Kieran Findlay

Welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast with me, Kieran Findlay and Jimmy Black. In previous episodes, Jimmy and I have spoken a lot about homelessness, but much of our focus has been on policy or the charities at the front line of the crisis. Today, we’re joined by two RSLs looking to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place.

Jimmy Black

Albyn Housing Society and Riverside Scotland both have interesting tenancy sustainment projects in place. So we are asking them what’s working, what has changed, and what needs to be considered when operating in different areas of the country.

Kieran Findlay

So Maureen Knight and Pamela Forrest, welcome to the podcast. To get started, can we get a brief introduction from you both stating who you are, who you work for and your areas of operation? Maureen, why don’t you start?

Maureen Knight

Thank you, so I’m Maureen Knight and I’m the executive director of operations/deputy CEO at Alban Housing Society.

We’re based in the Highlands, with the predominant area from Inverness taking us all the way up as far as Wick and Thurso. We have now branched out into Skye for some of our mid-market rents. So a large area, a huge population with very different communities. We cover nearly 80 communities. So we have to provide our services to a range of people and areas of population with different demographics.

Kieran Findlay

And Pamela.

Pamela Forrest

Hi everyone, for having me along today. So my name’s Pamela Forrest and I’m the head of housing and communities for Riverside Scotland. So we’re based in Irvine and we serve over four communities all across the Ayrshire local authority areas, so East, South and North Ayrshire communities. And we have Dumfries and Galloway, we have about 300 properties in Dumfries and Galloway.

Our organisation is fairly traditional in terms of the services that we provide. We have our housing team, our assets team, and we have a business support team, but we are part of the Riverside Group. So from the group aspect, we obviously are able to reach out and utilise all the expertise from the group, and we have a dedicated resource for income collection as well as other experts within the housing field, which is of great benefit to us and our customers.

Jimmy Black

Maureen, let’s start by looking at Albyn’s role and the specific pressures you face because the Highland Housing Challenge has been declared and it’s a bit different from other parts of the country. We’re talking about doubling the number of affordable houses to be built in the Highlands, and nobody’s quite sure where the money is coming from, and you also have a whole lot of existing pressures without the kind of expansion of the workforce that you’re going to have to face.

What is Albyn Housing Society? Where do you operate and what are the big pressures at the moment that the Highland Housing Challenge is placing upon you?

Maureen Knight

It’s very vast for us in terms of some of the issues that we face and you mentioned about the doubling of the numbers. So the first challenge that we have is actually getting projects through planning. Pretty much like most other RSLs with a healthy development programme, we’re finding a bottleneck in planning, which is obviously delaying site starts for us. We’ve got three current developments where we are facing these challenges to get them.

We’re due to start 206 site starts this year. Some of them were already planned to be on site and aren’t at this specific moment in time, so it makes it really difficult because these properties are going to provide a number of social rented houses, mid-market rents and some lift sales, which give us that mixed tenure because we do have varying degrees of people needing housing in our area.

We predominantly operate in, if you take as far down as Aviemore, but as far up as Wick and Thurso. And the needs in Wick and Thurso are very different to the needs that we have further down. If you take the Inverness central area, which is predominantly where we build. At the moment, we’re trying to get some site starts in Tain and also in Dornock. And again, these are about providing specific family homes to meet the housing needs analysis that we have undertaken. And they are very different. You’re right to say that, Jimmy, that the issues in the Highlands are different. We probably don’t have the pressing numbers that are in other areas, perhaps in the Central Belt. But nonetheless, the issues remain the same.

We’ve got a number of people who have some pretty strange needs in terms of that we have a lot of people who are very reliant on employment through hospitality and catering. So it’s very seasonal, so we can have people that will work for part of the year and then not work for other parts of the year. So that places a bigger demand on the mid-market rent side of things. We’ve got key worker issues, we’ve got a growing need for social care, but not the provisions for that, in terms of housing key workers.

