In this conversation, Neil shares the real story of how a simple change, renaming his team from "Compliance" to "Customer Safety", had a huge impact on team morale and purpose. Neil also offers his insights into his approach to recruitment, focussing on raw intelligence and professional pride rather than just qualifications.

Hi, Neil, thank you so much for coming down today. Obviously. Welcome to the People in Housing podcast. We're going to start off by introducing yourself.

Thank you for inviting me. My background, environmental health is my first love and career. I did that for 10 or so years and then I switched over to housing about 12 years ago now.

Yeah, so bit of a switch. So instead of serving notice and harassing landlords, I became the landlord that needed to prevent that from happening in the first place. I worked at a couple of housing associations and worked on everything from general property safety compliance stuff all the way through to the new Building Safety Act.

Perfect. Pretty much you in a nutshell. Amazing.

So, what do you think is the most important thing people should know about you today, obviously to have that trust in you as a speaker today?

I suppose my multiple perspectives from enforcement through to being on the other side of the fence lends a bit of credibility, just because I know generally what regulators look for.

So, there's part of it. But over the past five, six years, I've been very fortunate to be part of lots of different groups. At the moment, I’m Chair at the National Housing Federation's Building Safety Group.

That's a group of a dozen or so housing associations that look at trying to come up with best practise and steer people and other housing associations along the way to achieving really good building safety. And then I also, it's not actually been announced yet, but I also now sit on as an Expert Advisor to one of the working groups for the Buildings Advisory Committee. So, I'm advising that committee that sits under the Building Safety Regulator.

Hopefully that gives you credibility. Don't trust everything I say. What I say to all my guys is make sure you don't forget that your professional curiosity is one of your most important things. So anything I say, please always have a look at it closely, of course.

And I know there's going to be a lot of things that a lot of people are about to relate to.

I know one of the main things at the moment is recently a lot of organisations are experiencing downgrades in the industry. So can you walk us through that? What did that look like and what were the challenges that you faced?

Yeah, blast from the past, downgrade in 2015. It was a really bold step because they self-reported to the regulator which certainly wasn't the norm back then and still some would say isn't the norm now. But you know really honest and open with the Regulator which is massively commendable. So they self-reported in 2015, we had at that point six and a half thousand unactioned FRA actions. We only had about 75ish percent of our FRAs completed.

There was a gap of about 27,000 EICRs for the electrical certification. Barely had an asbestos register and there was a load of issues with legionella. So not uncommon themes but you still see that happening now as well. But we were the first housing association to be down ready for non-gas safety related elements. So myself and a chap called Nick Melling, shout out to Nick. Still the best boss I've ever had. We were brought in to fix that problem to help. We built a really strong team and worked tirelessly.

What do you think that like other housing associations could take from that and learn from it if they're experiencing that themselves?

It would depend upon the position they find themselves in. But some of the core things that I think really still resonate with me today and that being enshrined within our team, are that trying to focus just on the slavish following of KPI's is at the root cause of why things go wrong in the first place.

So, if you have a look at how there's a big divide, and that it's less now, but certainly back in 2015 there was a huge divide between the way we looked at occupational health and safety, so the safety of our staff and the safety of customers. And there is still a big divide.

And that's why the Building Safety Act is so foreign to a lot of people working in the built environment. They're expecting the Regulator to tell them what to do, and whilst I agree there are certain things that are difficult to try and work out and implement before you submit to the Regulator. The point is the Regulator isn't going to tell you what to do because that would be prescribing. And that's the exact opposite of what you do in occupational health and safety. That's why it's such a good system and a mature system.

One of the biggest things that you can do to try and transfer some of the learning that we've had since the 70s, since the health and safety workout came out into the built environment, is to transpose the plan do check act model.

So, when the Building Safety Regulator and when the legislation was being, the new stuff was being written, the reason they've gone down a route of recommending BS997 and other safety systems is because they want to get people doing the plan do checkout model.

Now what Housing has gotten into a habit of is focusing on the do part. The how many fire risk assessments have I done? How many actions have I got outstanding? How many asbestos resurveys have I done? That stuff that you can put a numerical value on. That's the stuff that housing really focuses on. And what it forgets to do sometimes is look at how well have you planned? How well have you learned a lesson? And I can understand why people don't necessarily do that because it's really bloody difficult.

Yeah, I can imagine. It's not that actual number, like you said, it’s that data. Right.

That you can see and that's probably the underlying message that I always give my guys. This stuffs never done. It's not like running a project on your home and building an extension. It's more like housework. It's never going to stop. It will always get continuously more messy. And then you’ve just got to keep doing things and then find better ways of doing things.

