Is the local housing allowance (LHA) cap creating a postcode lottery for the most vulnerable in our society? Where rents are at their lowest in the poorer areas of the UK, the development of new homes is often being redirected to less needy areas in order to gain higher returns. With various freezes and cuts…
Is the LHA cap working?Read More →
056 - March 2017
Start-up the innovation
2016/17 has been RHP’s ‘year of innovation’, the foundation of which was rolling out last April the UK’s first all-digital housing service, RHPi. The service, which is designed to lower costs while also improving service, will help us to invest £250 million over the next eight years in providing more affordable homes. For us, a…
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Gizmos, gadgets and good design
In the early ‘noughties’, I ran a seminar for ‘constructing excellence’ on ‘safety by design’, followed a few years later by one on ‘designing out waste’. The purpose in mentioning them is to emphasise the fact that, despite new products and new and updated regulations, such as those dealing with high-speed electronic communications networks, the…
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Budget time – Are you spending wisely?
As organisations across the country approach the end of another financial year, all eyes are on budgets. Assessing spending over the last year and crunching the numbers for the year ahead is the name of the game right now. For housing providers, sensitivity to cost is crucial and it always has been. We know from…
Budget time – Are you spending wisely?Read More →
Looking beyond housing for IT procurement
Housing providers need to adopt a more commercial approach to IT procurement and a proven approach to IT implementation that is commonplace in many other sectors, according to Rob Bryan, operations director and transformation specialist at Vantage Business Solutions. My experience of procurement in other sectors is that an approach of ‘outputs first’ must be…
Looking beyond housing for IT procurementRead More →
Housing Technology – A 10-year story
This is a slightly-abridged version of a blog-post written by Tony Smith, an independent housing IT consultant at Acutance Consulting, on his ‘Tony Smith: That Housing IT Guy’ blog (tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.co.uk), following the Housing Technology 2017 conference in March. I remember in my days at MIS-AMS, at an NHF IT Conference at Olympia (remember those?), a…
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