Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast and Happy Scottish Housing Day. I’m Kieran Findlay and today with Jimmy Black we’re exploring this year’s theme of ‘Everybody Needs Good Neighbours’. Finding out why it was chosen and what it really means for people and communities across Scotland.

Jimmy Black

Yes, and a Happy Housing Day from me too. We’ll hear about the findings of a brand new report on neighbourliness and community trust, and we’ll also look at how housing associations are bringing those ideas to life through regeneration projects that go far beyond housing management.

So joining us are Callum Chomczuk, national director for Scotland at the Chartered Institute of Housing, and Jamie Ballentine, social regeneration manager at Queens Cross Housing Association.

Kieran Findlay

So Callum, this year’s theme is focused on ‘Everybody Needs Good Neighbours’. Talk to us about the Scottish Housing Day team, when they get together to make this decision, and the kind of process for doing so, and why now for this theme?

Callum Chomczuk

Thanks, Kieran. So as you know, CIH Scotland, we chair the steering group for Scottish Housing Day every year. And really what it’s turned into is a focus on the areas that probably don’t get as much attention as others for Scottish Housing Day. We talk a lot about the housing emergency. We talk a lot about homelessness. We talk a lot about net zero, quite rightly so. These are big systemic challenges.

So for Scottish Housing Day, we want to focus on maybe where we can improve things, but we also want to celebrate great work that goes on in the sector. The great work of housing associations, local authorities, private landlords, great working practitioners. And we felt that actually, we’ve never really had that focus on community and neighbourliness. We never actually had that deep dive into actually the great work that goes on across Scotland every single day, and the quiet work of communities and social landlords and helping catalyse that, but also just the work of the people in those communities.

So. it was really that concept and the steering group were delighted to focus on it and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve done what we can to shine a bit of a light on the work of neighbourhoods and communities, and really trying to start maybe a deeper discussion around what more can be done at a national and local level to support social landlords, to support neighbourhoods and communities.

Kieran Findlay

So the team has got together and produced a survey, undertaking some workshops, I believe, and they’re showing that people do value their communities highly and in a report that people will be able to read today, there’s also a revelation about some frustration about issues like litter and safety and disengagement. What do you think this tells us about the balance between the places and the people have in creating a strong neighbourhood?

Callum Chomczuk

Yeah, so you’re absolutely right, Kieran. For the most part, and this chimes with other national surveys that governments have done, there’s real positivity about people where they live. They’re really proud of the place, they’re really proud of the place-based features, but they love the people. The people, actually, the connections they have to their neighbours and other individuals, are the things that really matter.

And I think what came through our surveys and our workshop was that, exactly as you said, it’s frustration, because people want it to be better. They’re not asking for the world. They’re not asking for things that are unachievable. They’re actually not even asking for things that other communities have as well. But what they’re wanting is honest endeavour from community groups, from organisations, from the state and council to actually do what they said they’re going to do, to engage, to listen and to help them improve the things that they know they can be part of improving. They’re not asking for a lot, but what they want is just that commitment to working with local people to improve things, so making the neighbourhood safer, making them cleaner, improving team spaces, some of the basic things that so many of us take for granted that other people just want a little bit more of.

Jimmy Black

Callum, we want to make this a nice positive podcast. Actually, we want a positive image to emerge from all of this. But you know that it’s people that are the problem as well. I mean, I’m a councillor, as you know. I have people who are erecting six feet fences between themselves and their neighbours’ gardens and putting up cameras and polls so they can survey what’s going on and ring doorbells have become a fascinating source of CCTV evidence about the kind of things, neighbours screaming at each other through the doorbell actually, and making sure it’s recorded so the neighbours absolutely get the full benefit of the screaming.

Anti-social behaviour is a massive problem. How does that chime with what you’re saying about the way that people look after their neighbour, or think about their neighbours?

Callum Chomczuk

So the report is, as I said, broadly really positive about people’s experience of their neighbourhoods and communities. But it’s not absolutely. We’re not living in a utopia. There’s still, there’s absolutely that recognition around crime, around anti-social behaviour, about neighbourly disputes, about environmental negligence. So that all happened. But I think one of the things they kept coming back to was the support of the council and the support of organisations to help address those challenges. So when complaints and issues are being raised, so they’re not having to be raised time and time again.

