Skills shortage in affordable homes development calls for different approach

Like many senior development professionals in the social housing sector, Alex Fury – Assistant Development Director at Muir was finding it increasingly tough to recruit high calibre candidates. Here he shares his thoughts on why social housing is struggling to bag the right people, his views on the main challenges in the sector right now and why turning to an external resource was the best moves for their programme delivery.

Based in Chester, Muir is a social housing provider with around 6000 properties spread across the North-West and East of England. With a development programme of circa 150 homes a year for affordable rent and shared ownership, the development team were on the lookout for a mid-weight professional back in 2018, which is where Alex picks up this familiar story:

“We’d gone out to market a few times, but the quality of candidates just wasn’t there. There’s a definite skills shortage in the sector and I think that’s a couple of things. Firstly it’s a hard job. It’s about results, but there’s no qualification to teach you all the elements of development management so you have to learn on the job. And then secondly the last recession certainly reduced the pipeline of professionals coming through so we’re suffering the lag impact of that.

“With shortage, you get supply and demand so some of the big players in the private sector are successfully courting those people who are very capable with attractive packages and essentially sweeping the market. In the last 18 months I’ve heard of more people than ever leaving the affordable sector for the private sector than I ever have before. So where I got to was why would I appoint someone that I’d got to invest so much time in, when we really didn’t have that time available to us? I needed someone to step in and hit the ground running.”

Enter Laura Astwood, from DTS Development. With around 16 years of experience in affordable homes development Alex was immediately able to lean on Laura to lead on a discreet piece of work to develop a new business pipeline. As a “bolt on” she also keeps an eye on what Alex describes as “the criticals” monitoring schemes to pre-contract stage, compliance with Homes England funding and audit requirements, providing informal mentoring to the wider team and on a personal level acting as a peer-to-peer confidant.

Alex adds “I would never undersell the network Laura brings. She’s opened up doors for me in the North-West and her experience of working in multiple local authority areas means she can adapt, which is vital for us as we operate across around 36 local authority areas. Her network and experience also provides us with a vital perspective - hard lessons learnt elsewhere serve as a cautionary tale for us.

“Ultimately the benefit of outsourcing is that you’re buying a service – so you can quickly upskill for the peaks and then you’re not necessarily over-resourced in the troughs. We wouldn’t be where we are today without that injection of skills as we simply wouldn’t have had the resources.”

So what are Alex’s tips for recruiting external resource?

Tip 1: Be really clear about what you’re bringing someone in to do. “So for Muir it’s about ensuring that our new business keeps moving. Laura’s objective is to get new business in and through to pre-contract stage.” That clarity is vital for success.

Tip 2: Have someone that’s immersed in the housing sector. Someone who gets it, gets the sensitivities and the challenges and they are used to the language and the way we work – the nuances that someone from the private sector wouldn’t necessarily get such as those very odd little queries that feel like a level of detail you should never need to know.

Tip 3: Save yourself a headache and choose someone with lots of emotional intelligence. Someone who can manage relationships well, whether that internally with your team or the senior team and externally. Always seek someone who pitches things right. , It brings a lot of reassurance.

Along with the challenges of a skills shortage in the social housing sector, we wrap up the interview with Alex Fury by asking him what the other key issues are for him and Muir’s development team at the moment; “There’s the obvious challenges we face in the operating environment with both Brexit and the economic impact of COVID looming large. But we’re also awaiting further clarity on the new funding programme and we have the issue of rising costs, where delivery costs are going up before the financial model can catch up. All of this uncertainty is why the flexibility of outsourcing continues to work for us well into the future.”

To find out more on how Laura Astwood and DTS Development could solve your resourcing issues visit ww.dtsdevelopment.co.uk or call 07783 199980