One of the current developments that we have ongoing at the moment is that we’ve just bought properties in Ullapool that we’re going to convert. It was a former care home that had been closed down and we’re going to provide some FIT homes for that and some other properties that will be for the key workers that will provide NHS care in that area.

Jimmy Black

The Freeport is going to bring a lot of people in, or so people hope anyway, and you’ve got Scottish and Southern Energy in the network and the big expansion of that, so you’re going to have temporary workers as well as permanent workers. I mean, that must put a bit of pressure on you as well must make it difficult to plan.

Maureen Knight

Well, it does the SSEN in particular is probably one that is going to provide a big challenge for us in terms that they do want to provide temporary housing in the area which would some of it might consist of like pop-up type almost like small camps but SSEN have also made a commitment that they’re going to provide a housing legacy in these areas so what they’re talking about is working with ourselves Highland Council to provide new homes that they will then basically rent for a number of years from us in a kind of leasehold arrangement and then they would be gifted back to the community so they would end up becoming social housing.

So in effect, they will upfront fund some of that. So that will provide some much needed investment in the area. But like anything, you’re dealing with a large corporate organisation, and the wheels of these things don’t always turn as quickly as we would like them. So that does make it difficult to plan for us. We’re trying to set aside properties so that we can assist with that, because obviously, the revenue that that will bring for us will allow us to do many more things at Albyn that we would not perhaps be able to do.

And you know exactly the same as you said around Greenport, know the fact that we’ve got you know all of these people coming in it places untold pressures across all of the accommodation. We’re even in a situation sometimes just as an example, if we have to decant somebody because of an emergency situation and we want to put them in hotels, we’re struggling at the moment to find hotels because of the amount of workers that are being put up in these.

So it puts strains on operational things that you wouldn’t generally think of, but it’s ultimately where all these people are going to be housed whilst all of these works are going on. SSEN at the moment don’t have all of their planning permission for the overhead cables and things that they are putting in, so we’re holding our breath at the moment in terms of that.

Kieran Findlay

Pamela, Riverside Scotland has been implementing its Housing First for Families service. Now, Housing First is a term that we hear a lot in terms of homelessness, very, very linked to that. But Riverside Scotland’s initiative seems much broader. What was the reason behind that name? And just give us an idea of what the service is as well

Pamela Forrest

So our Housing First for Families service was launched in 2021 and it started as an initiative really through Scottish Government funding, where we were able to establish this project and really deliver it for our communities predominantly in Ayrshire. We did take the Housing First model, so again it is utilising the Housing First model that lots of RSLs already know about through the homeless team and through rapid rehousing. So we have taken that model where it is Housing First, but our Housing First for Families service is geared towards families, families who have either experienced or are at risk of homelessness. And usually these families have multiple and complex needs and they may also be accessing like several services across multiple agencies. So that’s what this service is aimed at.

The service is primarily aimed at prevention of homelessness but it’s also there to provide that wraparound support service and that support service is bespoke to each and every family, depending on their own personal needs and wishes.

Again, the service is, you opt in and you can opt out. It’s absolutely not a condition of taking a tenancy with us, but it’s there to provide support for the family. And its main aim is to sustain that tenancy long term and to prevent homelessness from happening again, or for children within the family, ideally for them never to experience homelessness.

So we’ve now been running this for four years. I would say that it’s quite different to traditional housing support because it’s customer-led. Basically, each family has their own individual support plan and that plan is reviewed and it can change as many times as that family want during the course of their tenancy. We will never walk away from a family. So again, if a family feels that they are doing really, really well and feels that they can live without accessing our support, that’s absolutely fine. But if in a year’s time or 18 months’ time crisis hits again and they contact us, we’ll just lift the case up again. And that’s what’s certainly quite unique about our service because it really is client-led.

Kieran Findlay

We hear all the time how pressed organisations are for resources. Like you said, as well, many of these families are already working with different agencies. But does being under this Housing First for Families banner give everybody a bit more impetus to work together and cooperate on these things?