And I think what we found in our report was maybe some of these trusts had broken down between some organisations and local people, that things were asked for and not delivered on. They’re quite modest things, asked for but not delivered on. And when that trust breaks down, there’s a disengagement, isn’t there? And actually, often the place that community groups can come in and help address some of those gaps, their capacity is pretty limited.

So absolutely, Jimmy, there is. It is not a utopia, there’s positivity, there’s great work going on. But people, even where there are examples of less desirable behaviour, people still want to have an ability to work with others to address it. And I think that, for me, that’s what the report comes across. It’s not trying to whitewash the challenges. I actually say, actually, we give local authorities, RSLs and other community groups a little bit more capacity, a little bit more resource and let them in work for local people. We might address some of these kind of neighbourhood disputes that you’re talking about.

Kieran Findlay

Jamie, Callum has set out the national picture there quite well, but your role at Queen’s Cross is very much about the practice of community regeneration. So tell us about your work and how it reflects with this year’s theme of Scottish Housing Day.

Jamie Ballantine

So I’m the social regeneration manager at Queen’s Cross Housing Association and this year’s theme is a perfect fit for the work that we do at Queen’s Cross. We#re involved in social regeneration, community regeneration, bringing people together. And we’re doing this work day in, day out, every week of the year. So one of the things I would see is that I think people, human beings are fundamentally social creatures. They want to interact with others. And we get a lot out of that.

We know that from a lot of the national research that there is a problem with things like social isolation and we know from the indicators that we’re always looking at locally like the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation we know what the factors of multiple deprivation are so when we are looking at a programme of activities for social regeneration we’re thinking ‘what can we do what can we do that might chip away at social isolation,’ ‘what can we do that might chip away at some of the factors that lead to people being unemployed or struggling on low incomes’.

So all our initiatives are in some way orientated into trying to tackle some of these big pictures. And obviously housing is one of the cornerstone aspects of this because access to affordable quality housing is kind of built into it all. And we know that housing associations, community-based housing associations like Queen’s Cross, what we do is in high demand. You’ll hear often about the things that go wrong, you’ll hear is housing associations getting criticised and depressed for one thing or another. But the big picture is that it’s a success story. There’s far more people on our housing list than we can ever house. There’s a huge demand for it and we know that it works.

So what we do at Queen’s Cross, it’s a combination of things but ultimately some of the common denominators are, I think, bringing people together, helping them to get to know their neighbours and helping to foster some positive relations, social connections, which I think are key to a healthy community and key to healthy social relationships.

Jimmy Black

How do you create that positive feeling about a community then? I mean, you’ve got this amazing Cedar mural project. had 200 children helping you design a piece of public art. Did that work?

Jamie Ballantine

That one did work. That was a couple of years ago now, Jimmy, but I think there’s a good legacy from that project.

That mural, if anyone wants to look it up, if you Google the Queens Cross Housing Association hands mural, that was part of an inclusion project where we were working on the theme of trying to make people feel welcome. What makes you feel welcome in a community? And we consulted the community about what makes you feel welcome and got their ideas for this mural project.

The resulting theme of the multi-coloured hands stacked up on the side of the gable in the stacking, one potato type motion. The result of that mural was the outcome of a lot of consultation. And what happened there was we asked people what made them feel welcome and they talked about social connections, friends, holding hands, and they also talked about the diversity of the community.

So a lot of the submissions that we received were pictures of people holding hands around the world, different coloured hands, older hands, younger hands, hands with tattoos, this type of thing. And the artist worked with that to came up with what they did. The good thing about the social connection for that project is everybody that took part in it remembers that they took part in that and they wrote in their ideas. And because so many people suggested some theme connected to hands, there’s a lot of people that walk past that on a daily basis that think that mural was their idea. And I think that’s a good thing, because everyone’s got a social connection to it.

And that’s another example of when you’re planning a project like that, you’ll have the people that say to you, well, don’t do that. That’ll be vandalised. And that was two or three years ago. Now, I don’t want to jinx it, but that doesn’t have a mark on it. And we find that a lot when we spend money in communities, be it a capital project, be it a new community garden. I think when you provide something good quality, people do tend to look after it, especially if it’s something they wanted in the first place, something they’ve asked for in the first place. So I think that was a successful project. And it also, I think, shone a light on the diversity in the area and gets people to think about that.

