we really value it.

4. Flexibility should be driven by culture, not cash

If the main driver allowing staff to work flexibly is to save a few quid on office space, then stop what you’re doing right now.

This is a cultural journey focused on improving the health, happiness and performance of your team, not a financial one.

Money that would ordinarily be spent on office rent should be reinvested in better kit, systems and activities that set the right culture.

5. Working remotely won’t make you fat or lazy

Apparently, home working is impacting our calorie intake. Everyone who’s ever worked in an office knows there are mountains of holiday chocolates and special occasion treats, not to mention the birthday cakes. Lunch is often grabbed at the nearest corner shop.

Food is hastily eaten over a dirty keyboard before your next meeting. If you missed out on the last sandwich, there’s always the crisps and chocolate machine to help you out.

It needn’t be like this of course – lots of worthy people manage to pack a healthy salad before they start out for their early commute AND hold out until lunch time before they crack it open.

I’m no expert on healthy eating choice, and, frankly, neither is our Prime Minister, but surely it’s a lot easier to eat well if you have some influence over what’s in stock.

If Mr Johnson can’t concentrate and eats too much cheese while working from home, perhaps that says more about what goes on at his house than in ours.

6. Old habits die hard

The old way was great for those who already had it good. It’s no wonder some are desperate to rush back to it.

Newspaper owners who miss their daily sales to commuters and property owners who shudder at the thought of office rents reducing will understandably resist change. It’s also understandable that people who live in crowded or unfit homes may be happy to spend time in the office.

That’s the point – flexible working gives you a choice. We’re on the threshold of something new and exciting. That’s progress. Let’s embrace it.

Ben Powell has become the latest recruit at Hough Bellis following a strong period of growth, joining the team as Account Director. He will play a leading role in ensuring that the expectations of clients are met at all times and will help the agency to meet the growing demand for impactful campaigns and political engagement.

Cheshire-based Ben has 13 years of experience in delivering high-impact communications, media relations, campaigns and public affairs. He joins Hough Bellis from the senior management team at 38 Degrees, one of the UK’s biggest campaign organisations. Prior to that, he held senior communications roles at two trade unions.

After qualifying in law, Ben spent the early part of his career in local and national politics, working in Westminster as a political advisor and serving for six-years as a local councillor. Ben has also held board level positions at Marketing Cheshire and Avenue Services, and currently serves as a Non-Executive Director for a housing association.

He said: “I am thrilled to be joining at what is an incredibly exciting time for the business. The reputation that Bobbie and the team have built over the last five-years is second to none – Hough Bellis has established itself as a must-have partner for any organisation with a social purpose.

“I’m looking forward to helping some outstanding organisations to tell their stories, and I’ll use my experience in delivering campaigns to ensure that they can make a strong impact at the highest level.”

Hough Bellis Managing Director Bobbie Hough added: “Ben embodies our values and has a clear passion for doing work that improves lives and communities.

“The experience that Ben brings to the team will enable us to broaden our offer to clients, building on some of the really exciting campaign work that we have undertaken over the last couple of years.”

Hough Bellis Communications has promoted Nicola Douglas to the role of Account Director.

Nicola, who joined the company in 2018 as Account Manager, has been an integral part of the company’s rapid growth.

Hough Bellis now counts more than 30 organisations retaining its services, ranging from local authorities and social landlords to mental health charities and cleantech companies.

The business is also embarking on a recruitment drive on the back of a number of new client wins, with Catriona Gilmore recently joining as Account Executive.

Edinburgh-based Nicola has more than a decade of experience of delivering high impact public relations work in the housing, local government and charity sectors, and has an MSc in PR.

She said: “I’m really excited to be taking this next step in my career with Hough Bellis as the company continues to go from strength to strength. I love my job here and feel lucky to work day in and day out to help organisations with a social purpose to tell their stories.”

Hough Bellis Managing Director Bobbie Hough added: “It makes me incredibly proud to see Nicola progress into this new role.

“She has been a vital part of our success in recent years and epitomises the values that we set at Hough Bellis.”

To find out more about roles at Hough Bellis click here.

Nicola Douglas
Account Director
Mob: +44 (0)7759 835244

Hough Bellis Communications has launched a new training academy named after its founder, Catherine Bellis.

The Catherine Bellis Academy will launch in 2022 and will help develop the next generation of communications professionals.

The academy will offer training for Hough Bellis recruits and the wider industry.

Catherine helped found Hough Bellis in 2016 with business partner Bobbie Hough, but retired when her multiple sclerosis worsened in 2017.

She remains an active voice in the business and will help develop the academy programme.

Catherine began her career in journalism and edited a number of local and regional titles. She moved in public relations working at Staniforth PR before moving to become a Director at IPB Communications.

Catherine said: “I was one of the very lucky people to look forward to work each day. Having to give it up has been hard. I am delighted to be involved something that will benefit new recruits across the social communications sector. I feel very honoured to have my name attached to what I believe will be such an asset to a new wave of recruits.”

Bobbie added: “Catherine has dedicated a large part of her career to helping develop talented people in both journalism and public relations.

“It is therefore a fitting tribute to set up the academy in her name.

“We look forward to working with Catherine in developing the programme and providing the best possible training for our own recruits and others across the sector.”

Further details about the academy will be announced in 2022.

Hough Bellis has appointed Catriona Gilmore as Account Executive as the company enters a new period of strong growth.

Catriona will join the team permanently from 1st November following a stint at The Hut Group. Prior to that, Catriona had worked in marketing for leading cultural tour operator Martin Randall Travel, where she developed and led the organisation’s social media strategy.

With a keen eye for creativity and spotting new opportunities, Catriona is looking forward to working with ambitious and socially conscious organisations.

Hough Bellis Communications was launched in September 2016 and specialises in sharing the stories of charities, housing providers and companies with a social purpose.

Since then, the agency has grown significantly. Hough Bellis now counts more than 30 organisations retaining its services, ranging from architects and social landlords to mental health charities and cleantech companies. They are also embarking on a recruitment drive, with an Assistant Account Manager post currently being advertised.