Pamela Forrest

It definitely does. We’ve got dedicated Housing First for Families officers which are completely separate to our traditional housing officers. So their skill sets are different and their case numbers are different. So you could have a traditional housing officer that might have a patch of up to 500 properties and tenancies, whereas a Housing First for Families officer has a maximum caseload of about 25 families that they will deal with. So it’s very small numbers and it’s aimed to be flexible.

So some of those families will require quite intense support and that might be every day, that might be for a full day, it might be for a few hours every day, whereas there are other families who are doing really, well and it’s a weekly appointment or it’s a fortnightly phone call or it’s a I’ll come along to that appointment. So it can really be whatever the family wants it to be. But yes, we have taken it completely away from the housing officer role. This is dedicated specialist support services delivered by our officers who have come from really a care background. So our officers have got some experience either working within homelessness, working within care, through social work and through supporting victims of domestic abuse.

So that’s the skill set that we have within our Housing First for Families team. And we do believe that those skill sets, they are really, really vital. It’s those kind of skills, it’s that ability to take time to really actively listen, to really provide that kindness, that comfort, that patience that is often needed as well to help somebody who’s really, really struggling, got multiple issues, multiple complexes, to really help that family to work through them.

It can take a long time. We’re now in our fourth year of operation and we still very much have the same families who have come on this journey with us and they’re now being supported for the fourth year. But they’re obviously, they’re living a completely different life to when they came to us. They do report that they’re feeling much more confident within their own life. They’re able to manage their home. They’re able to work with lots of different agencies, which was quite often something that was just so overwhelming, and that they would maybe avoid, they would avoid appointments, they wouldn’t make the appointment, they would be late, it was just too much.

Our Housing First for Families officer can really help a family navigate all the complexities of working with multiple agencies and be able to support them and advocate for them and physically take them to whatever appointments they need in order to get the support and the assistance they require and like I say four years on we are seeing real successes from the families that we’ve been working with.

Jimmy Black

So Pamela, I read the Care Inspectorate report on Housing First for Families. I’ve never read a more glowing report of any care service ever. It was all ‘very good’ and ‘very good’ was I think the top you could get so fantastic congratulations on that.

Maureen, Albyn offered a reactive housing support service before but now it’s a proactive tenancy sustainment service. Why the change of name? What’s the difference? What are you doing differently?

Maureen Knight

So basically in 2023, we designed our whole customer services team who had been very similar to what Pamela was talking about and having generic patches. And we were finding that because of our geography, we had 16 different patches and trying to ensure that that consistent service was applied across those 16 services was proving pretty challenging for us. So what we decided to do was basically to redesign into specialist teams and one of the teams that we formed from that was our tenancy sustainment team, and that was with a specific eye on us aiming to have a high level of tenancy sustainment in terms of that once a family or a single person, anybody came to us, their tenancy remained.

So we looked at what we could do around that. But it was also redesigned just because we were finding that there was a massive difference in terms of pre-COVID to now, in terms of the support services that was available in the Highlands. And we actually did an overlay of ourselves in the Highlands compared to the Central Belt. And we found that we had far less services than you could access elsewhere.

So we knew that we need to provide something more. So that was the origin of where our tenancy sustainment team originated from and two years as we’ve grown on we’ve really realised that we needed to take this different approach, which is why we’ve come up with a couple of initiatives that we are going to be talking about today.

Jimmy Black

And is the service you’re providing similar to Housing First for Families?

Maureen Knight

Ours is probably slightly different in that it is open to everybody. So we’re taking two specific projects, one of them being our early intervention service. So really what that entails is the minute that we’ve identified an applicant who is coming to us, who’s going to be taking up a tenancy, even before that tenancy starts, a member of the team will go in and have that first contact with that applicant to find out as much as they can around what they need in order to successfully start that tenancy off.