Kieran Findlay

Callum, one striking finding I thought from the report is that people are more willing to offer help to their neighbours than to ask for it themselves. I think I’m probably guilty of that personally. So what do you think that reveals about trust and confidence amongst your neighbours and communities in general?

Callum Chomczuk

Kieran, I absolutely agree. For me, that was one of the standout findings from the report. That desire to connect to people, but that shyness, essentially, that lack of confidence around engaging. I think that’s, maybe there’s a reflection of society and where we are. So that’s part of the reason about Scottish Housing Day. It’s a part about how do you connect people? How do you build on the great work of Jamie and Queens Cross? And how do we create a, how do we roll that out more across Scotland? And that was part of what this day is really about is we want to celebrate great work, but we also want to say, how do we improve that? How do we address that tension, that awkwardness, that lack of trust?

So I talked earlier about, I do think there is a role for the state. I do think there’s a role for local authorities in being more dynamic and trying where they can, as engaging and following through and building that trust. I also think it’s critical for social landlords more broadly as well. But how can they learn from organisations like Queen’s Cross and take some of the small steps that people might not be mindful that may make an impact, but start to do so themselves?

And then also there is responsibility on us as human beings. It’s not just that we can’t just outsource this, benefits to communities, neighbourhoods, to organisations it’s actually up to us. So how do we support and look after them? I think we’re all probably part of WhatsApp groups and things like that. And actually you think about where we’ve come in that kind of digital connectivity is sometimes it can seem as a really bad thing, actually really, really powerful and really effective in actually bringing people together.

Equally, in the housing sector, we’re seeing more and more robotics and AI and data can be daunting, but actually helps keep people connected as well. So I think we have to be mindful about how we can use that. And hopefully, we get to the point that we start to trust people again, Kieran. So actually we’re just as likely to ask for help as to offer. And I think when that trust exists amongst people, we’ll start to see greater community cohesion.

Kieran Findlay

Jamie?

Jamie Ballantine

Yeah. One thing to reflect on, on Saturday we were holding a community consultation event down in Dundasvale, which is basically the city centre in Glasgow, next to Cowcaddens if you know it. And we were consulting the local community on what they would like to see a currently unused space used for in the future. And one of the interesting things that happened at that consultation session was I found myself in a three-way conversation with two other residents who had lived near each other in the same block for 10 years and they had never spoken to each other until that day. And they actually got on quite well together. They had common interests, one of them knew the other one’s family members.

Thinking about that, that lets you see about particularly in high urban density living conditions like multi-stories where this was, think people sometimes are suspicious of their neighbors or wary of their neighbours until they’ve had a chance to meet them in a safe environment, which we obviously facilitate at that consultation event. So I think one of things we can do as community-based housing associations is we can facilitate these connections. We can create opportunities for people to come together where they can check each other out in an environment that’s safe. And quite often, what happens is friendships form at these groups or these activities and new connections are made. And I think that’s all for the betterment of the community.

We often talk about feelings of community safety. And one of the reasons you maybe don’t feel safe in your community is because you don’t know who people are. You don’t know why they’re there. And when you get the opportunity to speak to people, I think that often breaks down the barriers, the perceived barriers. So that was one from Saturday that I thought was, it kind of summed it all up for us. Whatever comes out of the consultation, which will be a lengthy process, there was benefits already from that day.

They’ll all remember the day they came down to discuss the use of that space with us and some of them will probably go on and meet each other for a cup of tea and things. So I think that neighbourliness is important. We can definitely do work to bring that together as social landlords.

Callum Chomczuk

I think just adding on to what Jamie said, that’s exactly what we want to see, isn’t it? Because that is the power that Queen’s Cross and social landlords have. That organising, that brokerage role almost to bring people together gets past that point you made there, Kieran, around people feeling awkward and uncomfortable. ‘I can’t ask someone for help. It’s not my role, but of course I’d help them’. And that community capacity building at Queen’s Cross and so many others do so well is absolute power beyond the management and the building of a social and affordable home, for that day-to-day experience.

And we also know that people’s experiences and how they feel that their neighbouring communities are different. As Jamie said, whether it’s an urban or rural area, whether you’re young or old, whether you’re rich or poor, or you’re experiencing community, a neighbouring list can be quite different. So we need to, we can’t just take what Queen’s Cross are doing and say that will work everywhere. We need to build these structures and systems around the people that we’re trying to bring together. But that’s exactly what we want to see.