Catriona will also be the first to benefit from the company’s new training programme, The CB Academy, named after co-founder Catherine Bellis. It was an early dream of the company to offer young communications professionals coaching and insight from esteemed professionals in the industry.

Hough Bellis’ ethos is focused on innovative and flexible ways of working. Working from home long before the pandemic made it the norm, the consultancy has no formal offices and promotes the freedom of its staff to choose the location and hours they work.

Catriona said: “I am passionate about finding and creating opportunities for exciting projects and worthy causes – which is exactly what Hough Bellis does.

“I’m honoured to be the first to train as part of the CB Academy programme, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in.”

Bobbie Hough, Managing Director at Hough Bellis, added: “Hough Bellis is enjoying a period of sustained growth and Catriona’s appointment will support the services we offer. She will be an important part of our plans to give companies with a strong social purpose a voice.”

Being a bit silly is a serious business.

One of the first things I learned as a newspaper reporter was to never be scared of asking a question that might seem blindingly obvious.

They often get the most interesting answers – and rarely do people say what you were expecting.

Yes, every now and again you might look a bit of a berk. But it’s a sacrifice worth making if it earns you the right to tell a better story.

The same is true in business.

Organisations that tell the best stories tend to be the ones that succeed.

And great stories – along with great ideas – only start when you’re prepared to ask interesting questions.

Again, it’s the seemingly simple ones that are the hardest to answer.

We live in serious times.

From troubling scenes overseas to the impact of the pandemic at home, there’s lots to feel angry about.

Serious times need serious people. But not always.

Whether you want society to build back better/stronger/fairer, the reality is if we have the same people asking the same questions and using the same processes, we’ll get the same answers.

Nothing will change. We’ll drift back to how things were – a frustrating prospect for those of us committed to social change.

Recent developments in the shift to flexible working are an example of this.

We have an opportunity to address a deep-rooted social challenge around our relationship with work. To make employment more accessible. To open doors for those locked out of the system.

However, as soon as the great debate reaches those who hold the purse-strings it gets reframed as an economic challenge, not a social one – and we’re back on the carousel.

Serious people, asking serious questions and landing on safe answers. How can this save us a few quid? Who has ever got in trouble for asking that?

Google and others appear to be heading down the route of offering less pay for home workers, while the Government has made its stance clear on where they want people to work.

To me, the Google story is a ludicrous proposition. If someone is, say, 15% more effective at their job working flexibly then surely that constitutes a pay rise rather than a pay cut? Or maybe 15% more time off – four–day week anyone?

Maybe my brain works a little differently, and that’s kind of the point.

The ability to reframe situations and view challenges through a different lens will give us more hope on arriving at a future that is kinder, greener and fairer.

Ad man Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy argues this beautifully, using simple questions to reframe the debate around everything from HS2 and tax reform, to NHS waiting times and the reasons we brush our teeth. 

The pandemic means the world is ripe for change. For the chance to write a new story about our lives and our organisations. But we won’t get there with fear and conformity.

If we really want to change, then now is the time to unleash the creative forces within our organisations and our institutions. 

To empower “the mad ones” as Kerouac described them. The ones who are “mad to live, mad to talk… the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.”

We need folks who think differently. Who ask daft questions. Who are, perhaps, a little bit silly.

Creatives (and I include comms people in here) challenge conformity. They can take organisations to new places. 

They understand that changing perception can have as much value as changing reality – and that it is a hell of a lot cheaper.

But they can’t do that downstream as part of an operational team.

They need a seat at the top table – and leaders that are brave enough to give them a voice.

For those serious about change, creating a little more room for people who ask silly questions at to the top table might be a good place to start. 

No other area of comms has developed faster in recent years than video production. Video is a powerful tool that can connect with audiences on a deep emotional level, and it’s becoming increasingly easy to produce with the ongoing evolution of phone cameras, editing apps and social media platforms.

Let’s start off with some stats. You’ll have heard all of these before, but they demonstrate why video is completely essential to any serious PR strategy:

• Video makes up 80% of all internet traffic
• YouTube is the second largest search engine
• 85% of millennials engage with brands after seeing a video on social media

I could go on – but I won’t, because you don’t need me to tell you that video is a big deal. All the major platforms are scrambling to double down on their video offering. Video is the world’s favourite form of storytelling, and telling a story is what good PR is all about.

Producing video content in the 2020s is like having a website in the 2010s.

If you don’t, it’s just a bit weird. People expect it. That said, please don’t start creating video simply because you feel like you need to.

Hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll understand why video content is a valuable comms channel, what sort of video content you could be making, and how you can get started with producing it.

Trends in video marketing

During the COVID pandemic, the video content industry (like most industries) has undergone fairly seismic changes. Here are three big trends you need to be aware of:

Cause marketing

This can be a really hard sell sometimes, but the content you put out shouldn’t always be about the product you’re trying to sell. In times like this, consumers want to invest in brands that care about the things they care about. In fact, two out of three people say they would “choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on where it stands on the political or social issues they care about”.

It’s little wonder, then, that throughout the pandemic we have seen countless examples of brands posting video content about what they believe in, not necessarily about the wares they sell.

Democratisation

With the rise of platforms like TikTok, and with existing channels like YouTube and Instagram providing sophisticated video editing tools, everyone is a creator now. Everyone is a camera operator, an editor, a journalist and a presenter. Is there a way you can harness that desire to create content and make it work for your organisation?

On platforms like LinkedIn, business owners and C-suite members are increasingly finding the confidence to put themselves out there in video form. Some of the most successful posts have been relatively personal and vulnerable in nature, challenging the idea that LinkedIn content must always be ‘professional’.

Unsurprisingly, these days we expect in-house comms and marketing teams to have an enormous skillset. They’re somehow meant to be Hollywood directors as well as knowing their traditional PR and marketing onions. Thankfully, the restrictions brought about by the pandemic have meant that consumers are much more forgiving of content with lower production values. We’ve seen several TV ads shot on phones, and even a feature film made on Zoom – and yet I’ve heard nobody complain about the poor resolution, the wobbly shots, or the mixture of portrait and landscape. Professional quality video production still has a huge impact, but self-shot material can too as long as it feels authentic and tells an engaging story.

