So you see there is one CIH working for the benefit of you and members of the wider sector and in the public interest across the whole of the UK. Recently the social housing sector, the quality of the homes we manage and the way we treat the tenants and residents that we work with and for has been a subject of some high-profile attention. I think we all understand that it’s virtually impossible to get everything right all of the time, but that is what we must strive to do, and equally importantly when we do not, we must put things right as quickly and fully as we can. To acknowledge our failings, to apologise, to put things right, to learn and to improve is part of what it means to be a professional.
We must also be proud, though, of the great work that we do and celebrate all that is good and great about the housing profession and the difference that you make every day to people’s lives. To steal words from our previous president, Jim Strang: “The work you do is transformational. Every day housing professionals have the ability to change people’s lives for the better, in a way that many other professions would give their eye-teeth for.”
We should not lose sight of that. In order to build this culture, to drive change, we must truly engage with and listen to tenants, residents and customers, the people and communities we exist to serve, we work for, and we work with. And at CIH, we are here to help you with that and to support you in that work.
So with that in mind, I want to talk a little bit more about the professional standards, and I’m genuinely excited to be leading an organisation that is providing you with the tools that can help you and help your organisations to drive the change required to meet head-on the challenges outlined in the Social Housing White Paper.
Already landlords are using our professional standards, embedding them at the heart of their work, in their approach to recruitment, to training, to development, to procurement and of course, in the homes and the services they deliver to the people and communities that they work with.
Individual members are using them to assess where they are on their career journey, to identify where the gaps are in their knowledge and behaviours to try to become the best housing professional that they can be – something I think that we would all aspire to. And if you’re not using them, then we’d love to talk to about professional standards, because they speak to the very heart of what it means to be a housing professional.
As I’ve said, our work is different. It is unique. It directly impacts on people’s experience of home. I can’t imagine anything more fundamental than that. As Aileen Evans, another one of my previous presidents says: “Home is where we start from.”
Your work impacts on people’s homes. There is nothing more important.
Alongside this, it is particularly important to me that in our work at CIH, we work hard to become a more diverse organisation in our governance, in our membership, as an employer, in what we train and what we teach in the platforms and the events we create and promote. We are working very hard on all of that, I promise you, and we’ve made some good progress, but we have further to go. And I also want to publicly recognise that we’ve got a sector leadership role and that’s a role, make no mistake, that we want and are willing to play.
History teaches us that seismic events always act as catalysts for change. And without doubt, the pandemic has been a seismic event. The biggest peacetime challenge that our country has faced, and the globe has faced since the Second World War.
And as we start to move towards wherever our new normal begins to look like, we do have an opportunity to place housing at the centre of the UK’s recovery from the COVID pandemic. So I want to ask for your help. If you are a member, help us shape that role. Come with us on that journey. If you’re not a member, why not? But come with us on that journey – together, we can create a profession and a housing sector that we know that we can be served by a professional body that you deserve so that together we can create a future in which everybody has a safe, secure, decent and affordable place to call home.
So I encourage you all now to take advantage of the fantastic opportunity we’ve got across the next two or three days to learn new things, which you can take back to your work, to build new relationships, to have conversations, conversations with people you won’t have seen for nearly two years. I know I can’t wait for that experience. Great things happen when housing professionals get together and I’ve missed the opportunity to talk to all of you. So I hope that what I’m saying to you now is the start of a conversation – a conversation, if you like, that has been paused for the best part of two years, we can begin again to talk to each other, to learn together, to develop together.
And the next three days provides us with that opportunity. And at that point, thank you very much for listening. I wish you very well. I hope you enjoy the conference. Enjoy the next three days. Thank you very much.”
Gavin Smart, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, speaking on the first day of Housing 2021, 7 September 2021
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