Social landlords do so much, it’s a struggle to ask them to keep doing more, but this is what makes a difference to people’s lives. Actually, exactly what Jamie’s talking about, if you’re bringing people together, you’re doing so much more than just managing your home. You’re making them feel good about life because they feel that connection to their people. And that is what Scottish Housing Day is about this year. It’s about talking about how we can drive greater community engagement and show that everybody has good neighbours, learn the lessons from each other so that if we do this again another time, we see even greater engagement and greater happiness about where people live.

Jimmy Black

Angus Housing has a nice thing that they do. Meet, greet and eat. Or it might be great to eat and meet. I can never remember which way around it goes, but that works really well. One of the things that you mentioned in the report is street parties. Now, that’s interesting. That just feels a bit like 1950s Britain with Union Jacks and the Queen.

But actually, I realised when I thought about it, my neighbours in the lane that I live in, have street parties, we have lane parties. It really works because we all know each other now and we help each other. Can we find ways of doing that in large urban estates, council estates, housing association estates? What can you celebrate and bring people together to enjoy?

Callum Chomczuk

Jimmy, I think you’re right, and I think it still comes back again to the point that Kieran mentioned. This is about that awkwardness that people feel about asking because organising something like that, that’s an ask, isn’t it? It’s like asking somebody to come to your birthday party perhaps, I don’t want to organise it. That’s a bit much. Actually, your example is perfect because when you do that, you do find that people, these are people that you’ve shared a street with, shared your life with for years and years and years. You know more about them than probably lot of other people in your family that you work with. So actually, there is that appetite to come together and for the right occasion.

And I stay in Edinburgh as well, I can think of not so much my street, but streets around me often will have street parties for whatever reason. So there is that, it’s about us perhaps finding a little bit of resource to make it happen. Community leaders and I think, Jamie and the kind of the whole kind of community-based housing association movement is based on community leaders recognising there’s a need there, actually recognising the to mobilise local energy and actually put in place structures and organisation systems that addressing these people have them right now.

Let’s be honest, loneliness is an epidemic, like it’s crippling people’s mental health across the country. So actually the work that Jimmy, what you’re doing and then the Jamie’s doing through his employment at Queens Cross and so many other social landlords are doing actually helps address that. So yeah, we all need to get over the Scottish cringe. We need to be a little bit less sheepish about ‘I don’t want to organise something because no one will come along’. Actually, we know there’s an appetite and this report I think encouragingly reinforces that that people do want to feel connected. We just need to have confidence in our convictions.

Jamie Ballantine

Just to come in there on Jimmy’s suggestion, that’s something we’ve tried at Queen’s Cross as well. We’ve had community barbecues at multi-storey sites and they’ve been really popular. We’ve done that through our Queen’s Cross Community Foundation, and I think partly, the multi-storey sites are good because, one, they’re easy to get the word out, you can put posters up, you can get the message out. And also, once you’re actually having the event, people can look down on it and decide if they want to come and participate or not. So that’s quite useful.

One thing which, and you also mentioned, Callum, about social isolation, and the negative impact it has. It’s actually, if you look at some of the reports around that, this actually leads to physical health problems too. There’s negative health outcomes for people that are suffering from social isolation, more likely to have heart disease, more likely to have depression, more likely to have physical problems. So a lot of the activities that we do, particularly when we’re thinking about some of the older tenants, is we’re looking at things that they want to do that tackle social isolation.

We have a singing room, which used to be set up a number of years ago now as a pilot. And through various rounds of funding, we’ve managed to keep that going over the years. That’s a really positive one because people come together. The act of singing helps, I think, with things like memory recall. It’s a bit of a workout for the lungs and it’s sociable. And we offer this in of our community facilities, which is right next to where people live, so it’s easy to get to. There’s no cost.

And I think that’s the sort, so we’re trying to replicate situations where people can choose to go to quality activities at no cost to them. So we’re removing the barriers. If you can’t afford it, it doesn’t matter, you can come. And the Queens Cross model, which over the years means we’ve ended up with community facilities in all our neighbourhoods. Every time we’ve either built houses or taken on houses, we always end up with more community facilities. So it’s about putting those to good use as well.

Yeah, so I think that’s what we’re trying to do. You were talking about at the start, how do we do more of it? And I think a lot of it comes back to the fundamentals. We need more investment in social housing because your rental pool will increase your capacity to do this type of work. And if you’re having more housing, then you need more community regeneration or community development. Because I think it’s obvious, the benefits are obvious when you start to add up what you can easily put in place is basically all about preventative public health. That’s what it is, it’s preventative public health.