Live

With so many ‘real life’ events forced to take a back seat, huge numbers of people have turned to streaming to try and replicate the buzz of a live experience. According to Restream, across the main three streaming platforms, “viewership increased from 3.89 billion hours in Q3 2019 to 7.46 billion hours in Q3 2020.”

One the on hand, people are more accepting of virtual events than ever before – just as they are with those self-shot TV ads. At the same time, though, there’s a growing sense of fatigue with online life. This appetite for live streaming might not continue for long once we’re all vaccinated and able to mingle in person again.

Video content strategy

Before diving into creating video content, it’s essential to think about why you’re doing it, what sort of content you’re going to produce and who’s going to watch it. You should be thinking about these five questions every time you put out a piece of video, as well as when devising your overall content strategy.

Why are you using video?

This gets overlooked surprisingly often, but it’s a really basic question that should inform every stage of the production process. Think about the end goal, and work backwards from there. For example, a charity might be looking to spark debate, drum up donations or raise awareness. Whatever the objective is, everything from the tone of voice to the visual style should serve that goal.

Who will the audience be?

In the same way as you produce video content with the end goal in mind, you should also have the target audience in mind. That could be existing customers, prospects, staff, or someone else. In 2020 I created a series of six videos for St Ann’s Hospice to promote their Manchester Midnight Walk, and the tone of each video was tailored to a specific audience. Compare this video aimed at existing supporters, with this one aimed at people wanting to keep fit. Just as a side note, the Manchester Midnight Walk inevitably didn’t go ahead due to the pandemic, but I was able to reversion the existing content to help promote their Virtual Walk instead.

How do you want people to feel?

Provoking a strong emotional reaction is a proven way to get people to engage with and act on your video. Despite what we might want to believe, most decisions are driven by feelings rather than logic. At the start of the production process, decide what emotional response you’re aiming for, and go all-in on it. Humour, sadness, anger, surprise – all of these and a thousand others are powerful tools for making your content stick in the viewer’s mind.

What will set your content apart?

Standing out from the crowd can feel like an impossible task. Especially in the days when 500 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube every single minute. But it’s well worth thinking about how your video content will be heard amongst the noise. It might be that your brand has a really specific tone of voice that you can apply to your videos. Maybe you give people a clear incentive to watch, like in this brilliant boohooMAN competition devised by Social Chain. One simple way to stand out is to target a very specific niche, or appeal to an audience in a single locality.

Back in 2019 I was building my own brand – trying to build a reputation out of thin air, having previously been comfortably employed by the BBC. I wanted to put some content out there that would show off my skills, make a big impact and give my social channels a boost.

Using Google Earth Studio, I created a series of four videos showing stunning aerial views of different northern cities. There were two main things that set these videos apart. As the technology was new, I knew people wouldn’t have seen anything like it before. I also knew that targeting a specific local area is a surefire way to gain traction, simply because there’s less competition than if you’re going up against the entire internet. The result? Each video received hundreds of thousands across Facebook and Twitter, I gained hundreds of followers (from next to zero) and the Manchester video was shared by Manchester Evening News.

When/where will you publish it?

There are lots of things to consider here: how frequently you want to publish video, how frequently you want to publish non-video content, how much you want to spend, whether there’s a topical event you can peg your content to. Will you be making it yourself or will it be professionally shot and edited? There’s often a balance to strike here: could you upload DIY content on a regular basis, and more polished pieces less frequently?

Remember that not every piece of video content will work on every platform. Each social network has its own quirks in terms of what content performs best, what format your video should be in, and the demographics of the user base.

Practical tips for content creation and publishing

We live in a world where most of us have a video production studio nestled in our pocket. Phone cameras are still no match for professional sound and video recording equipment, but they can work brilliantly for everyday social media content. Here are a few simple ways to get the most out of your phone. Some of these tips will also apply to DSLRs and other digital cameras, but I will focus on phones because you can also use them to edit and publish your content.

5 tips for filming yourself or other people

1. Set up in an area with plenty of natural light. You (or the subject) should be facing the light or at a slight angle. If the sun is so bright that your face is overexposed, move away from the window or use the curtains. Be intentional about what time of day you film, thinking about how much sun there will be and from what direction.
2. Consider whether you/the subject should be looking straight at the lens, or off to one side at an interviewer. Keep this consistent.
3. If you’re filming yourself, still try to use the back camera (not the selfie camera) if you can. Not only is this probably a better camera, it also takes away the distraction of the screen and helps you focus on the lens. You will need to make sure the shot is framed right first – e.g. by taking some test footage.
4. Minimise all background noise. Before you start, be quiet. Listen for any noise, even if it’s just a low background hum, and see if you can identify it and eliminate it.
5. Think about your framing. Should your phone be landscape or portrait? There’s no right or wrong answer, it mainly comes down to what platform/s you’re using. Get a tripod or find some other way to get the camera to head height; low angles rarely look good!

5 tips for filming other subjects (B-roll footage)

1. Always shoot more than you need.
2. Experiment with slow motion. It will smooth out your shots and give them an arty quality.
3. Time lapses can be incredibly effective and incredibly easy, either on your native phone camera or using third-party apps. Think about what would make an engaging relevant time lapse for your brand – from sunsets to setting up for events.
4. If you need to stitch lots of shots together (e.g. for an event highlights film) make sure you get a mixture of different types of shot. Close-ups, wide shots, and maybe some slow motion or time lapse.
5. Don’t feel like you need to move the camera unless there’s a specific reason to do so. Static shots, framed and edited well, will look dynamic and professional. Random wobbly panning will not!