And a number of things around that can be ‘What’s your circumstances at the moment? Do you have furniture? Do you have the necessary things that you need to start that tenancy off successfully?’

What we do find is that in terms of we looked at the tenancies that had failed over a period of time. And what we found was that sometimes it was basic things like not having floor coverings, not all of the things that they needed. So we knew that we had to address some of that to enable people to have that successful outcome in terms of that. So for us, early intervention was that first point, ‘what do you need before you even start?’ Also then just so that they got to know the Albyn staff a bit better, so that if they did want to disclose further information to us that they felt comfortable around us and it wasn’t just that they met us at a sign-up and suddenly that was our first contact with them. So that was what we did around that.

And then we broadened that into the Making a House a Home project because again, ‘what does this need?’ And for some people it’s very small tailored packages, it can be things like a kettle, a microwave, a set of curtains. But for another tenant, it might be that they’ve basically had to leave a previous tenancy with nothing and they’re starting off with nothing so we’ll help them in some cases do a full kit-out of that and this is just about making it as successful for them as we possibly can. So we, regardless of whether or not it’s a single person or you know a small family or a large family, that early intervention starts at the minute that we identify them. We also use it for tenants that are going to be transferring as well, for example, if their circumstances have changed and they’re moving to a bigger property. So it’s about sustaining the tenancy, whether or not they’re new or existing.

Kieran Findlay

I see as well that you’ve introduced new community benefits agreements to tie into your tenant support fund. How has that been received by the contractors themselves, and what successes has it had in its early stages?

Maureen Knight

We were re-procuring all of our reactive maintenance services last year and when we looked at that, we looked at the option of community benefits. Now that usually has the form of contractors doing education pieces around schools, etc. But we had thought would be far more beneficial would be if contractors could directly contribute to the Tenant Support Fund, which is a fund that Albyn provides £150,000 annually to help support tenants in various ways. So what we looked at was a 1% payment back to the Society from our contractors on an annual basis.

So we just started last July when we procured all of that and just at the start of the new financial year, that equates to about £43,000 that’s coming back directly to support our tenants. And from that, we’re going to be using that for the Making a House a Home specific projects. There’s going to be money from that that will also go towards an initiative with New Start Highland who are, again, they’re another community enterprise that we will be working with to supply those goods across various ways.

So our tenants over the course of this year will see that even distribution across various funds, which will be through the Tenant Support Fund, the Early Intervention Programme and Making a House a Home.

Kieran Findlay

Pamela, I see that Riverside Scotland has expanded its Housing First for Families service at Dumfries and Galloway. You have a new officer working there to join the team.

What was the specific need that you identified there, and what kind of support will be, do you imagine, or is being already tailored to the families in Dumfries and Galloway?

Pamela Forrest

We very recently expanded our service in Dumfries and Galloway and the reason for that was our existing Housing First for Families officers had picked up a couple of families from Dumfries through our internal referrals from their tenant partner, which is our housing officers. And there also were another few families that were really on the radar as being potential for Housing First for Families. We had some families that have got increased rent arrears, they’ve got some poor property condition and poor mental health. So we started to build up a possible caseload in Dumfries.

Now Dumfries is 65 miles from our head office in Irvine, where the two Housing First for Families officers are based. So it was really becoming time-consuming to travel back and forth. And sometimes we would travel to Dumfries and the family maybe wouldn’t be home or wouldn’t engage that day. And for us, that was a four-hour round trip on our day. So we started to recognise that actually, doing that commute wasn’t really going to work for us long term. And we started to look at our common housing register and what our promise was through that in terms of our lets to homeless. And we have a 55% homelessness target in Dumfries and Galloway. So we do have, we do house quite a high percentage of our relets to homeless cases.

