Ensuring excellence for housing association boards

Our Board Excellence Conference, scheduled for 2 and 3 February 2023, couldn’t be timelier. The landscape in which we operate is always challenging and boards face many difficult decisions as you strive to support your organisations to deliver their social purpose. I know we are all acutely conscious of our responsibilities to ensure this.

As a sector, our top priority must be to understand and act upon instances of disrepair and to ensure residents have safe, affordable and high quality homes. As board members, we must hold our housing associations to account. This conference will give us all an opportunity to hear some of those messages directly from representatives from the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman.

We will also have the chance to reflect on the recommendations from the independent Better Social Housing Review, which was commissioned by NHF and Chartered Institute of Housing earlier this year. This will outline practical actions housing associations need to take to tackle issues of poor quality housing.

Other keynote speakers include Lord Bob Kerslake and Thomas Pope, Deputy Chief Economist at the Institute for Government. Breakout sessions will cover a diverse range of topics including decarbonisation, our EDI work, values across an organisation and cybersecurity. It will be a packed agenda. But that is only to be expected when we have taken on such an important task impacting as it does on so many individuals, families and communities.

I look forward to meeting as many of you as I can and to learning more about the issues you face and how you are tackling them. The visits to housing associations, networks and projects I have been making have brought home to me what a remarkable job you all do and I hope you will make every effort to join this conference to share your experiences.