5 tips for publishing video content

1. Take your time at the upload stage! Otherwise you’re wasting all the time and money you’ve spent on producing the content itself.
2. Consider creating different versions of the video for different platforms.
3. Choose a suitable thumbnail, title and description that grabs people’s attention and accurately reflects what the video is about.
4. Consider whether you need to add subtitles – I’ve linked to a couple of great tools for that below.
5. If your video is going on a website, add plenty of supporting copy to give search engines a fighting chance of taking notice.

5 apps I recommend for video

1. Adobe Spark Video – online and on iOS. A really intuitive way of pulling footage and photos together into a video, with the ability to add text, music and stock assets.
2. Lumen5 – online, iOS, Android. This is perfect if you generate a lot of blogs, press releases or other written content. It turns your text into a really nice-looking video automatically. You can tweak it to your heart’s content, but honestly you’ll be amazed by what it does on its own.
3. Rev – online. Upload a video and a human transcriber will create subtitles for you. I use this service all the time – staggeringly cheap and generally very accurate.
4. MixCaptions – iOS and Mac. Like Rev but automatic, so it’s quicker and cheaper but less accurate.
5. FiLMiC Pro – iOS and Android. If you’re serious about filming with a phone, this app is essential. It gives you manual control over all the things your native camera does automatically, which means you can fine tune things like focus, exposure, white balance and audio.

Over the past year, we have seen massive changes in the way video is made and consumed. The power and prominence of video is only going to grow over the coming decade. Just in the start of the year we’ve seen once again how even the simplest, most amateurish video content can take pop culture by storm.

It’s important to remember, though, that video isn’t the be all and end all. It’s just one method of communication. It’s arguably the one with the most potential impact, but it’s also one of the most expensive. Your PR and marketing strategy should involve several different touchpoints, which all complement each other and have a consistent tone of voice. And one of those touchpoints, of course, should be video.

Hough Bellis Communications has formed a new partnership with video production agency Studio 91.

The partnership is part of the company’s plans to expand the services it offers to clients as the demand for film production and editing continues to grow.

Studio 91 is based in Stockport and Manchester and led by Ben Horrigan who previously spent six years producing digital video content for the BBC for flagship brands such as Blue Peter and BBC News.

It is a social video production agency driven by purpose and impact and works with clients with inspiring and sharable stories to help tell them.

Bobbie Hough, managing director at Hough Bellis, said: “We’re delighted to be working with Studio 91, an agency which shares our values of working with clients with a social purpose.

“The demand for film content continues to grow and with Ben’s talent and experience, this partnership will enable us to offer our clients new and creative ways to share their stories.”

Ben added: “Hough Bellis have an amazing track record not just in terms of the great work they do, but in the way they do it. We’re so excited to be working alongside them and their clients, towards our goal of making content that is good for people, good for platforms and good for the planet.”

You can see the latest showreel from Hough Bellis and Studio 91 here:

How will our businesses look by the end of 2021?

One of the silver linings of the Covid age has been its role as a change agent. It has forced us to challenge traditional beliefs on how we run and structure our organisations.

We have long argued the case for a more flexible approach to work – and the need to ensure a (peaceful) transfer of power away from business owners and leaders and back towards employees.

In short, give people freedom and choice – so long as they can meet the needs of their roles and the business – and you should get happier staff and better outcomes.

Over the past 10 months we’ve been privileged to speak to dozens of leaders about this topic. For some reform was already on the horizon, for others Covid has been a catalyst for reimagining what their businesses might look like once we return to some kind of normality.

2021 will be the year that the outcomes of those soul-searching conversations become apparent, where freshly polished transformation programmes turn vision into reality.

Some change will happen very quickly, but most will take a significant amount of time.

Internal comms and a focus on re-evaluating the stories we tell about our companies will be high on the agenda. Those who have engaged and empowered their teams early in the conversation will be best placed to deal with the challenges ahead.

As new business models start to take shape, we have identified four main categories that – in the broadest possible sense – typify the approaches businesses seem to be taking. They are:

I wonder how many leaders recognise where their organisation might fit?

Of course, the above is not meant to offer any definitive answer on where companies may or may not end up over the coming years.

We are in a rapidly evolving environment – there is no rule book for the set of circumstances we find ourselves in.  This is merely a snapshot in time based on conversations in lockdown with a wide variety of businesses, and an attempt to offer up a first draft of a framework based on months of debate.

It is a provocation – there for people to muse upon, challenge and dissect.

Nobody is certain what the future will look like. But what is clear is there are plenty of good people having meaningful conversations to ensure their businesses are kinder, greener and fairer places to work after the pandemic.

And that, for once, is good news.

The Government’s white paper on Social Housing mentions transparency nearly 30 times.

If you managed to miss it, take another look: it talks about transparency in relation to culture, regulation, accountability, performance, information provision, charges, decision making, tenant engagement and accessibility.

Transparency is already at the heart of many housing associations, who strive to be as openly accountable as possible.

To many organisations it is old news: the Freedom of Information Act is a teenager, launched 15 years ago. Many public sector bodies have become used to publishing information and responding to requests as a matter of routine.

While the white paper stops short of making the social housing sector subject to the Act, it does propose that transparency will be regulated through a new access to information scheme.

Housing associations will adapt – and it’s worth learning a few lessons from those who’ve gone before.

As usual with these things, it starts with culture – Boards and leaders must be genuinely supportive of openness or it will be a struggle throughout the business.

It can be tough – but it’s easier to learn to love it than try to dodge it.

And now is the time to know and own your organisation’s problems and weak points. Know the story behind them and what is being done to put them right.

Your communications team is your friend when it comes to providing clear, consistent information in a transparent way.

It’s what many of us are trained to do.

So it’s worth colleagues getting together now to work out how your organisation is going to open up, what you need to do to prepare and to learn to love this new regulation on transparency.

Susan Fox is the author of “Freedom of Information: is it changing the way we do PR?” in Chartered Public Relations: Lessons from Expert Practitioners, published by Kogan Page.

Would you like some help understanding what the access to information scheme might mean for your organisation? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us hello@houghbellis.co.uk.

Liverpool mental health organisation, Imagine Independence has teamed up with Hough Bellis Communications to launch the first ever Merseyside Mental Health Week.