So we engaged with the Homeless Casework team to tell them all about our Housing First for Families service and they were just blown away. They right away could recognise the need for that service in Dumfries and they said that they would be absolutely delighted if that came to Dumfries. So that was part of our proposal when we were thinking, you know, that’s the right area to do an expansion and we’ve got the support of the homeless casework team. We’re already recognising from our own customer base that we have, a small number of Housing First for Families and like the casework because it starts quite slow and very intense, you can only start with small numbers and then as you get to know those families and you start to develop that relationship and you start to maybe nudge them along with some successes you can then start to add more families to the service.

So it just seemed like the right time, it seemed like the right place for us to expand. And like I say, having the support of the Homeless Casework team was fantastic as well. So they are fully on board and it means that when they are speaking to a homeless family about their choices, about their area base, they can now start to see Riverside area is here and actually as part of their service, they’re able to offer this support to the family if that’s something that you’re interested in. So quite often we’ll get referrals with a note to say ‘potential for Housing First for Families. I’ve spoke to them and they’re interested’.

So right away, that allows us to pick up on that conversation with the family to just tell them a little bit more about the service and to chat to them about what’s their family makeup and who are they working with and where are they having some difficulties and what would they maybe like to try and achieve or try and get better at and just to show them that we could be with them and work with them together and build up a little bit of a plan in order to support them to move into their home. But not only that, to maybe look at their life as a whole and start to look at capacity building and resilience and confidence building and self-esteem and really make some progress that way to try and build a successful and happy life. That’s what we’re looking for for the families that engage with us.

Kieran Findlay

Pamela, you’ve said that you’d love to see the Housing First for Families adopted more widely across Scotland. What would need to happen to make that a reality? And you look into policymakers to help you with this or as it so often is, is it incumbent on RSLs to look around and see a gap in service and just do their best to fill it?

Pamela Forrest

I think for me, think a lot of it maybe does fall to policymakers, to Scottish Government when they are opening up the funds for homelessness prevention. What we often see is, maybe come mid-year, there’s money available for homeless prevention, but you’ve got to have it spent by March. And you cannot deliver or set up a service like Housing First for Families or a long-term sustainment project in six months.

So what we tend to do is we all rush for the funds and we go, ‘yeah, we can provide crisis prevention’ because that’s what it becomes. But, you know, a crisis prevention is not helping in the long term. What I would really love to see is for there to be a specific fund for Housing First for Families, so a prevention fund, but dedicated to Housing First for Families. We’ve got the model and again, we are in the fourth year. We know that it’s working. We’ve got 100% tenancy sustainment of our Housing First for Families, families that have engaged with us. So we know that it works, but what we would love to see is for other RSLs to be able to take our model and fair enough, adapt it to their own needs of their own communities.

The bones are there, the model is there. But what we would love to see is for there to be a specific funding stream for Housing First for Families, because this project is not something that can be done in a year. This requires long-term funding, long-term investment. And it originated for us through £105,000 that was awarded from the Scottish Government. And that took us to our first three years of funding. Thereafter the service was so successful that we knew we couldn’t do without it. So we then brought that into our permanent structure. So Riverside Scotland is therefore funding it going forward.

And then we have been able to expand the project in Dumfries through money from the Riverside Foundation. So again, it’s funded for the next three years. But there’s that promise at the end of the three years that we will absolutely bring that into our permanent structure as well.

So that’s the difficulty, it requires funding, it does require commitment and it’s got to be a long-term commitment.

Kieran Findlay

Maureen, if you had one message to policymakers to help Albyn continue to provide the services and other RSLs to provide the services that are desperately needed at this moment, what would it be?

Maureen Knight

I think reinforcing what Pamela said is that there has to be money behind it. We have to have access to streamlined funding so that it’s not something that you’re saying that we get at a mid-year point and it’s a six-month rush to spend the money and we’re throwing everything that we have at it. We need the money to build a team that can provide the services, that we can train people for it and that we’ve got access to that funding that will allow a sustain, it’s about like, tenancy sustainment. We need sustained funding in order to be able to do it. Homelessness isn’t going to go away. If we throw something at it in the next six months, it has to be something that’s there permanently. So I think it’s about asking for the appetite to look seriously at some of these projects that RSLs do.

