L&Q relaxes 10-year new homes target as it redoubles resident focus

Pipeline notwithstanding, keeping the brake on development might seem a surprising early move for a new chief who has served for the past three years as L&Q’s group director of development and sales, leading on landmark projects such as the 10,800-home Barking Riverside development. Prior to L&Q, Ms Fletcher-Smith was director for development, enterprise and environment at the Greater London Authority.

But the stance may be interpreted as a continuation of Ms Fletcher-Smith’s approach since arriving at the landlord from City Hall in 2018 and reflective of her very first experience of L&Q many years earlier. Temping as a housing officer for the association for two summers in the mid 1990s while completing a university degree, Ms Fletcher-Smith says she “fell in love with the place”.

“It was so caring… on your patch you almost knew all your residents by name. So when I came back to L&Q, I was really keen to enter the human being into the development process, and that’s what we have been doing as a team.

“It is about saying no to poor quality, to really challenge ourselves and those building for us on the quality, reminding them that at the end of all of this process, there is a human being that is going to move in there and that their home is their place of sanctuary and safety. We have a massive duty to make sure that that works.”

Advocacy role

L&Q is currently working up a new five-year plan which it hopes will crystallise its focus on residents’ needs, supported by “excellent services and thriving communities”. Ms Fletcher-Smith indicates that this means facilitating, rather than prescribing, and involving existing and potential new residents in placemaking.

“It’s about enabling communities to develop. I think all of us, as housing professionals, need to be very careful about a sort of a paternalistic approach to how we do things, and it’s really about creating places where communities can flourish, grow, feel comfortable and contribute.

“It is about really giving our residents opportunities to be involved in the strategy and policy that directly affects them.”

She adds that this follows the lead of the Social Housing White Paper.

L&Q will be supported by a new resident services board, which will have a purview on all services that affect residents, from existing services to new development to environmental sustainability.

“We’ve got some of the most amazing residents on board there. I guarantee they’re not going to give me an easy time as chief executive, but bring it on because I think it’s going to be fantastic.”

The work will also focus on L&Q’s relationship with its leaseholders. Asked whether leaseholders will be asked to bear the cost of fire remediation work, Ms Fletcher-Smith will not be drawn, saying only that this remains a “very live issue”.

“We are not at a stage yet of having made any decisions around the fire costs. However, the scale of the challenge to us as a sector is so phenomenal that we will have to look at this very, very carefully with our board.”

Despite this uncertainty, Ms Fletcher-Smith describes the relationship with leaseholders as becoming one of an “advocacy” role on the part of the organisation.

This means L&Q will support leaseholders to recover funds where available. “It is about maximising where we can get income back from either government schemes that will help us pay for remediation; [or in] the case of poor quality if we have found that a contractor or builder has built something that just is not adequate. Be warned, we will want to seek to gather those monies back from you. That’s going to be a really key part, that we are therefore working on behalf of our leaseholders.”

Ms Fletcher-Smith is also committed to offering financial transparency to its leaseholders, meaning it will be clear about “what is being charged and what isn’t” and be able to explain the group’s procurement processes and how it is achieving “best possible value”.

Sustainability

On the subject of sustainability, Ms Fletcher-Smith says that “a lot more” will be revealed later in the year as L&Q unveils its new corporate strategy, but she says the group is “absolutely ideally placed to lead on the ESG [environmental, social and governance] agenda”.

She acknowledges that “new build will be easier” when it comes to meeting environmental targets, as partnerships with offsite manufacturers help the organisation hit higher standards. Retrofit of existing buildings remains the bigger issue for L&Q and the wider sector.

“One thing we can be absolutely sure of, it’s going to be financially challenging, because it comes on top of our absolute priority around the safety of our residents and resolving any fire remediation works we need to do there – and that has to come first, ” Ms Fletcher-Smith says.

She adds: “That said, we’ve had real signals from the prime minister on this; [the UK] will be chairing COP 26 [United Nations Climate Change Conference] in November, and I would really like to see L&Q step into this space and really show some sector leadership in terms of what we can do.”

‘Big developer’

While L&Q may have taken its foot slightly off the gas with development as it juggles these competing demands, its role as a leader in the field also is not going away, Ms Fletcher-Smith emphasises.

This includes a continued commitment to cross subsidy, which Ms Fletcher-Smith says remains “vital” to funding its social purpose. The group’s requirement for 50 per cent of its programme to be at affordable tenures is also something that will be maintained.

Some changes may be ahead, though, as L&Q continues to expand beyond its traditional heartlands through its acquisition of Trafford Housing Trust (THT) in October 2019, as well the earlier purchase of land business Gallagher Estates in 2017.

In January, THT was named one of three housing association partners to Hong-Kong based developer Far East Consortium to deliver the first 800 new affordable homes on its 20-year, 15,000-home Northern Gateway scheme in Manchester.

“London and the South East is a vital part of what we do, but we will be putting a lot of thought and energy with our colleagues in the North West about how we can work more closely together, how we can do big development in the North West, and lever our financial strength and stability to be able to do those big regeneration schemes or development schemes with our North West colleagues. That’s probably one of the shifts you’ll see,” Ms Fletcher-Smith says.

“We owe it to the sector to be known for that and to prove that you can be big and still deliver excellent services”

But the biggest shift L&Q’s new leader hopes to achieve comes back once again to residents.

“L&Q has for a long time been known as a big developer; that ambition is not going away, development is key to our social purpose. But I now want us to be known for an organisation that really genuinely puts our residents at the heart of what we do and that we consistently deliver operationally excellent services.

“We owe it to the sector to be known for that and to prove that you can be big and still deliver excellent services.”