Imagine Independence is bringing together people and organisations from across the region to support thousands of people experiencing poor mental health and to raise awareness of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental wellbeing in the city region.

Taking place from 2^nd November to 6^th November, Merseyside Mental Health Week will deliver a week-long programme of online events and community activities.

This includes working with local people on Imagine’s Building Up Stronger project which is trialling a new approach to providing mental health services, improving digital skills and reducing loneliness and isolation.

The week is backed by The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, Liverpool City Council, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, Professional Liverpool, The Federation of Small Business, Knowsley Chamber of Commerce, LFC Foundation and Everton in the Community.

Hough Bellis has worked with Imagine since 2018, overseeing the organisation’s major rebrand, together with the development of an effective social media presence.

Margaret Hanson, Chief Executive of Imagine Independence, said: “Merseyside Mental Health Week couldn’t have come at a more important time for our region as we move into increased lockdown restrictions. We hope that through Merseyside Mental Health Week we will encourage more people to seek out help.”

Bobbie Hough, Managing Director at Hough Bellis added: “We’re proud to be supporting Imagine Independence in launching this campaign. It fits perfectly with our vision of working with great people to deliver great work on projects that improve people’s lives.”

For more information contact Bobbie Hough on bobbie@houghbellis.co.uk

My latest phone update came with a translate app – could be handy, I thought.

Playing around with it threw up some weird autocorrects until I learned how it worked (“Gluten morgen wine list veg tea” being the memorable one). Yes, I could have read the instructions, but does anyone do that any more? And that got me wondering – what if we had a human translation app?

We’re in the midst of – well, you know, weird / unprecedented / strange times (delete as applicable to you). Faced with extreme and frequent changes of rules for social interaction, work, travel and even doing the shopping, an understanding of human behaviour and attitudes has never been so important.

There are times when bringing people along with you is the best way to get the results you need, and this is surely one of them.

Building trust with your communities, creating clear and consistent messages and knowing how to convey them effectively is something every professional communicator will happily bend your ear about, if you’ll let us.

The ability of the human being to rationalise our beliefs and behaviours can be astounding (Barnard Castle eye tests, anyone?).

And our inability to understand the attitudes of others can create tension, waste time and risk lives. Now is a great time to increase our understanding of other people – and of ourselves.

In the words of the evergreen Jane Austen “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other”. Or the prejudices.

While we’re not at the stage of having a “Human Translate” app, taking time to understand ourselves – maybe through training, coaching or mentoring – not only helps to clarify our own motives and behaviours, it can also shine a light on why other people behave as they do.

Those of us who work in communications know that it can take a very long time to change behaviours and attitudes, and we need all the help we can get.

I think now is the time for us all to take the first step in building our own internal “Human Translate” app.

If you’d like to improve your communications skills or build your confidence through coaching and mentoring, contact Hough Bellis – we’d love to hear from you Hello@houghbellis.co.uk  

We’re feeling warm and happy at Hough Bellis right now. The reason? We’re super-proud to have won the PRCA Dare Award for Small Consultancy of the Year.

We were also shortlisted for the Prolific North PR Agency of the Year award.

I’m so pleased the work of the Hough Bellis team has been spotted and recognised.

They’re a good group of people doing great things – and they’re a lovely bunch to work with.

A huge thankyou to everyone who we work with and to our amazing team.

Bobbie

The corona-coaster hasn’t been a fun ride for any of us, and we suddenly find ourselves in July. For many of us, the whole year seems to have been a blur.

Almost every sector has been affected in some way. We’ve heard a lot about the collapse of retailers and restaurants and a swift change of direction for many others.

One sector we perhaps hear less about is the charity sector. Possibly because charities operate in such wide-ranging areas in our communities.

But charities have been hit incredibly hard. People have had less money to give and fundraising events have been cancelled or dramatically scaled back.

Yet, in many cases, it has been those charities which have supported our communities through the COVID-19 crisis.

Large national charities have a huge presence, levels of awareness are high and marketing budgets are large. I’m sure we can all name several national charities who have been able to continue with their high-profile advertising campaigns, swiftly updating them in reaction to the changing situation.

They are undoubtedly doing amazing work.

But what about those that are regionally or locally based? The ones providing food parcels to hungry families, or breast-feeding support to new mums, or money advice to those in debt, or help for elderly people unable to leave their homes?

Those charities have helped many people survive the last few months but are now struggling to survive themselves.

For small charities relying on donations and grants to continue providing their service, their financial situation is always uncertain. But for many, the crisis has had a bigger impact than they’ve experienced before.

So what can we do about it?

We can choose to support them of course, whether that’s financially, by volunteering our time or helping to raise awareness.

But what will have a greater, more lasting impact, will be charities telling their stories to the Government. Highlighting the impact that the pandemic has had on them, and the often vital services that may disappear without support.

Charities need to do that now and do it consistently. Those small organisations may not have a big voice when they stand alone. But standing together to campaign for additional funding and support could really have an impact.

We need funding and financial support to be targeted in a way that lets the regions decide how they can best support charitable organisations.

This week there were some big announcements from the Government, pledging support to people out of work, the hospitality sector and home buyers. They are looking to get the economy moving again after the lockdown.

Now is the time for charities to make their voice heard. And the louder we can all shout in support of them the better.

For about five years I couldn’t walk. I could barely get myself dressed.

I’d been crippled by Rheumatoid Arthritis.

It was a condition I’d had since a teenager. The doctors said it would catch up with me as I got older. I ignored them. They were right.

By my mid-20s I had to use walking sticks to get around. I was depressed. In a horrible place. One that I’m sure lots of people reading this have been to at some point.

Keeping going

Thankfully – with the help of our wonderful NHS – I got better. Physically and mentally.

One of the things that kept me going during tough times was work.

Like many people with a long-term health condition, work provided a counterpoint to other problems. It was something I could control.

When work doesn’t work

The problem was that work wasn’t working. Not for me. And not for many people in a similar position.