You’re speaking to two today from probably 160 providers that are all doing their own thing because they all know that something is needed. So I think that the key thing is to talk to us, understand better what we’re doing. We are the experts in this, and we’ve got the ideas where we can deliver these projects, but we do need money in order to do it. We can’t keep trying to patch another bit of the budget across to try and provide another housing officer here and there and just have a bit of stab at it because we all know that the work that we do is, I often call it that they’re very hungry babies to feed in terms of the services that we need to cover for people.

So we’re constantly taking it away from one pot and handing it over to another. So if we could have something that was streamlined a bit like where we look at funding for development programmes for the affordable housing supply type thing, something where we know that we’ve got three years or five years of money would really allow us to get our teeth into it. And also for us to work as a collective, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There’s some great projects out there that we could adopt and easily plug and play into the needs of our own communities.

Kieran Findlay

And to finish up on a really positive note, could either of you share an example without naming names, of the kind of difference that your services have made to a particular household or a family?

Maureen Knight

I’d happily share a success story for us. So we’ve got this what we call a first independent tenancy. So it’s somebody who has come from a multi-tenancy situation before where there was a family breakdown and we had to rehouse two separate people from it and we’ve been able to help them. So we’ve worked with our local authority there, taking two people from temporary accommodation that wasn’t working out for them for a number of reasons. And what we’ve been able to do there is with our partners at New Start Highland, we’ve been able to basically furnish them and equip them with the goods that they needed to start that tenancy off in the right manner.

We’re also helping them with support around finding employment in a new community because they’ve had to move from an area where they knew everybody to an area where they don’t really know a lot of people because of some of the difficulties that we’re facing. And what we’re finding is that that initial help that we’ve been able to give them has really, really, really helped them. And one of the things that we got just recently from the tenant was that they’d said to us that without our help, they didn’t think that they would be here. And one of the things that it also made them do was to look at their own health situation around their mental health, some of the things that they were struggling. And they’ve now made an appointment with their GP, who’s helping them. They’re being referred for some specialist help in the hope of getting a real proper diagnosis. And they know that their health is not great, but at least they’re getting the help. And they wanted to thank us for their patience and their understanding and they’re hoping that they’re also going to be able to visit their family soon, which they had never thought was something that they were going to be able to achieve. And they just feel it’s good to know that someone cares.

So for me, I think the fact that you’re hearing directly from people that you’ve changed their situation where somebody’s not had hope, and then they suddenly change from that and they’ve started to turn some of the things around. I think it’s really humbling to be in the position to be able to help that. And that’s just one story from several. So far this year, we’ve helped 71 tenants through the Early Intervention Service. We’ve got almost 4,000 tenants and last year alone across the year, we had 1,213 referrals. So that’s, you’re talking nearly a third of your tenants that are requiring, it can be really, really small scale help to large scale help, but it just shows you what’s needed out there. So for me, think the fact that you’ve got direct quotes from tenants that tell you the difference that you and your staff team are making, it does make you feel very, very proud and it just means you want to do more.

Jimmy Black

And Pamela, if you could add a story.

Pamela Forrest

I do. Like Maureen, we probably have several stories that I could share with you today. We’re currently supporting over 50 families. So we’ve got 50 families now in our Housing First service. And there are a few standout cases. One of them was one of our first Housing First for Families cases. She came to us very young. She was 17. She was pregnant. She’d been living in temporary accommodation for a couple of months. She was very, very quiet. She’d come from trauma. She’d come from a household where there had been alcohol issues and some abuse. So she was very, very vulnerable, really vulnerable living in our temporary accommodation. She did have a partner, but again, that situation, there was some domestic abuse in that relationship, but she was still very much with her partner and wanted to be with her partner.

She was referred to us for housing and we picked her up as a Housing First for Families case. And like that, when she came to the viewing, she was really just thinking I’m just going to get this house and that will be me I’ll move in have my baby and nothing more.

