Housing stock condition: bridging the data gap

He adds that “the next year or two will be dynamite in our industry” with regard to providers bringing their stock up to standard, with far-reaching consequences for those that fail.

 

“If you don’t know your stock, how can you maintain it properly and comply with current statutes and regulations, guidance and codes of practice? It throws up big, wider issues. For example, if you don’t know where asbestos is, how can you carry out your annual checks?”

 

Mr Wright says that Poplar Harca was the first urban stock transfer association and as such initially invested more than £500m in improving and understanding its homes. This included carrying out investigations such as contaminated land surveys with multiple master planners and consultants, which he says means that their “knowledge is excellent compared to most”.

 

Beyond the core

 

Still, he admits that post-Grenfell the team has had to go beyond “getting the basic core information up to date, as part of a broader asset management strategy” and look at its stock in more detail.

 

Elsewhere, Greg Wheeler, housing and public sector director at Savills, makes the point that the different demands placed on the sector in recent years (as it has increased its development), have forced HAs to re-evaluate how they are using their data to make investment decisions.

 

“If you don’t string those together, then that’s when we see some organisations that can potentially get into trouble”

“Stock condition information is there to inform, not dictate, investment, but it’s about the link between all the steps in this process where the robustness lies,” he says.

 

“[Providers] have a result from a survey and it’s up to the individual landlord to manage its own risk appetite for that, incorporate it into its own local standards and apply it to its asset management strategy to ultimately come up with a confirmed investment and management plan across those areas, which is then linked back to the data.

 

“If you don’t string those together, then that’s when we see some organisations that can potentially get into trouble. Putting it bluntly, it means you can pick up a business plan and ask how they got to those numbers, and that should be a really easy question to answer, but if it isn’t, then it maybe spells that those links are not as robust as they should be.”

The need for good data

 

A recent spate of breaches of the Home Standard over health and safety concerns further demonstrate just how vital an issue this is for the sector in that regard.

 

Councils including Lambeth and Gateshead have received regulatory notices concerning safety this year. And Runnymede was chastised for “record keeping, monitoring, and evidencing of electrical testing work” that has “historically been very poor”. On the HA side, data weaknesses were cited in regulatory notices issued to Brunelcare and Connexus.

 

Mr Wheeler further crystallises the implications associated with this lack of knowledge – starting with health and safety, which he says remains one of the “chief” risks of having inadequate data on stock and its condition. He adds that quality data would enable HAs to better understand their liabilities and work them into their business plans accordingly.

 

“[Good quality data gives you] the ability to meet your objectives, particularly around achieving customer satisfaction or improvement in standards in stock and neighbourhoods. Clearly, you need good data to understand the cost in doing that and to prove success in doing it.”

 

Simon Latson, national director of JLL’s building consultancy, gives a snapshot of the problems he sees facing the sector in regard to stock condition and data.

 

“Post-Grenfell has exposed that the information generally held in health and safety files and operating and maintenance manuals on site isn’t good enough”

 

“Post-Grenfell has exposed that the information generally held in health and safety files and operating and maintenance manuals on site isn’t good enough, it’s not specific enough and it’s not worked through,” he says.

 

“Relating that back to what information providers have about their whole stock, they often have stuff which is of various ages and don’t necessarily want to ask the right questions, and even when they do ask the right questions and get the right answers, they don’t necessarily follow it through completely, and that’s obviously competing for budgets and prioritisation.”

 

A “golden thread”

 

The sector is responding to this challenge in part through the exploration of building information modelling (BIM) – a move prompted by the Hackitt Review, which suggested that BIM could deliver a “golden thread” of asset information to enable building owners to manage their buildings more safely and reduce the sorts of risks that led to Grenfell.

 

BIM Level 2 is currently mandated on public sector projects, excluding the housing sector, but the government is now looking to mandate the use of BIM on high-rise residential projects taller than 18m (six storeys or more). Early adopters in the social housing sector include L&Q and Peabody, the latter of which has been involved in the BIM in housing initiative to improve its data quality and collection.

 

George Stevenson, managing director at BIM specialist ActivePlan, who has been working with Peabody, says that much of the work has been creating a standardised data platform – or a digital operating and maintenance manual – of the products and materials that go into a building.

 

The platform has been created with input from the asset management team, including what information that team needs on certain products. This information can then be given to the design, manufacture and construction teams before a building is built.

 

“A lot of this is about history and about how records have been maintained and what maintenance has been done”

 

Mr Stevenson explains: “The approach we’ve taken with Peabody is to actually determine what information [the asset team] really needs rather than the information the design and construction team thinks they should have.

 

“We’ve then created that as a dataset, which is published and provided to the design and construction teams so they have a very clear and explicit set of requirements that can be measured and audited against.”

 

This dataset will eventually be populated with information on existing buildings, although Mr Stevenson admits that this process will be a “much bigger challenge”, given that it will require teams to visit properties to collect and document information with the appropriate technology.

 

A long journey

 

As for how far along the industry is in adopting BIM and improving the information it holds on its stock, it is fair to say that this is the start of what will be a long journey.

 

Although Mr Stevenson says he is in “detailed conversations” with “several” providers over the use of BIM, he adds: “In comparison with some of the other clients we’ve worked with, [HAs have] really embraced it and they are doing a good job in trying to bridge what’s currently a big gap between the design and construction and the management side of things.”

 

His comments echo those of Mr Perry, who adds: “Different providers will be in different places on [stock condition and data collection]. A lot of this is about history and about how records have been maintained and what maintenance has been done. But the sector knows it has a job to do.”