Unplanned bouts of fatigue and pain were hidden. Long commutes sapped already depleted energy. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

15%!!!

A quick scan on my diary from that time shows around 35 hospital appointments each year. For context, there were 253 working days in 2019. Add in annual leave and that accounts to 15% of working time at hospital.

I’ve always had supportive bosses. But for businesses of any size these are tough numbers to digest.

There will be countless people in your organisations going through similar challenges. Circumstances that make work and home life incompatible.

Last year 4.2 million Brits who reported they had a disability were in employment. 70% of the 1.8 million single parents in the UK are in work, up from just 44% in 1996.

Almost 5 million workers are juggling work with caring responsibilities for a family member or friend. That’s one in every seven of your staff.

Flexibility

All the Government reviews, research papers and reports on this issue could be boiled down to one word. Flexibility.

That’s all people really want and need. The freedom to make work work for them.

At Hough Bellis we wanted to give people as much flexibility as possible. No office, no commute (thought we meet up regularly) and, where possible, the freedom to choose hours that fit your circumstances.

More freedom – when handled properly – means better performance and happier staff. That’s always been our experience.

In the UK, 77% of employees feel flexible working makes them more productive. Only 17% of people who work from home feel regularly affected by workplace stress, compared to 37% who work in office-based cubicles.

Over 39% of the people who work flexibly see a noticeable improvement in their mental health.

The future

We are already hearing of companies reporting a spike in productivity and a fall in sickness for large sections of the workforce – including those with long term health challenges – since lockdown.

As we wrestle with what the future of our organisations should look like my ask is that we take time to think about how we can unlock the hidden talent in our organisations.

The dozens or hundreds or thousands of people who have never been able to thrive because their work life and home life were not compatible.

We have a chance to change that.

The old way was great for those who already had it good. It’s no wonder some are desperate to rush back to it.

For those who believe in people’s potential, let’s build something new!

All great stories start with change.

Whether it’s the inquisitive mouse setting off on a journey through the forest in Julia Donaldson’s  classic – and my son’s favourite book – The Gruffalo, or Sal Paradise heading west across America in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a story that inspired a generation of beatniks (and one angsty teen from Runcorn), there’s a common theme in the stories that define us.

Think of the books you love. The songs that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The newspaper articles that boil your blood, or academic papers that make you pause for thought.

The catalyst for all of them? They all start with a moment of change!*

Over the last few months we have had to reinvent our businesses, our society and how we see the world as individuals.

We are standing on extremely fertile storytelling ground.

A plot twist

Right now, whether we recognise it or not, we are all writing a new chapter in the stories of our ourselves, our communities and our organisations.

In the face of monumental change, how we respond will reshape how the world sees us. It’s a plot twist. A chance to take the story in a new direction.

Or, for those who don’t like the story so far, an opportunity to start afresh.

How we go about this will impact our businesses and careers for years.

Organisations who get it right – the local shop that delivers to its vulnerable customers, the pub that cooks for the homeless – will earn trust and be repaid with loyalty.

For those who get it wrong – the organisations which put profit before people or abuse the trust of the public – huge investment will be needed to repair the reputational damage. Some will never recover.

Storytelling takes time 

The stories of our organisations – and the people who lead them – take time to tell and need to be crafted so they fit with our values and aspirations. They need a narrative arc. They need a strategy.

‘Quick win’ newspaper articles are not storytelling – nor is spamming key messages out on Twitter.

Like a conductor standing in front of an orchestra, leaders must set the direction for thousands of individual actions choreographed to create a symphony that an audience (be it our colleagues, customers or stakeholders) can understand, believe in and celebrate.

Those promising otherwise are selling snake oil.

It’s a noisy world

The world is a noisy place – as Sarah Harvey wrote about in her last blog.

An overwhelming 6,000 tweets go out every second and this blog is one of nearly four million being posted as I write.

We hear communicators talk about achieving the fabled ‘cut through.’ But cut through only gets you so far. It needs to be backed up by trust. And an understanding that a brand or person belongs to the same tribe as you.

Stretch your hand out in front of you and give a thumbs up (don’t worry, you’re probably WFH so no one is watching).

The area of your thumbnail – that’s what you see in HD. It’s about 2° of our field of vision. The rest is more blurred. A bit fuzzy. It’s there. But it’s never quite as sharp. The more we move to the periphery of our vision, the less we can focus.

Our eyes are constantly scanning the horizon for things we should focus on. For signs of change.

We digest information in a similar way. There is plenty of it out there. But a tiny fraction of it commands our undivided attention each day.

Often these are the things that are relevant to our own lives right now – conversations with friends, family and work colleagues and information from causes that we already know align to our belief systems.

If we want people’s attention, then we have to earn it.

Fancy sports cars

One off campaigns that blast into public consciousness for a moment are like a fancy sports car zooming past us on the motorway.

We hold them in our gaze for a second – we may even stop to admire them – but we rarely dwell on them for long.

By telling our story clearly and consistently over time, by being authentic and sticking to our values, and by being brave enough to allow people and organisations to show character and vulnerability we will register more regularly in people’s vision.

This is how we tell our stories. This is how we build trust. And this is how – when we do get opportunities to cut through, and we do hold people’s gaze – our message not only lands but sticks.

We all have the chance to write our own story. Now is the time to consider whether you are happy with yours.

* Will Storr’s book The Science of Storytelling is excellent on this topic.

The coronavirus pandemic has been frightening. For many people, it has been a lonely experience.

Everyone is more distant than ever. Overcoming the downsides of this has been the focus of plenty of articles in recent months.

As lockdown restrictions continue to transform the way we connect and communication as both individuals and as organisations, I’d like to consider another perspective and ask whether in the face of these challenges, space has been created for some new and different voices

Author and businessman Stephen Covey famously highlighted that one of the most important habits of highly effective leaders is the ability not just to find your own voice, but to inspire others to find theirs.

While the lockdown has created huge challenges for everyone at both a personal and professional level, what it has created is a levelling of the playing field at a scale we’ve never seen before. From leaders to frontline workers and everyone in between, what is putting us all on a more equal footing in organisations is that no one has the answers.