Jimmy Black

Can I take us back to anti-social behaviour again, just briefly? We have these powers in terms of housing officers, have powers, anti-social behaviour orders, the police and so on. And they’re like sticks. What can the police and community workers and local councils do positively to try and assist the landlord like a housing association create that kind of harmony in the community, deal with really difficult, bitter anti-social behaviour disputes? Are there positive things that these other agencies can do apart from just going to court?

Callum Chomczuk

I suppose for me, I’ll let Jamie come in in a minute, I think for me, one of the things I see in my own local community is actually just the presence of community police officers has probably been, I think during summer, sometimes connect and aid social behaviours flared up in pockets for lots of reasons. But actually simply that visible presence of community police officers has provided a way to relax the community.

That is not necessarily a long-term solution and the kind of resourcing, I appreciate, every community is not going to have police on the beat at every single moment. That I think is really useful in the short-term but I think like anything it’s about building relations people at a local level, at a school level, at a community level. Actually, ‘who are the police?’ ‘what is appropriate?’

I think so much we talk about rights and responsibilities about tenancies, and that’s absolutely righ,t but it does go beyond that as well. Actually how do we how do we help people understand their rights and responsibilities about just being a good citizen, being a good neighbour and a good person? So, the police can play a part in that. The schools have actually absolutely got a part in that. But what I said earlier about what our own role is, we need to model, we need to lead and we need to show actually what it is to be a good neighbour.

Now, I’m not trying to paint a picture of motherhood and apple pie and suggest that then we’ll create a kind of nirvana. But these are some of the steps I think are absolutely critical to help address some of these underlying tensions. Absolutely, like every other public service, I’m sure police and others in education will want more resources to be able to do that and quite really and they can make the case for that. But we know if we’ve got more housing officers, we’ve got more resources, we can support some of the work that Jamie and Queens Cross are doing to also help address those anti-social challenges.

Jamie Ballantine

Yeah, I think on anti-social behaviour, we’ve got the same tools that everyone else does, the same package of rights, the same legal measures. Our housing management teams are pretty effective at resolving anti-social behaviour cases. And I think, as I say, the stuff that we do is to try and make life in communities that bit better. It’s more, I guess, diversionary. It’s more on the preventative end.

But I think that’s just one of the challenges of providing the strongest package of rights, in terms of security of tenure. It will obviously be a bit harder at times to resolve some of these tendency matters when they come to light.

Kieran Findlay

Jamie, it’s often said that we live in an online world now, people are often siloed from others with different views and interests, and these are increasingly becoming fractured further by bad actors for a whole host of reasons that we don’t need to go into, but have you seen any trends that back up this theory or hopefully dispel it?

Jamie Ballantine

Well, obviously I see that too and the online world is pretty grim. But what I would see in the in-person world, we work in very diverse communities. Queen’s Cross communities are very diverse, hugely diverse. And because we do a lot of in-person activities, what you see when you bring people together from different cultures, backgrounds, what plays out is nothing like what you see playing out on social media. People get on with one another, they talk to one another, it breaks down barriers. I think there is huge value in that.

For example, over the years, we’ve done various things, like celebrating Chinese New Year, introducing elements of Scottish culture, bringing different cultures together. A couple of years ago we did a Ramadan Iftar event where we invited basically members of the native Scottish community along to this Ramadan Iftar event. And that was, you can see the barriers coming down before your eyes. You can see we had a group of people at one table. And at the end of the event, one of these women came up to me and said, ‘Up until this evening, up until this evening, I thought a Muslim was a Pakistani. And that’s what I thought.’

And she was, you might think that’s ridiculous, but that was just her being open about what she’d learned that night. And she’d made new connections. She’d met new people. She’d tried new food. And that’s the sort of stuff that I think does chip away at some of these barriers, because she will have gone back to her community and her circle of friends and told them about that positive experience, I’ve no doubt about it. So I think it does play out.

