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Friday 4 September 2015

Housing Associations: a Reminder of our Roots and an Appeal to Landlords

Housing associations recently came under attack due to claims that they are not building enough new homes, being dubbed “the true villains of the property crisis” by The Spectator.

Inside Housing posted a useful article scrutinising some of the claims made by The Spectator and The Times, finding many to be untrue or misleading (see part 2 of this blog here). The article reminds readers that the ‘majority of housing associations are very small, charitable outfits which do not expect to build and many do not take grant to do so.’
Ashley Community Housing, being a social enterprise that began as a community organisation, falls into this category.
Whilst we are registered as a housing association, we were born out of a desire to do much more than provide housing. Our mission is to support the settlement and resettlement needs of refugees, vulnerable homeless and other displaced people. We exist to develop people’s independence, promote their positive contribution to the community and ease refugees’ integration into UK life.
Like the majority of BME housing organisations, we remain firmly rooted in the communities from which we were born, which allows us to target services effectively and to develop innovative solutions to the often complex problems our tenants face (see BME National’s recent research for further information).
As a specialist provider of training, as well as housing, we have developed partnerships with leading Higher and Further Educational Institutions to allow our tenants to gain professional qualifications in a range of subjects. We also provide English (ESOL) courses in a variety of levels and alongside this we provide pre-employability and employability courses with high success rates. We have partnerships with external organisations that are able to provide financial literacy classes and I.T. courses to both our tenants and members of the wider community. ACH are currently developing new ways to provide training and employment to tenants through the creation of social enterprise, which will take a similar approach to our Empty Homes project.
Just as important as the training aspect of our business is the one-to-one personal support available to each of our tenants. This is especially important when tenants first arrive at ACH, often with little English and no understanding of the UK benefit system. The dedicated time of our staff ensures that tenants understand what support is available to them and enables us to signpost tenants to external services, such as health and mental health services.
Each aspect of our unique business model is important in supporting our tenants in gaining independence and integrating into UK life successfully. This approach creates transformative, long-term change by developing citizens who do not have to rely on the UK benefits system for a significant length of time.
We measure our success primarily by social, rather than financial, outcomes. As a result of this, our ‘social value’ per £1 spent is very high – £7.66 in fact. We believe it is social value we must focus on if we are to tackle some of the worst-felt effects of inequality and homelessness. Inequality brings with it more than housing disparities – our tenants suffer the effects of disparities in economic opportunities, healthcare, and education too, so we respond to this through a holistic approach to housing and we strongly encourage other housing organisations to do the same.
We are not denying there is a shortage of social housing and that housing associations have a role to play in building affordable homes. The top 50 housing associations built an average of 804 homes each in 2014/15. ACH are hoping to purchase new houses in the West Midlands in the near future to meet the growing demand from our client base. However, due to the housing market in Bristol, we have a waiting list of 60 tenants in this city.
We therefore urgently require private landlords and investors, and are currently looking to acquire 4+ bedroom houses to rent on long term leases from the private sector. In exchange we offer some fantastic benefits: 
  • Long term leases with the possibility of extension 
  • Competitive rents 
  • No set up cost or ongoing management fee 
  • Complete peace of mind – the property will be fully managed by us with several visits per week 
  • The property returned to you in the same condition as it was handed to us 
  • No DSS payments – We will pay you or your agent directly each month in advance 
We have housed more than 1200 tenants over the past few years and we work closely with local authorities and a number of large housing providers to maintain the highest standard of services.
If you would like further information please phone 0117 954 0433 or email info@ashleyhousing.com

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