Housing associations have never had so much information on risk as they do today, writes A2Dominion’s Rachel Bowden, but that doesn’t mean boards gain the full picture – unless they look beyond the dashboards
Every quarter, the board papers arrive full of information. Performance reports, risk registers and dashboards covering everything from building safety and compliance to cyber security, complaints and financial resilience.
Housing associations have never had more information about risk than they do today. Better information helps boards understand their organisations, challenge decisions and make better-informed choices, but having more information doesn’t necessarily mean having more assurance.
Risk is experienced out there in the real world – in people’s homes, in the decisions colleagues make every day and in the ways residents experience our services. Boards, therefore, need to understand what the data is telling them and what is happening on the ground. That means drawing on different sources of evidence and being prepared to ask questions when they don’t seem to be telling the same story.
The question for boards and audit committees shouldn’t simply be, “What are the risks?” It should be, “How do we know the picture we’re seeing reflects the reality residents are experiencing?”
Central conversation
As a sector, we’re managing increased regulatory scrutiny, an ongoing focus on building safety, investment in existing homes, the delivery of new ones, and the challenge of maintaining financial resilience while supporting residents facing continued cost of living pressures. With so many priorities, it’s imperative that risk is a central part of conversations at board level.
There is a danger that we start to see risk management as a process rather than what it really is: an enabler of better decisions. We can find ourselves looking for reassurance in board packs, or hoping the next system or IT project will solve a problem, when what we need is the confidence to make good judgements.
I’ve spent my career working in governance, audit and risk. Across all my roles, both executive and non-executive, good risk management hasn’t meant producing perfectly complete risk registers – it’s been about understanding uncertainty, asking the right questions and using evidence and judgement to make important choices.
Housing providers are increasingly focusing on data quality, and that’s crucial. Without reliable data, we can’t understand where risks exist, where services are improving or where more work is needed. Performance reporting gives us an important part of the picture, internal audit provides independent challenge, external scrutiny gives perspective, operational colleagues help us understand what’s happening day to day, and resident insight helps us understand what those decisions mean in practice.
For example, a compliance appointment can be recorded as “no access” for reporting purposes – but how do we as board and committee members know what that means? Did the resident refuse access? Or were they unable to attend because they were working? Did we offer appointments at times that worked for us as an organisation rather than for the person living in the home?
If someone must take annual leave every time we need to visit their property, is that really the resident’s problem, or is it our approach that needs to change? Only by speaking to residents can we find out what’s really happening.
This is why I believe resident insight should not sit separately from governance, classified as an engagement activity. It should be viewed as another source of insight and assurance, helping us triangulate the evidence and understand whether we’re delivering the outcomes we intended.
Risk aversion is not risk management
For me, good risk management also means accepting that we need to take risks sometimes. As boards operating in a sector where the consequences of getting things wrong can have a huge impact on people’s lives, it’s easy to become risk averse. But avoiding risk altogether is not the same as managing risk well.
If residents tell us we’re not delivering the services they need in the way they need them, or complaint levels are high, doing more of the same is unlikely to solve the problem. Sometimes organisations need to try something different, and governance should make sure that happens safely, with a clear understanding of the risks, appropriate boundaries and proper oversight.
A good governance framework should allow boards and executive teams the room to innovate. The same applies to emerging risks. Not every issue starts with red alerts on our risk registers. Sometimes, it starts with someone saying, “I’m not sure this is a risk yet, but I think we should talk about it.”
Good governance doesn’t focus today’s risks, it asks what might be around the corner, and that depends on organisational culture. Formal whistleblowing arrangements and Speak Up policies are essential, but organisations shouldn’t rely on people only raising concerns when something has already gone wrong. The strongest organisations create environments where people feel able to say, “I’m worried about this, but I’m not able to fully articulate why yet.”
The same applies when listening to residents. Collecting feedback that fits neatly into our dashboards and performance reports is insufficient – we must absorb resident experiences that challenge our assumptions and help us see things we would otherwise have missed. Sometimes those conversations tell us far more than a performance measure ever could.
Housing association boards will continue to receive more information. The challenge for board and audit and risk committee members is making sure that information becomes insight. The most effective boards won’t be those with the largest packs, they’ll be those that combine reliable information with professional judgement, independent challenge and a genuine understanding of the people affected by their decisions.
Assurance isn’t being told everything is working perfectly, it’s understanding what’s happening, where improvements are needed and what action should follow. And usually, the best way to understand the reality behind the risk is to listen to the people living with it.
Main image: Rachel Bowden is a board member and chair of the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee at A2Dominion
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