Disruptive Innovators Network property conference hears sector must move from compliance to resident outcomes
Roof insulation and window changes could cut the share of UK homes in the heat danger category from 90% to 22%, delegates were told.
The figure came from journalist and author Peter Apps, who opened the Disruptive Innovators Network (DIN) annual property conference by arguing that climate change is no longer a future concern but a housing management issue today. He said the measures should be delivered as part of planned maintenance.
The event took place at Amazon HQ in London. Billed as DIN’s flagship property event of the year, it brought together regulators, housing leaders, legal experts, operational specialists, and technology providers for a day focused on safety, quality, asset management, innovation, and delivery at scale.
Seven sessions covered climate resilience, regulatory direction, building safety, an innovation showcase, field operations lessons from Autoglass, data and AI in asset management, and a closing panel on scaling up innovation.
Apps framed climate risk as a “black elephant” – a danger that is plainly visible but goes unaddressed – rather than an unforeseeable “black swan”. He said this year’s heatwave caused many deaths, yet people were still being allowed to live in homes that were getting too hot.
Building new homes to resist heat was the easy part, he said. The harder task was existing stock, such as overglazed blocks served by heat networks, which he warned could become uninhabitable by 2050.
On cooling, he said: “We’re going to need air conditioning as a country.” Surface water flooding, wildfires, and rising insurance costs were also landing on providers, he added.
His challenge to delegates was to know who their vulnerable residents are, have emergency plans in place, and use the next six months to learn from this summer. Disaster response, he said, “is a core part of housing management now”.
From compliance to outcomes
Richard Foster of the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) used the second session to set out what the regulator is seeing. He cited strong asset intelligence, data-led investment decisions, and a “sensible” balance between existing homes and new development as positives.
Poor quality asset data, surveys and compliance checks that do not turn into action, and weak governance of development and investment decisions were the problems.
Collecting data was not enough, he said; landlords had to show they were using it to improve services and manage risk. Looking ahead, he pointed to new tenant satisfaction measures for 2026/27, phase two of Awaab’s Law, and more data-driven regulation.
Jonathan Cox, partner at Anthony Collins Solicitors, described a shift from buildings to people and from process to outcomes. The old question was whether a building was compliant; the new one was whether residents were safe. Awaab’s Law, he said, changes the question to “is this home causing harm?” The challenge for landlords was joining up data from legacy systems so that risks were spotted before residents came to harm.
He summed up: “That’s the shift really, moving from compliance to risk and process to outcomes.”
A panel chaired by Apps then asked whether building safety is actually working. Stephen Flounders, non-executive director at Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, (RBH) said Grenfell was not the first building safety catastrophe and that the lessons existed before 2017. His verdict was that building safety is working and getting more attention, but there is still some way to go.
John Palmer, director of operations at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), was candid that the regime is not working as well as it could, but said it was improving. The regulator was operating a new piece of legislation, he said, and was doubling its operations team by the end of the year.
Dr Bola Abisogun OBE, founder and chief executive of Twin-ium, asked what would happen if insurance premiums were tied directly to an organisation’s demonstrable ability to manage building information. His Project IIRIS aims to align the sector, insurers, and regulators around shared standards, with better risk managers rewarded with better premiums.
Practical technology, practical lessons
The innovation showcase gave three presenters five minutes each, with no slides, followed by questions and an audience vote.
Andrew Fitzpatrick, director of ArcAirTech, presented hydroxyl technology designed to eliminate mould spores while tenants remain in their homes, leaving visible staining for surveyors to inspect. Luke Bedford of Auro presented a self-testing fire door, which he described as a world first, and a portal that pulls data from any smart device into a single source. His advice was to define clear goals before starting a smart technology journey, or the pilot will fail.
Jeandré Labuschagne of Amazon presented Amazon Key, a retrofit access device that works with existing access control systems. It is offered to organisations at no cost, he said, and the same system can give staff and contractors time-limited access, revoked automatically after the job, with a full log to help with Building Safety Act compliance.
After lunch, Simon Blake and Nick Cleary of Autoglass (Belron UK) explained how the vehicle glass repairer rebuilt itself around customer feedback, having interviewed half a million customers. Autoglass reported a net promoter score of 84, with 60% of insurance jobs booked online.
The transformation was delivered in phases, centred on Salesforce in the front office and Oracle Fusion in the back. Their lessons were to build in accountability, review progress constantly, create feedback loops, and carry out post-implementation reviews.
The Future Asset Manager session argued that data must come first. Greg Robinson, managing director of Mears DLO, said most housing associations are grappling with legacy systems and fragmented data. Combining two sources of evidence typically shows 5% of assets generating 25% of repair demand at component level, he said.
Richard Young, built environment technical director at Sovereign Network Group (SNG), said the landlord’s 85,000 homes were served by competing systems, so it built a Single Asset View. Getting AI to give the right answers took a lot of going back and forth, he said.
Dirk Huibers, chief executive of Spotr, demonstrated a platform that scans images for hazards against Awaab’s Law and argued that just-in-time maintenance, such as replacing a boiler only when needed, could save millions of pounds.
Scaling up
The closing panel, chaired by asset management consultant Phil Pemberton, asked what it takes to move innovation beyond pilots.
Leann Hearne, interim chief executive of Switchee, said the main blocker is not usually money but permission, and that collaboration dies in silos. She said the sector has the people and communities it needs, but a fear-based culture sends teams back to business as usual.
Christine Paxton, group director of change and communications at Karbon Homes and a founding member of SHINE, described how the Social Housing Innovation North East network works in practice.
Its shared mapping project, built to tackle damp and mould, has 10 housing associations and 180,000 properties mapped. Piloting is easier, she said, because risk is shared. The difficulties are finding time to collaborate and getting permission, particularly where leadership direction is competitive between landlords.
The panel’s conclusion was that collaboration is the way forward. Hearne put the stakes plainly: “Innovation isn’t nice to have, it’s a survival strategy and we forget that.”
Main image: The Disruptive Innovators Network property conference at Amazon UK’s headquarters in London
Read next: G15 urges share of London Stamp Duty to fund social homes
Are you a social housing professional? Sign up for a FREE MEMBERSHIP to upload news stories, post job vacancies, and connect with colleagues on our secure social feed.
