Our team of experienced consultants can offer expert guidance for social housing providers in England, Scotland, and Wales. Whether you need to enhance governance practices, reduce risks, or create a strong business continuity plan to ensure your organisation’s resilience, we can help.
We are committed to supporting social housing organisations through impartial assessments of governance practices and leadership development. We provide customised support to assist you in navigating governance frameworks and regulatory compliance, addressing risk and performance challenges.
Governance review and code compliance
Our Governance Review service provides a thorough assessment of your organisation’s governance frameworks and practices, with a focus on compliance with legislation, standards and relevant codes of governance. We help you understand how well your governance framework aligns with your long-term goals, mission, and the expectations of both internal and external stakeholders.
Whether your focus is improving compliance, improving Board effectiveness, or preparing for future regulatory assessments, we help deliver the insights you need to ensure that your Boards are fully equipped to maintain effective governance, make informed decisions, and demonstrate accountability.
We can support you with:
- Analyse and interpret your governance frameworks against best practice to identify possible improvements
- Review governance documents and paperwork to ensure compliance with your own expectations and agreements
- Practical recommendations and action plans to improve how you work
Board effectiveness and succession planning
Through a comprehensive evaluation, we assess your Board’s effectiveness in fulfilling its responsibilities, ensuring compliance with the standards set by your regulator. This includes evaluating collective and individual Board Member performance, identifying areas for improvement, and working with your Board members to ensure you have the right skills and attrubutes to sucseed.
We provide tailored strategies that ensure continuity and resilience, helping you bridge talent gaps and prepare for future challenges. Our succession planning service addresses the critical need for a robust pipeline of leadership talent within your Board.
We can support you with:
- Analyse and interpret current performance against best practice to identify possible improvements.
- We will provide practical recommendations for continuous improvment
- Action plan development: our support includes creating detailed action plans to address performance gaps, improve governance, and ensure regulatory compliance across your housing association.
- Provide Boards with strategies for how to gain assurance that governance practices align with regulatory standard.
Business Continuity Planning
Disruptions happen, but they don’t have to derail your organisation. We offer comprehensive Business Continuity Planning (BCP) services that ensure your operations remain resilient in the face of unforeseen challenges, from natural disasters to cyberattacks.
We will work closely with your team to create BCP strategies tailored to your unique needs, helping to protect essential services and maintain trust with your residents and stakeholders. This will enable you to effectively navigate disruptions and maintain essential services.
We can support you with:
Identify specific risks your organisaiton faces, including those emerging risks such as those relating to climate change.
Complete Business Impact Assessments (BIAs) with your organisation and teams and support you to align their needs with your capabilities, especially within the area of IT capability.
Develop comprehensive strategies for handling emergency events once they are identified. Plan how your Strategic team (Gold team) will manage and communicate decision-making. Decide if you will have operational Silver teams and how will they work with Gold or other teams.
Create action plans with individual teams, mapping out how they will react to different situations.
Awareness raising to ensure staff are aware of their roles and expectations of them in an emergency.
Staff training. Train your staff on everything from general awareness of the organisation’s processes, communications during an incident, and expectations of the emergency command team.
Testing, once you have raised awareness and trained your staff you want to test aspects of your planning and run desktop and scenario testing. A great way to embed learning and test assumptions.
Risk and Assurance
Inadequate risk management frameworks result in unidentified vulnerabilities and being unprepared for potential challenges. On the other hand, effective risk management will promote the sustainability and success of any organisation. It is vital in today’s environment to have robust risk management.
How you provide assurance to your Board and Committee is also key to your organisation’s governance and success.
We can support you with:
- Risk management framework development: work together to establish robust risk management frameworks that identify, assess, and mitigate risks effectively.
- Strategic risk registers and maps: developing and reviewing strategic risk registers, ensuring clarity in risk exposure, and providing actionable insights for mitigation.
- Stress testing and defining risk appetite: develop risk-based stress tests and clear risk appetite, aligning it with your strategic objectives and operational capacity.
- Audit and Risk Committee support: help your Committee review its makeup, skills and delegation scheme.
- Committee effectiveness reviews tailored reviews that assess how well your Risk and Audit Committees are fulfilling their governance roles.
- Preparation for inspections we provide expert guidance to ensure your housing organisation is ready for scrutiny from the Regulator of Social Housing.
Value for Money Reviews
Demonstrating Value for Money is critical for social housing organisations, especially when managing limited resources. Our Value for Money reviews assess your current operations, identifying opportunities for efficiency improvements. We provide evidence-based recommendations that help you enhance service delivery while demonstrating accountability to residents and stakeholders.
We can support you with:
- Board and Committee member training: Ensure your decision makers understand VfM, what the regulators expect of them and the reporting requirements. Learn about the importance and how to embed VfM into Strategic decision-making.
- Value for Money framework development: establish clear VfM frameworks for evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of services.
- Evidence-based VfM reviews: conduct analyses of your service delivery models, providing actionable insights.
- Stakeholder engagement: facilitate sessions to gather feedback, ensuring your VfM initiatives meet your customers’ needs.
Corporate and strategic planning reviews
We conduct strategic reviews of your corporate plans, business plans, and governance initiatives to ensure their viability and future-proofing. We ensure that your plans are not only forward-thinking but also strategically aligned with organisational goals, optimise resource allocation, and increase adaptability in a changing environment.
We can help you with:
- Stress testing and risk-based planning: we develop and review stress tests to assess how well your plans can withstand external shocks, ensuring your organisation is prepared for the future.
- Action plan development: our support includes creating detailed action plans to address performance gaps, improve governance, and ensure regulatory compliance across your housing association.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
As social housing provider face increasing scrutiny regarding their environmental and social impact, integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles into your strategy can lead to improving the organisation’s reputation, attracting positive attention from stakeholders and potential funding opportunities.
We can help you with:
- Sustainability assessments: review your current ESG practices and identify areas for improvement.
- Sustainable development strategies: develop strategies that comply with regulations while improving your organisation’s reputation.
- Monitoring and reporting: create frameworks for monitoring and reporting on your ESG initiatives.
Regulatory compliance and health checks
Our regulatory compliance health checks give a detailed assessment of your organisation’s readiness to satisfy the regulator’s requirements. We provide practical advice and action plans to help you reduce the risk of regulatory sanctions, address compliance gaps and improve your regulatory ratings.
We can help you with:
Regulatory ‘health’ checks: our assessments help you maintain compliance with the latest legislation, including the relevant Code of Governance, and pinpoint areas for improvement to mitigate risk.
We can support you to improve regulatory grading; we act as a key friend, offering advice and helping you improve governance and regulatory grades through practical and strategic programs.