Helping the housing sector to become more resilient when making Tough Choices

Last month, Zurich Municipal launched two thought-provoking risk publications at the NHF Finance conference: Achieving resilience in social housing & Tough Choices.

The Tough Choices: different perspectives on long-term risks facing the social housing sector paper follows on from the full report that was launched in November 2010. This updated version explores the risks that are likely to affect housing associations over the coming years, particularly given the changes in government policy and the austerity measures being taken across public and private sectors.

The Achieving resilience in social housing: developing a ‘whole risk’ approach to managing risk and uncertainty paper aims to provide some solutions to the risk challenges that are raised in the Tough Choices report. This paper explores how registered social housing providers can use risk management to build a more resilient organisation. It also explores the dangers of taking a short-term approach to budget cuts, without understanding the true, long-term effects.

The two publications were well received at the event and prompted many interesting discussions. Also at the conference we ran a questionnaire looking at how the Government’s austerity measures are affecting the whole of the public sector. 35% of those who completed the survey felt that local authority services were most at risk from the budget cuts, with only 9% feeling that emergency services were most at risk. 12% felt that housing associations were most as risk from these austerity measures.

Our Tough Choices report looks at the risks facing the housing sector over the next five years. Interestingly the majority of those who took part in the survey (49%) expected the public sector to recover from the current austerity drive within the next 5 years.

The two papers will shortly be available to download from our risk publications microsite – http://www.zurich.co.uk/newworldofrisk/. This microsite contains a variety of papers which address the risk challenges facing the public sector.