And then she realised that the Housing First for Families officer would actually be with her every step of the way. And they started to make a plan, ‘right, baby will be here probably in a couple of months. So what do you want to work in first?’ And they were able to get a nursery decorated and things for the baby. They were able to apply for all the grants so that they could get floor coverings, all the essential household items. They were able to use some of our budget to then pick up on some items that weren’t available through the grant. And they started to make this house a home.

And during that process, the Housing First for Families officer was able to build up a real strong connection with the girl. And she opened up a little bit more about the relationship. And although she knew that she was in danger and things had happened in that relationship, she wasn’t ready to leave that relationship and she wanted to be with this person.

Baby then arrived and again our Housing First for Families officer was there supporting them, making sure the health visitor was getting in to check on baby. And over time, our tenant was able to build up a lot more confidence and was able to end that relationship. And after she had ended that relationship, she worked very, very closely with the Housing First for Families officer to really start to build her own confidence, her own self-esteem.

She wanted to start thinking about who she was going to be as a person as her baby got older. She wanted to be somebody that was working, she wanted to provide for her family and she really worked very hard. She worked with lots of agents like Social Work Department, she was engaged with counselling services and she started to develop a plan and she was very creative and she really wanted to go to college and do something with that. So we supported her through the applications to go to college and that then led on to employment. And since 2023, she’s been in employment and she’s now got two children and she still engages with the For Housing First for Families officer and she still speaks to her every couple of weeks just to touch base, just to check in.

And again, we are there for her depending on what she needs. There’s sometimes extra forms to be filled out or she might need a little bit of support to go to a social work appointment or to attend an appointment at the school that she’s really nervous about. But in the main, she has really come on leaps and bounds. Her confidence, she’s got a smile. She speaks really highly of the Housing Firsts for Families officer and she’s out there living a life. She’s got friends, she’s got a job, her children are engaging in school and this was something that she just never ever thought that she would be able to achieve. But you know she’s out there, she’s doing it and she does credit a lot of that to the support that she got in her tenancy and she does call her Housing First for Families officer a friend.

She said ‘she’s more than an officer, she’s a friend to me’. She says ‘I’ve cried on her shoulder, I’ve phoned her you know out with office hours and now she’s taking my call.

‘She’s literally been there for me for whatever I needed her’ and that’s a bond that’s absolutely there. That’s the positive relationships that are built through this type of service.

Maureen Knight

So I was just going to say in terms of what Pamela was saying, the role really reinforces that that role has changed and I think one of the things around being a housing officer is that you need to have great empathy and I think what we’ve spoke about today shows that.

I know it’s demonstrated in Albyn daily and I’m sure it’s the same in your organisation, which is the part of it that does make you very proud because empathy is something we can train forever with lots of different things and lots of scenarios, but you can’t teach empathy. And I think that’s about, I think this shows that we’ve got great professional teams out there who are able to be that professional, but to also hear that you’re helping people to this extent that they turn round and they call a housing officer a friend because I think the key to what we’re all doing here, the success of it is that getting that engagement, which is the really difficult part of it. And I don’t think that we can ever forget just how difficult that is and our teams need to be really resilient around that because sometimes it takes five or six attempts to actually get there.

But look at the results. We’re really proud of our results. We went from the tenancy and sustainment team’s inception, that we went from 93% of our tenancies being sustained to nearly 98%, which is a tremendous figure for us because what that’s telling us is that, you know, we’ve got less people, you know, turning over and this is what it’s about.

Kieran Findlay

That’s great stuff. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks to Albyn’s Maureen Knight and Pamela Forrest from Riverside Scotland, both for the fantastic work that you’re clearly doing, but also for coming with us today and sharing all about it. Please do subscribe to the podcast, share it amongst your friends and your colleagues and get in touch with us if you have any ideas about future guests or topics.

Thanks as always to Jimmy Black and thanks for listening.