“What I do actually matters, because I’m helping people with their home. I absolutely love my job, but I can feel frustrated. Some people don’t speak to us very nicely and I sometimes [think] when someone’s complaining about their house, ‘At least you’ve got one.’”
She is bidding for social housing, but as a single person in work, she is rated in Band 4, the lowest priority. “I keep bidding on places and I don’t get anywhere, because there are people in more desperate need and not enough housing stock. But a private rental is just not something I can afford,” she says.
Staff in the social housing and homelessness sector see the impact of the housing crisis every day, but many of them also experience it first-hand, as they struggle with insecure, poor-quality homes or skyrocketing rents.
How is living in these conditions affecting the sector’s workforce? And how is it affecting their ability to deliver for their organisation?
To find out, Inside Housing surveyed more than 200 staff living all over the UK and in a range of tenures. Three-quarters of respondents worked for housing associations, 60% were in customer-facing roles, and half were on salaries of less than £40,000.
Our survey paints a worrying picture, particularly for staff living in the private rented sector (see chart, below). More than half (55.9%) say that if they lost their job, they would “quickly and easily” be at risk of homelessness, and a quarter (27%) say that if they spoke to a customer or a client in a similar situation, they would consider them ‘housing-insecure’.
Three in every four staff members who rent privately are spending more than 30% of their salary on rent.
One survey respondent wrote: “Several times I have been forced to move, as the landlord wanted to sell the property, and then struggled to afford somewhere else in the same area as private rents are so high.”
This is not the first time we have written about this. In 2017, prompted by a remark made by Kate Davies, chief executive of Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) at the time, Inside Housing collected testimony from hundreds of staff members about their experience of housing insecurity.