Housing Community Summit 2024: A Transformative Gathering in Liverpool

Berwick Partners’ Bonnie Amos-English and Marek Dobrowolski were delighted to attend and participate in the inaugural co-hosted Housing Community Summit. Held in Liverpool, it marked a significant milestone for the Social Housing sector as it was the first time the event was co-hosted by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation.

Bonnie kicked off her conference experience by attending the CIH’s Future Housing Leaders breakfast session. The panel consisted of Chief Executives and senior leaders in the Social Housing industry who have all had interesting and varied journey’s to the “top job”. Bonnie commented:

“This session was incredibly inspiring, and the panel spoke so openly about their personal experience, including the challenges they had all faced throughout their careers and how they overcame and worked through them. What an excellent way to start the conference, and hopefully the representation to audience members who had maybe been questioning the next step in their career the proof that there are many different ways to reach senior leadership and C-Suite positions”.

Being in Liverpool for this event was an excellent opportunity to build on the important work that Berwick Partners have done with Liverpool City Council this year in their newly created Housing Directorate, most notably appointing the new Director of Housing. Marek Dobrowolski, Partner for Place and Regeneration, who has led on our work with Liverpool City Council, was also in attendance at the conference, with his highlight being an insightful panel discussion on “How to get to 1.5 million homes” hosted by InnerCircle Consulting. Marek commented:

“I was struck by the candid nature of the panel’s views and the focus on the sense of opportunity the sector faces, despite some huge challenges”.

The panels and talks throughout the course of the conference were carefully curated, taking attendees through the most important and critical topics of the day. Both the Social Housing Regulator and The Housing Ombudsman were present on panels to talk about the new Consumer regulatory landscape, and offer early insight and candid feedback from their findings so far for those who are preparing for their inspections.

Another key theme of the event was the use of data to improve customer engagement and experience. It was clear from the amount of SaaS and data exhibitors in the conference hall that digitalisation is a key topic on the agenda of all social housing providers. During the Data Utilisation in Customer Engagement panel, Paul Harris (CCO of Curo Housing) spoke about the need to collect the right data, and use it to improve the service to customers and tenants. He talked about the importance of not viewing data collection as a “tick box” exercise and instead working on creating tenant surveys that would provide specific and useful data that can be converted into actionable tasks to better serve residents, and to improve their experience when going through a planned or emergency repair process.

Looking Ahead

The Housing Community Summit 2024 set a high standard for future events in the Social Housing sector. The diverse range of topics and the depth of discussions provided some excellent points for attendees to take back to their organisations. We look forward to attending next year’s event, and in the meantime look forward to engaging with our clients to assist them with leadership appointments covering themes across data-driven engagement, effective complaint management, asset management, community development, and health integration.