You’re talking about how can we do, coming together, street party type stuff in urban communities. So every year we have a Gala Day, a Queen’s Cross Gala Day. And this year, I think it was our record turnout, it was about two and a half thousand people turned out. And we use the Firhill complex, which is near Firhill Stadium, but it’s not connected. And we have a big site there, we fairground rides, have stalls, and we have indoor activities, outdoor activities. You’ve got two and a half thousand people to come together from all walks of life. There’s no arrests, there’s no trouble, there’s no one falling out, and there’s no name calling or anything like that.

So I think you’re right, I think the online world is a terrifying place, but people behave differently when they’re in the community, when they’re in person, in our experience.

Callum Chomczuk

Just to add to what Jamie said, it has that elements, doesn’t it? It absolutely has that viciousness, but it can also be a real utilisation. So complementing, for example, the work that Jamie and Queens Cross have done. But you communicate that through WhatsApp groups and other online messaging networks. So it doesn’t need to be just seen as a bad thing.

Actually, like I said earlier, I think so the world as well, members of far too many WhatsApp groups. I think in my kids at their school, there’s a creative fair on this weekend and there’s something on the following weekend. And that’s shared with the networks of parents and others through these online communities. That’s how they mobilise and that’s how you get that critical mass. And they’re quite easy to use for most people. So we can utilise digital tools to actually bring people together in person.

It absolutely needs that combination. It’s not just about, we’re not looking to, when we’re building neighbourhoods and community, we’re not looking for simply online communities, obviously can have a place in certain circumstances. They’ve got housing associations, local authorities, it’s bringing people together. But let’s try and use these digital tools that exist to then bring people together and reinforce that and just start new relationships that will drive better community cohesion, exactly as Queens Cross have been doing.

Jimmy Black

It sounds like you’re trying to generate pride in communities, a feeling that we all own this stuff and we should all look after it.

Jamie Ballantine

Yeah, that’s exactly right, Jimmy. And that was one of our strap lines in the last business plan was, ‘proud to live here, proud to work here’. That’s what we’re trying to achieve. I think one thing I should explain for the purpose of this podcast is I think that the Queen’s Cross Group, we’re talking about the housing association, but the Queen’s Cross Group as a whole really is a force for good.

So in the Queens Cross Group, you’ve obviously got the housing association, but we also have a workspace company that lets out commercial premises to small and medium-sized businesses. And that’s an economic driver also. So we’ve got local employers in the community. We also have a factoring service. So we operate in an area where we’re city centre, West End, Possilpark, so Woodside. So we have a factoring service that people also choose to want to go to. They choose us over some of the private sector factoring companies. And we’ve got our community foundation. So we’ve got this Queens Cross group and that creates our own circular economy, our own circular economy of things happening.

For example, in terms of a Queens Cross success story, for example, in the summer we run a summer holiday programme where parents can send their kids to one of two summer holiday programmes and that’s partly funded by the City Council, that’s also partly funded by the factoring company and the workspace company. And people can send their kids along and some of them will literally live in one of our houses, send their kids to one of our summer holiday programmes, go to work in a premises that’s owned by Queens Cross workspace. So, it’s that kind of circular economy going on just locally.

But obviously within that, we still have to look beyond our own group. We’re obviously very grateful for it and we couldn’t do half the work without, for example, the funding from the City Council and organisations like the Lottery and the government. So yeah, that’s the kind of big picture. So I think you’re right, Jimmy, that is exactly what we’re trying to do. We’re just trying to instil pride in the community and we’re looking at housing, we’re looking at social, we’re looking at economic and we’re just looking at how can we provide the best services within that group and how can the group benefit all its component parts.

Kieran Findlay

So community engagement, neighbourly connections, all very positive stuff, but everything or so much of what housing associations do nowadays is measured. How can you measure success in this kind of work?

Jamie Ballantine

So we report to every funder that funds one of the components, we report to them. They have their own measures, but generally, we look at things like footfall, how many people attend a thing. Footfall is also some sort of basic indicator of vibrancy. If there’s a building where nobody goes to it, it’s not very vibrant. If you’ve got activities on there several times a week and people are coming and going, that’s vibrancy. That’s creating a meaningful flow of people. So we look at footfall.

We also look at some of the individual case studies, success stories. And often, some of those success stories are the unexpected. Somebody might come to an event or an activity for that purpose, but then whilst they’re there, they maybe reveal another bigger problem in their life to one of my colleagues or one of the other participants. And that might lead them to be signposted to something else, which maybe helps them address a more challenging aspect of their life. So we can measure that. We can share the case studies. And we also get feedback as well from people if they like it, they keep coming back.

