HACT: Measuring resident resilience amid the cost-of-living crisis : Housing Digital

As HACT prepares to launch its new Resident Resilience tool ahead of schedule, we caught up with managing director Jacqui Bateson to find out more about the project and how the cost-of-living crisis turbocharged its development

How has your new Resident Resilience tool come about?

We started on this project about eight months ago, and it came about because we were in conversation, as we often are, with a group of housing providers and housing associations.

We got to talking, and it was a result of the pandemic, about how resilient residents were. And actually, could we even define it, let alone measure it? We started a research project to first of all work with some providers to see if we could understand if we could, first of all, define what we meant, and then, off that the back of that, if there was a way, using data, that we could look to measure it.

We did a whole lot of research that lead us to understand that there were three key factors that were indicators of resilience. One is around their level of dependence on benefits, one is the level of contact with the organisation, and the other is the level of arrears.

Since then, we’ve been working towards the next phase of this project, which is how you then create the tool to make that work.

What does the tool allow users to do?

Over the next few months, the resident resilience tool will enable organisations across a range of different things that affect resilience, be able to take a look at what those things mean for a resident, and then how that will impact them from an operational perspective. So, if arrears go up, if they’re going to be in contact more, and there will be other things I’m sure as we go along, it will enable them to better plan for that internal impact.

But, in light of this massive cost-of-living crisis, housing organisations, in particular, have talked to us about the challenge they’re facing around the rent increase. They were testing themselves anyway with the thought that they could have the ability to put rent up by CPI+10 or +11. And now, they’re faced with the probability that there will be a cap, which will of course impact on their income.

So, we are accelerating the product development of the resident resilience tool so that, when they’re reporting to boards, they’ll be able to look at a range of scenarios.

How does the tool work?

[Housing providers] will put the data into the tool, they’ll then be able to test it – there’ll be a benchmark position where resilience is. Then they’ll be able to test it against a 3%, 5%, 7% rise or whatever they want to.

The tool itself will categorise, based on those three areas, their whole database into 27 segments. It will give them an overarching view of resilience and how that shifts within the organisation. They will also be able to drill into each segment. Ultimately, they will be able to get down to the individual.

So, at all levels of the organisation, they will be able to look in and say, this resident needs us to act, but they’ll also be able to look at the more strategic level and say, this is how it might impact on our services, so therefore we need to be prepared. Or, these are the support services we need to be putting in place to have the most impact on our residents.

So, the tool can be applied to both the tenant and the organisation?

Yes, so currently, when say organisations are looking at a rent increase, they know the impact on their own income, they can see that quite clearly, that we’re going to get this much more or not as much as we thought. And then they can start to think about, what does that mean for us as an organisation? They currently don’t have, I think, that more real-focussed understanding of the impact on their residents.

This tool will plug that gap. It will help them to see the change for their residents and then they will be able to assimilate, because of the research we’ve done, what that means for them as an organisation in terms of their operational effectiveness.

How long was the research period for this project?

What we did was to prove that we could or couldn’t create a tool was that we took data from pre-pandemic and data from post-pandemic. Essentially, all you’re doing is looking for a proper period of time where you know you are looking for a shift, so therefore you know people’s resilience is going to be changed.

What you do is you use that to enable you to understand what you need to understand that shift. So, that’s what we did. We used lots of really good research and testing methodology to make sure that the research [underpinning the model] was really rigorous.

To what extent has the tool been designed around the cost-of-living crisis?

It was designed to allow organisations to measure resilience in its entirety. It will still do that. It will measure financial resilience, but also health and wellbeing resilience. Ultimately, we will get direct feed-in from residents themselves. So, an organisation that signs up, they’ll be able to ask their residents how they’re feeling and that will come in and match with the data, so it will become much more sophisticated.

In the fullness of time, when the tool was developed, we would have always ended up with a bunch of use-cases. You’d always be able to see the overall effect of all the data coming in on resilience. But if you wanted to understand something a bit more specifically, you’d be able to drill down by saying, I want to understand the impact of whatever.

We made the decision that, because of the urgency around rent, we would make that the very first use-case.

How have housing providers so far responded to the tool?

We’ve already had the core group [Flagship, Hafod, settle, Southern Housing Group, Sovereign, and whg], who were working with us right through that initial research stage.

What we did before we started to accelerate – because, of course, it costs us to accelerate – was to speak to a few housing associations and said, is this something you’d be interested in? And without exception, they said, yes.

We also asked them about timing. From my perspective, it’s my job to make sure these things are delivered, and I was like, if we can’t deliver it in the right timeframe, if it’s a week too late, we might as well not do it. So, we know we’re doing it in a timeframe that will work for many.

When will the tool launch?

By the end of September. We want to time it so that organisations have the ability to use it when they’re talking to their boards so that boards and their executives all have some more visibility around the true impact on their residents.

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Main image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock

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HACT: Measuring resident resilience amid the cost-of-living crisis