We’ll be at the Housing Community Summit 2026 in Liverpool on 8 and 9 September, and we’d like to see you there.
Come and say hello.
What the Summit is
The Housing Community Summit is a joint undertaking between the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing, held at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool across two days. Its strapline — “by the sector for the sector” — is a fair description of what it actually is.
It brings together thousands of housing professionals, stakeholders, politicians and residents in one place. That last group matters. A sector event that puts residents in the room alongside chief executives and policymakers is a different proposition from a conference where the sector talks to itself.
The programme runs across a main stage and a substantial number of breakout streams, with fringe sessions and networking running alongside.
Events like this are valuable because they bring people from across the housing sector into one place to have the conversations that matter.
Why we’re coming
We work with housing providers on the operational side of the sector — the processes, the systems and the people that determine whether a service actually delivers what it promises.
Looking at this year’s programme, four themes stand out as the ones we’re most interested in talking about.
Leadership and culture
There are sessions on the agenda covering cultivating leadership and culture, skills and leadership for a new era, and governance in a redefined operating environment.
This is the part of improvement work that gets least attention and determines most outcomes. We’ve written before about how a process that produces different results under different managers is telling you something about leadership rather than about the process. In housing, where frontline decisions carry real consequences for residents, that gap between a well-designed service and a well-led one is unusually visible.
Technology and digital services
The programme includes sessions on using AI as a housing practitioner, making digital self-service real, and how the sector is using technology to improve services.
Our position on this is straightforward and occasionally unwelcome.
Digitising a broken process gives you a faster broken process. Understand the process first, then decide what technology supports it.
We’ve seen a good deal of housing technology deployed onto workflows that were never mapped, and the results are predictable — a system that produces better reports without producing a better service. The providers getting genuine value from digital tools are almost always the ones who did the process work first.
Service improvement and the resident voice
Sessions on turning resident voice into action, resident-led scrutiny and complaints handling all point at the same underlying question: does the operation actually respond to what residents are telling it?
That is a process design question as much as an engagement one. Feedback that arrives but has nowhere structured to go produces frustration on both sides.
Repairs under pressure
There are sessions on repairs under pressure, innovative approaches to repairs, and meeting energy standards and regulations.
This is where a lot of our housing work sits. The regulatory environment has tightened considerably — Awaab’s Law now imposes specific statutory timeframes, with a 24-hour investigation deadline for emergency hazards and further phases widening the scope of covered hazards each year.
Our view is that meeting those deadlines is an operations challenge rather than a compliance one. You cannot hit a 24-hour clock with a repairs process that batches work around a weekly meeting. The providers who will meet these duties consistently are the ones redesigning the process underneath, not the ones adding reporting on top of it.
Our work in the sector
Our repairs and maintenance transformation work with believe Housing → /case-studies is the clearest example of how we approach this — mapping the service as it genuinely runs, finding where cases wait rather than where people work slowly, and rebuilding the process around the outcome rather than the reporting.
That project is a fair summary of what we do across housing: less about telling providers they have a problem, more about locating precisely where it sits and what it costs.
We’ve been doing this for twenty years, across construction, manufacturing, social housing and retail. The common thread is that we build the improvement capability into the client’s own team rather than leaving them dependent on us — which is usually the difference between a change that holds and one that quietly unwinds.
What we’d like to talk about
We’re not coming with a pitch. We’re coming because the conversations at an event like this are more useful than anything we’d learn from a report.
If any of the following are live for you at the moment, we’d genuinely like to hear about it:
- Preparing a repairs service for the widening scope of statutory timeframes
- Improvement work that delivered results and then quietly drifted back
- Digital projects that produced better data without producing a better service
- Managers promoted for technical competence who now need something different
- Building continuous improvement capability in a team rather than buying it in each time
We’re as interested in what hasn’t worked as in what has. Most of what we know about this sector came from providers being honest about the second category.
Come and find us
If you’d rather arrange a specific time, get in touch → /contact before the event and we’ll put something in the diary. If not, come over whenever suits — we’d be glad to talk.
“The problems we see in housing are the same ones we see everywhere else — handovers that break down, rework that nobody counts, and digital tools that get bought but never properly adopted. What makes an event like this worth attending is that you hear what is actually happening on the ground rather than what the sector reports about itself. We’re looking forward to the conversations around leadership, technology and service improvement, and to meeting people we’d otherwise only ever speak to on a call.”
Andy Almey, Managing Director, RED Jam
You can find out more about the event on the Housing Community Summit website → https://housingcommunitysummit.co.uk/