We do use, every year we prepare an annual impact report, a social regeneration annual impact report, where we basically compare this year with the last and we look at how much we’ve delivered, how many people we’ve worked with, what neighbourhoods we’ve worked in. At Queen’s Cross, we also use the social value toolkit that’s produced by HACT and that gives us a monetary value for each activity that we offer and that allows us to add that up and see how much total social value we have created or generated that year.

Now we don’t make the values, that’s provided to us by HACT, and then we use that toolkit to get the value. The values are based on things like how likely those activities are to be of benefit to society. So they’ve done their own research to come up with those. But it allows us to chart progress, and it allows us to put a figure, albeit perhaps quite arbitrary, but a figure of positivity on what the combined social value of our projects are.

Kieran Findlay

I suppose now, Callum, looking ahead, what are the biggest opportunities and supposed challenges for housing associations who are trying to build these stronger and more resilient neighbourhoods?

Callum Chomczuk

So I think Jamie hit the nail on the head when he talks about size and capacity. We’ve got enormous waiting lists. We’re still in the housing emergency as we record this today, ahead of Scottish Housing Day. We’re expecting an announcement from the cabinet secretary for housing on the Housing Emergency Action Plan. We need investment. We know there’s need out there.

And that actually comes back to that point you said, that question there about how do we measure things, things that Jimmy’s talking about regarding anti-social behaviour. Now we can measure improvements now, can measure progress and complaints, we can look at how much are we spending on cleaning up damage to parks and communities. We can measure, we can track if we’re actually improving against those metrics.

We can’t do it on nothing. And actually, we do need that resource. We need that resource from the state and starting with the Scottish Government to invest in housing associations and councils so that you can build the homes, manage the homes, also deliver the services around that.

But then that has to cascade through, doesn’t it? It means that local authorities have to say what they’re going to do and follow through with it. And rebuild that trust that came through. And then the responsibility falls to us, I think, as individuals, to try and drive at creating that community that we want to see being a little bit less awkward than maybe doing that street party, checking in neighbours, and just helping that community cohesion.

There’s a lot there, and I recognise this is not the priority that comes up because we talked about the housing emergency and that’s fine, that’s really important. This is absolutely critical because this is actually how people feel about living in a community. If social landlords can just think a little bit more, mirror and learn from the work of Queens Cross and build on the great work they’re already doing, I’m absolutely certain that they’ll be able to improve communities across Scotland and we get back to our tagline and ensure that everybody gets the good neighbours that they need.

Kieran Findlay

What’s the best neighbourly gesture that you’ve ever seen, done yourself or received?

Callum Chomczuk

If I can take the liberty of giving you mine, Kieran. So I think back to the pandemic, because that was a heightened time for all of us, wasn’t it? Locked in our house minus an hour a day. My kids were younger then. I remember there was a lot of kids, my daughter’s year, she was in P1 at the time, were having our birthdays around that first lockdown. Birthday parties and all these things are cancelled. But what the community, what the parents, what everyone did was they hid a present for that kid in their own garden, and they went on a trail around the local community and like that made them feel like a million dollars. You only got an hour out of your day, what did you do? You went on a scavenger hunt to collect birthday presents for yourself. It wasn’t a big present, but it made people, made those kids think that actually they were thought about.

And it’s just as those exactly as Jamie said, it’s gestures. It’s about time. It’s essentially it’s about that connection we feel to other people. What was in the box or whatever it was is absolutely irrelevant. But, it made people think and know that others were thinking about them. I think at the time it was quite hard. And that’s what we’re getting back to. That’s the core of all of this is actually, how do we let people understand that we are thinking about them and we do care about them and think that doing that in a way that’s proportionate to the need and helps really build the trust that we’re open to looking at connection we’re looking forward to with each other.

Kieran Findlay

Thanks everyone, we’ll wrap it up there. A huge thank you to our guests, Callum and Jamie, for joining us and sharing their insights into Scottish Housing Day. Happy Scottish Housing Day again, however you choose to spend it. If you’d like to read the research report from the Scottish Housing Day team or even the Community Regeneration Impact Report from Queen’s Cross, and the mural as well. We’ll link to all three of them in the show notes and they’ll be on our website.

Don’t forget to subscribe and to share the podcast amongst your neighbours even. Why don’t you do that today? Thanks always to Jimmy Black and thanks for listening.