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Neighbourhood Housing Management Research: EastEndHomes

LSE Housing and Communities is currently working on an independent evaluation of the neighbourhood management approach of EastendHomes. EastendHomes is a community led, Registered Provider of Social Housing based in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

Professor Anne Power has many years' experience studying neighbourhood management (see Neighbourhood Management and the Future of Urban Areas). Through this work, Anne has identified a number of prerequisites for successful neighbourhood management:

  • defined areas of operation;
  • a manager of sufficient seniority to control and co-ordinate service inputs;
  • a defined budget to fund the local team and agreed services; allowing flexible local management decisions;
  • a small locally based and locally accountable staff team to implement management decisions;
  • a local base through which services can be organised and local residents can be contacted and make contact;
  • a high priority to basic services, in order to make a visible impact on conditions, thus gaining the confidence and support of other services such as doctors and schools;
  • a problem solving approach, involving partner services in the neighbourhood effort;
  • clear lines of communication with local authority policy makers and other decision making and service bodies;
  • mainstream core funding; not short term, project-based funding.

EastendHomes have developed the 'neighbourhood' as the basis for the provision of services through the delivery of housing management functions from a local office and by working with partner organisations at a neighbourhood level. In recent years, their model of providing services from local offices based within their neighbourhoods has become increasingly rare for social landlords, although there are now calls for more locally based housing management and for social landlords to return to their roots (See Housing Management: Back to its roots).

We will use a variety of methodological approaches to provide an evaluation of EastendHomes' neighbourhood management approach.

We will examine the following areas of service delivery:

  • housing management
  • caretaking
  • repairs
  • external and environmental maintenance
  • resident involvement.

We will compare the level of services and costs on the four areas of EastendHomes with the average costs across smaller London housing associations, and evidence from other models such as the Association of Neighbourhood Managers, other London boroughs, and London Councils.

We will:

  • interview centrally and locally based EastendHomes staff,
  • meet and hold discussions with representatives from each Estate Management Board / TRA,
  • conduct a group discussion with community development and resident involvement staff,
  • speak to block and tenant group representatives and other residents.

Our general approach will be resident focussed, taking care to talk to key members of the community and to organise meetings and interviews in a sensitive way, in collaboration with the community development staff and others.

We will contextualise our findings within a detailed analysis of the make-up of the neighbourhood areas using ONS data, including the Census, the Index of Multiple Deprivation, and other sources. This will give us an accurate picture of the population and conditions compared with the wider borough of Tower Hamlets and London as a whole.

A final report on this research is expected in March 2021 and will be published on our website.