Is this leading to a new environment not just where more people are finding the confidence to raise their voice, but where we have the space to take more notice?

The Zoom era

One of the biggest changes in how we do our jobs has been the overnight shift to video conferencing as the primary way for us to connect and continue to make things happen.

Zoom now has more than 300 million daily users. It has transformed our daily life, and, while the challenge of Zoom fatigue is very real, the new behaviours it is enabling could also be having some positive effects that we can build on for the future.

Some organisations that I have been talking too have been reflecting that they are starting to see that those often thought of as ‘the quiet ones’, now contributing more to conversations over Zoom and other platforms.

I was interested in an example of a Zoom meeting of around 15 mostly senior people discussing a new idea for a project, when one ‘quieter’ team member put some thoughts in the chat bar. That person’s idea went on to become the basis that the entire piece of work was taken forward on.

Whether they would have felt comfortable, confident or even given the opportunity to raise their voice above the crowd in a ‘traditional’ meeting setting is an interesting question, but on this new platform they had a new way to use their voice and they influenced the entire future direction of the piece of work as a result.

It got me thinking about how leaders and communicators can become more aware and better empower new voices in their organisations to feel confident enough to speak up. And if we did that how much hidden talent might we be able to uncover?

Thriving in lockdown

Similarly, there are some great examples of some of our current ways of working enabling people who have challenges with traditional office settings to thrive during lockdown.

People with underlying health conditions or commitments caring for family members that might previously have had to take time off to manage their health or responsibilities, potentially missing out on opportunities to have their say or share their ideas, are now being enabled to work in a different way and become more engaged.

Again, the benefits to organisations in unlocking new talent through a more flexible way of working is an interesting area to explore.

Old power vs new power

In the book #newpower, authors Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms talk about a shift in power brought about by an increasingly hyper connected world from a top down, controlled flow of information, to a more open and collaborative approach where ideas and movements spread and flourish at a pace never seen before.

For communications, this creates a new world of possibilities – one where it’s no longer always the biggest organisations with the loudest voices that are having the most impact but providing a platform for the most genuine and authentic messages to shine through. More about this in a future blog!

Navigating an uncertain future

We are all continue to do our jobs in the face of huge uncertainty. The only thing we know for certain is that we don’t know what the future holds.

If we are to build something better from this then hearing more voices will certainly help. The challenge for everyone – and communications professionals in particular – is to maintain this diversity of contribution when the noise returns.

Welcome to the new world of work.

But a word of caution. We might just find that – once the dust settles – this brave new world isn’t that different to the old one.

Big or small, most companies have wrestled with, planned for and even dabbled in introducing more remote and flexible working models. Now this is being imposed upon us.

Much has been written about how remote working and home working (and they are two different things) will change businesses beyond recognition.

This is nonsense.

“It’s evolution, not revolution.” A phrase made famous by Clifford Berryman’s 1934 cartoon about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal… and latterly, brilliantly bastardised in an Alan Partridge sketch.

This is what we are about to experience.

Lockdown has been abrupt and painful. But it has also provided a natural transition point for how we work at a time when many of us were already standing on the cliff edge of change.

It’s a line in the sand. An opportunity for renewal, where we recognise the things we were doing that had become archaic, and consider how we can adapt and progress to make work better.

This isn’t a seismic shift. Nobody is advocating closing every office in the land. There are no campaigns for a global ban on meeting rooms post COVID-19 (though some would argue there should be one).

This is a chance to take the good we learn from our time working remotely and make it part of whatever our new normal might be.

We’ve worked remotely since we founded three-and-a-half years ago and I’m here to tell you that there is no silver bullet here. More flexible approaches to working won’t cure all of your ills. They won’t stop a recession.

But, when done right, remote working leads to happier, more productive staff and creates a better work-life balance. Those are all good things.

I’ll blog on the reasons why we work remotely another day. For now I’ve attempted to bust some myths for those considering how they might introduce more remote and flexible working over the long-term.

These are based on our experiences along the way. I hope you find them helpful:

Culture and performance

Buildings don’t build culture. Having more desks won’t make your processes better. It’s people. It is always about people!

I’ve heard claims that being remote will affect your team spirit. Will make you less efficient or effective as a business. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Leadership, trust and communication are what matter. As is recruitment.

Staff wellbeing

All businesses, whatever size and however they are run, have a duty to wellbeing. For remote companies, that manifests itself in different ways.

Some people thrive working remotely, others will find it more challenging.

There is always a trade-off. There’s no need for long commutes, and people have more time for friends and family, but loneliness can become a bigger factor.  Working practices need to change to meet new challenges.

It’s important to remember that being remote doesn’t mean that you’re tied to your dining room table. It means you can work wherever’s best for you. Meeting up regularly (once we’re allowed) is important for our professional and personal relationships.

Trust is king

Remote working thrives in businesses with a high trust culture.

For those used to being micromanaged it is going to be a big shift and it could be a difficult time for staff. Managers will have to adapt to giving up more control.

If teams are used to managing their workloads and feel empowered they will thrive and productivity will likely go up.

Do what works for you

Every business is different. Every person is unique. Some of us do our best work in an office, others crave more freedom. It will ultimately be up to leaders to decide how much and quickly they feel their organisation can adapt.

This isn’t for everyone, but it’s going to play a big role in the future of work. Staff will come to expect flexibility. They will see the value in having more control over their own time. Now is the time to learn the lessons and find out how different working models features in your future.

Human connection. It’s probably not something we think about as part of our usual daily lives. We have our families, friends, colleagues, neighbours, people we chat to when we’re in the gym (or in the pub).

Most of the time, we wouldn’t necessarily consider these interactions as human connection.

They’re just our families, our mates. We chat, we hug, we do things and we do nothing, together. We don’t even really think about it much. That’s just life, isn’t it?

But with the arrival of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown, the need for human connection has, certainly for me, been brought into very sharp focus.

Suddenly, the ability to spend time with other people has been taken away. Lives literally depend on us keeping our distance.

