Embedding Good Relations in a Public Body
Chief Executive, Grainia Long, tells the story of good relations in the Northern Ireland Housing Executive:
‘The Housing Executive has been the strategic housing authority for Northern Ireland for the past 50 years. It's a massive landlord of public housing with 83,000 homes and over the years we've grown to become an organisation which now has the trust of the communities we serve.
In the late 1960s there was a general consensus that the housing system wasn't engendering trust within communities.
When you look back at why the Housing Executive was set up, it was born of a perception of discrimination or unfairness in how housing was allocated. The first Chair of the Housing Executive prioritised the provision of more social housing.
The first 25 years was about redressing those early concerns. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a relentless focus on new builds. At its height, the Housing Executive was building 9,000 homes per year. We also focused on building the trust of the communities that we would allocate homes fairly and correctly, without question, no matter who you were. After 25 years, I think it's fair to say we proved the Housing Executive was an independent housing authority and a landlord that now had the trust of the communities.
In the second 25 years, since the Good Friday Agreement, we have been working on how to change the system, so that we don't build separated and divided communities, and move as fast as we can to placemaking and building shared housing. Previously, homes were designed to face in different directions. Entrances and exits in estates were designed to keep people apart. The level of segregation in social housing is pronounced and it has an impact on all of us, particularly our tenants and their connectedness between their estate and the rest of their city, town or village.
The Housing Executive was the first public organisation that developed its own community cohesion strategy, well in advance of being required to do so.
This work was pragmatic and practical, working with communities, whether re-imaging murals or removing peace walls. We focus on ensuring strong levels of community cohesion are driven and led by the community. It can't be forced. We can only go at the pace the communities are prepared to go, and if you try to take it out of the hands of the community, you go backwards very fast. This work continues and this year, when we began to see an increase in race hate, we were able to step in as a landlord and dial up that funding. Our tenants expect this and it's our job to deliver. It shows the issues have not abated. In many ways, they've changed but the focus on tenants themselves, co-designing and funding community cohesion and good relations work is as important as it's ever been.
Our Housing Community Network is a phenomenal infrastructure of 550 community groups who work together from all different backgrounds on a whole range of community investment. They hold us to account and this gives us great strength and focus as an organisation, but it also means our community cohesion work is rooted in the reality of life on the ground.
The Housing Executive is a huge landlord but it's also an extremely local landlord. Good housing management requires you to be ‘of’ your community and it requires you to understand the people you serve. If you're going to be a good public housing manager you have to understand that good relations is at the core of what you do. In fact, it's so intrinsic, we probably don't even call it good relations. We just call it good housing management.
In the last 10 years, we've had significant growth in numbers of new communities and new arrivals in Northern Ireland. A colleague said to me recently that community cohesion between those who are from Northern Ireland and those who are arriving here is the new good relations challenge. Ensuring integration and good relations now needs a singular focus by all decision makers as part and parcel of what we do and we have to dial it up.
In the last few months we have seen a growth in the number of race hate incidents. As a public body we take this incredibly seriously and if we're going to make progress in Northern Ireland, in terms of our economy, our society and environment, then we have to tackle this big challenge. It’s not beyond us because we've done it before, and if anyone should know how to do it's us.
It's our job as public servants to make it as easy and safe as possible for communities to share, whether that's living together, spending time together, working together or traveling to work together.
It's our job as public servants to ensure infrastructure is working in the right way. It doesn't just mean housing professionals doing it, it means everybody doing it. It means changing the shape and design of what we build and how we build it and changing how our places are structured. It means wrapping around the right infrastructure, it means education and health and every other public service being part of it, along with the business and voluntary and community sectors. It would be fantastic if we could see that as a core priority across government over the next decade.
Themes: Housing, Public Bodies, Newcomers, Integration