So that for me is one of the fundamental things that I would advise to the built environment professionals that are out there. Is to stop looking at things like a prescriptive list of things I've got to do. To write how am I going to plan this to be really good, then implement it and then learn what went wrong and then enact the changes.

It takes longer. And you will mess up.

Part of the problem that the built environment has got at the moment is that mess ups cost a lot of money. It's not like I've accidentally delayed that fire door inspection or whatever that doesn't have a massive cost you. It's I've submitted a plan for Gateway 2. And now it's been rejected and now I've got tens, hundreds of thousands of pounds, just ebbing out of the business. So I appreciate that what I'm advising is difficult and, potentially expensive, but ultimately will end up better. I have faith that it will end up in a better position.

I had a look recently at, some of the publications that were released following the output of the Health and Safety Work Act and you'd be amazed at how similar, when you look on LinkedIn now, about the comments being made about the way the regulators are behaving now. Have a look back at how they were talking about the HSE back then. It's almost identical, really. So, it will get there.

Of course, with time and a bit of patience as well. Obviously.

When you and the team were obviously going through that, how did you approach it, during that difficult time as a team?

As a team, we focused on seeing things from the customer's perspective to try and make sure that we weren't so focused on the KPIs. We were forgetting the humans. So an example of that is we changed our team name, and this is way before this was in vogue. Yeah. And bear in mind, this is 2015, 2016. So prior to Grenfell. We changed our team name from Property Compliance to Customer Safety. To reinforce we're not here to achieve the bare legal minimum, we're here to keep people safe.

Even that small tweak changed things. When we were going to finance and asking for additional budget, it wasn't, “I need more money to achieve the bare legal minimum compliance”, it was, “I need more money to invest in customer safety”. And all of a sudden your finance partners are, “ah, I understand it”. And it is something that needs investing in. You then have that similar impact on your supply chain.

We don't have a big DLO that sits and does that at the moment. So it’s making sure our supply chain lives and breathes that as well.

It's so helpful to turn around and go from compliance to safety. They understand there's a different dynamic. And ultimately if you as a leader. Sorry, me as a leader. Sat there telling your guys, come on, break your back for me. Achieve the bare legal minimum.

It's not inspiring anyone, is it? Not the right language, is it? But if you turn around to them and say, look, I need you to go back to the well for extra energy because. You're keeping families and their children safe.

All of a sudden you get that extra energy and you get that extra work from people that you probably wouldn't do if it's just about chasing numbers.

100%. And I guess like you sort of said it’s inspiring and like more motivating.

How did you keep that team motivated, to obviously when you want to try and achieve the same goal?

Because we're a national housing association, we had to move around with the problems in the stock, sometimes that meant that a dozen or so at some points were in a hotel, localised to a problem that we needed to deal with. And so that team bonding we did there was amazing because you spent a lot of time together, learned about each other's families on a different level that's away from work.

And so, we ended up being in a position where you didn't want to let the rest of the team down by not trying 110%. There's one aspect but it always comes back to. It's very difficult not to be inspired by trying to keep other people and their families safe. And if you aren't inspired by that, you don't really end up in the team for very long.

Because we ask for a lot of dedication in that mission and if you're not prepared to give that dedication, you don't end up in the team for that long. It just too intense.

Oh God, absolutely. And then, I know you spoke about the team and things like that.

So, what do you feel like the main traits are for finding that right person to join a team that's obviously been bonded and that's had that motivation together.

It's really simple. And I think we're really fortunate in that because we work differently to others. Part of the team structure, we got rid of the traditional divide between the compliance part of the business, which usually does the policy writing, procedure writing, does the far risk assessing or the legionella, or at least manages the contractors on that function. And then what they do is they sort of pull the work, put it into a system and then divvy it out to other teams to do the work. We got rid of that divide. My team looks on paper to be much bigger than other compliance teams, but it's not. My team isn't a compliance team. My guys do both the policy procedure writing and the risk assessing. And then 90 to 95% of all the works that come out of those risk assessments, so that ends up in a world where it's very different to most other housing associations. We learned very quickly in the early days that if you got someone from a compliance background, they were quite poor at managing all of the contractors because it's a very different skill set.

You need to have a lot more empathy and be much more problem solving on your feet, of course, and vice versa. There were people that just didn't have the ability to sit and concentrate on the same thing for five weeks to fix it.

What we ended up finding was actually these people don't exist. People. These all rounders don't really exist. We're going to have to create them. So where that ended up, it became very simple. Instead of us trying to navigate, lots of people out there that were putting their CVs into us for the perfect candidate, we realised we needed to create them. So boiled down what we searched for and still to these dates, at the core of what we search for when we hire new people in, of course, is raw intelligence. And professional pride. Right.