Lockdown has been incredibly difficult for many people, myself included. As I write this, we don’t know when or how the restrictions will be lifted. We don’t know when, or even if, life will return to the way it was before the pandemic.

The phrase “the new normal” is being bandied around and quite frankly, it’s terrifying.

A new community

But this is our normal for now, and I’ve found it really interesting to see how people from across the globe have responded.

Sometimes it’s heart-warming, other times it’s rage-inducing, but the fact that we feel strongly either way about the actions of people who are so far away from us speaks volumes.

We’re now focussing a lot of our attention on other countries, watching how they deal with the crisis and sharing videos of people in Italy singing from their balconies or a Dutch train conductor pretending to do the job from his driveway, complete with blowing his whistle.

Does that mean that perhaps there’s been a shift in what we think of as our community? That it’s more about being human than being a certain nationality?

Making different connections

As lockdown continues and, for many people, loneliness increases, we’re looking for different ways to connect.

It seems that everyone is doing online quizzes, and we’re all Zooming, Facetiming and Housepartying far more than we thought possible.

Bands and musicians are doing online gigs, there are virtual comedy nights and dance lessons and fitness classes. There is even virtual speed dating… but don’t ask me how I know about that.

We’re clapping on our doorsteps to thank our keyworkers, people are dressing up as superheroes for their daily walk to make children smile, we’re checking on our neighbours, we’re writing letters and we’re making plans for “when all this is over”.

This shift in the way we’re communicating with those we love shows how important human connection really is to us.

Despite our many differences, the need to be part of a tribe is, and always has been, ingrained in us as human beings.

Communicating differently

Clearly the way we communicate with each other has adapted to the circumstances. But how about the way businesses are communicating with us?

Beyond the emails coming out during the first few weeks of lockdown, when it seemed like every shop you’ve ever entered in your life wanted to tell you that they were following Government guidelines and that the safety of their staff and customers was their priority, it’s been interesting to see how the messaging has evolved.

To me, it feels as though brands and businesses are becoming warmer in their tone, engaging with us as people rather than just consumers, becoming less formal and showing us their human side, too.

It will be really interesting to see how this continues as the situation develops. Personally, I would love this to become the norm rather than returning to more formal or faceless communications. It would be a real shame to break those newly formed connections that are so valued.

What can we learn?

Looking on the bright side of lockdown life, I’ve learnt a lot and I’ve started to think differently about things.

I am someone who has always valued my own space. I love some time alone to sing badly at the top of my lungs, or read a book, or watch some really trashy TV. However, this experience has taken it to the extreme and has been really hard.

But through the harder times I’ve learnt that gratitude and actively looking for positives can be helpful not only to lift my mood in the moment, but to re-frame my outlook on life.

Those friends and family I’m missing so much? I am lucky to have them in my life and I will never take them for granted again.

That empty feeling when I’d give anything for some time (and a glass of wine) with my best friends or a daft game with my nieces and nephews? I know that I’ll have those times again.

For many people who can’t go out or have no family, this loneliness is their regular life. I can’t imagine having no end point to look forward to after this, and I will be looking for ways I can help those people in the future.

Human connection is vital, and now that we’ve been forced to realise that through this scary and surreal experience, I very much hope we will all carry on caring for, respecting and thinking about each other in these new-found ways.

In a world where you can be anything…be kind

Every day we hear calls to “just be kind”.  There is a strong movement calling for us all to consider kindness in how we should live, think, act, treat others and increasingly importantly, communicate.

This is not a new message – Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius said “Kindness is mankind’s greatest delight” – the growing kindness movement today is one that communicators across all sectors can take lots of inspiration from.

Kindness is contagious

Scientist, author and advocate for kindness, Dr David Hamilton, highlights research from Harvard and Yale that shows how kindness creates a ripple effect – when you are kind to someone, that person will be kind or kinder to someone else, who will then be kinder to someone else and so on, continuing its effects way beyond your single act of kindness.

Not only is being kind good for our health and wellbeing, it has the potential to transform how companies and brands communicate and engage with their audiences. Put simply, being kind is good for you and your business.

Building trust

Kindness builds trust. It shows that organisations have empathy with their customers and their staff, and it inspires people to act. Jon Goldstone of Brandgym highlighted that to be kind, a brand needs to speak to its target audience in a tone that is authentic, honest and transparent, and over time it will become trusted. The actions of the organisation must of course be consistent with the brand, but I know what he means!

A great example of this in practice is in the health and wellbeing sector, where new brands like Deliciously Ella are creating a new model of business where the leaders communicate directly with their audiences, sharing honest content, giving insight into their lives and using this to encourage thoughtfulness and kindness – to ourselves, to the environment and to each other.  How can we encourage more of this I wonder?

Social media

Companies that have conversations based on a desire to be kind and engage empathetically with their customers on social media have stronger reputations. This builds trust and trust builds business.

A great example of one company that successfully used social media to turn a potentially negative situation into a positive was when Yorkshire Tea faced a backlash of comments after Rishi Sunak posted a picture that included a bag of its teabags. They reminded us that there are real people behind company social media accounts and put out a call for people to try and be kind. It was an authentic and honest call for empathy, with a bit of humour, and the response that followed was overwhelmingly positive. I was moved to buy their tea, and I am sure others were too!

A culture of kindness

Workplace civility is an important cultural issue for organisations – how we treat each other has a huge impact on how teams perform, how committed they are and how much trust they have in their employer. Research shows that if we experience rudeness at work, our ability to do our jobs can be reduced by up to 61%.  This matters!

How we communicate and facilitate conversations and engagement internally has an important part to play in creating a culture of kindness, supporting civility and enabling everyone to feel better informed, respected and engaged in their work.

Be kind

In an ever-changing world and particularly in the challenging time that we all face at the moment, it’s the companies that are acting and communicating with kindness and compassion that are really standing out for the crowd.

It’s never been more important in a world where you can be anything, to be kind.

Let’s do that and raise a cup of Yorkshire Tea to an ancient Roman!