If you've got those two things and you can demonstrate that in the interview, you've got a really good chance of getting into that team. And more importantly, you've then got a really good chance of progressing through that.

So if you look at my team, we've been together for 10 years now, I can't think of anyone. In fact there is, other than people that have literally just joined. There is no one in that team that hasn't had at least one promotion. Most of them have had two or three. That's partly because we've created about that bond and a similar goal together. But it's all fundamentally on those two common denominators. That's my advice.

How would you sort of identify those characteristics? Because obviously having an initial conversation with someone at face value, you don't know those things. So how would you sort of feel that. 

And I’d recommend pulling out those characteristics or identifying them in interview.

Anyone that's been interviewed from our team. I don't know whether it comes as a surprise or not, but the questions aren't your normal questions or actually they are the normal questions, just not necessarily for a compliance team. So we rely quite heavily on things like, what are your leadership qualities? How do you lead a team? Leave a really nice open question.

And then you'll find people that have thought about it and therefore are intelligent. And have had that introspection. To understand that, right. This is a leadership post, I'm going to have to really think about my leadership. That's the professional pride part.

And if they come up with a really good answer to that question, you can almost sense that. And then the other absolute classic, almost cliche. Definitely cliche. Is your strengths and weaknesses question. So tell me your strengths and your weaknesses? You can immediately find out who's just googled anyone that comes into a strengths and weaknesses question. And says, sometimes I'm a perfectionist. It's my weakness. Very nice to meet you.

Say, they've not got that introspection, they've got not that self-awareness and it's not that they can't get that. We try, particularly if it's an internal candidate, we make sure that we feedback to the candidates that there are certain aspects that you need to think about how you're answering these questions.

That's the way we go about it. I think it often comes as a surprise to people trying to get into our team that we don't ask more technical questions.

You can rely on a CV for some of the technical stuff. You can't rely on a CV for those raw intelligence and professional pride indicators. So, you need open questions.

Yeah, absolutely. Which I think, like we mentioned before, it's so important of having that similar thing as a team because, when you're going through those crises, you've got to be on the same mission as well.

Do you feel like there's anything else in the industry that you just feel like we're not really talking about enough?

Yes, but not necessarily that it's what we're not talking about enough. We're talking about these things a lot. I don't think it's got to the right level of detail yet. The two things that I think are not necessarily silver bullets but are things that if we got right, the whole playing field gets easier. And I'm not just talking about safety; I'm talking about the whole of housing industry.

The first one is information management and data. So, through the years I've been fortunate enough to write, and contribute to a fair amount of the golden, well, all of the golden thread information and guidance that's come out. And through that I've had to study a lot of how housing manages data and what I've realised is that data management is so poor in housing, that until we get that right, we might as well just throw money up a wall.

It's not like people aren't talking about it. You've got the golden thread, you've got key information management from the ombudsman, you've got lots of people talking about, and highlighting that data is really important, but no one's quite understanding why the data doesn't work. They know the symptoms of the disease and they're pointing out all the symptoms of the disease, where they don't truly know the cause. If you don't truly know the cause, how are you supposed to fix it?

So I think there's a deep question that needs answering around. We've got 3,000 odd housing associations. How is it as a sector been allowed that we effectively talk 3000 different data languages? There's no way any of your supply chain can be efficient in all of those different languages.

There's slightly more talk around data tables, around things like Yuka, housing data standards. Which I'm a massive advocate for. That if everyone, all housing associations turned around tomorrow and said I'm going to start using the UK housing data standards, it means that when you talk about a building and I talk about a building, we know what the same thing is. We're using the same definition.

Whereas now, at the moment if I went to another housing association and I said we own this many buildings, we wouldn't agree. We nearly merged with an organisation two years ago. Took us best part of six months to work out how many properties they owned. Because they knew how many properties they owned. It's just they had a different definition of property to us. And so, it's something as simple as that.

But try that across the thousands of thousands of different attributes and sub attributes you have in a data system. So I think that needs to be fixed and there's lots of people working on it.

I think there's not enough depth of conversation around the Director, Exec Director and even bored people to really understand when you say we need to sort our data out. What that truly means. So there's that one. Then once you've got your data sorted, it's probably going to take, five, ten years to do that.

The other big thing that I think is necessary for us to really transform housing is to fix the competence situation. There's a lot of non-competent people just simply because to a degree we're all non-competent with the new building safety regime and the new law and all that. We're all semi-incompetent on that because we don't know how to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. And everyone's learning.

It takes a long time to inspect it. Exactly. It takes a long time to do that. So I think there's a big space at the moment for people to try and fix that and more power to the robot if they come up with some solutions because that again is a structural issue.

That's going to take a long, long, long time to fix. But it's well worth the effort because those two things coupled could just transform our services for our customers.

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