Connecting communities

Jocelle Lovell outlines the findings of new research into the benefits of co-operative and community-led housing.

The Wales Co-operative Centre has been supporting the development of co-operative Housing in Wales since 2012. As this area of work evolved the support broadened to cover all forms of community-led housing, including community land trusts, one planet developments and cohousing.

In 2019 reflecting on the achievements and challenges, the Wales Co-operative Centre secured funding from The Nationwide Foundation and Welsh Government to deliver a three- year programme Communities Creating Homes that aims to ‘create a thriving community-led housing movement in Wales which creates affordable homes that meet local need’.

Communities Creating Homes will create awareness of co-operative and community-led housing with the general public, remove barriers to help schemes progress and offer three levels of support: Explore,  Enable,  Expand.

Over the years we have seen the benefits that can be achieved, especially the softer outcomes such as improved health and wellbeing, loneliness and isolation, skills and confidence. We felt the time was right to substantiate this by commissioning a piece of research that focused more on the voice of residents and their experiences.  The research was split into three parts: a literature review; the resident’s perspective; and the provider’s perspective.

The literature review flagged up that most of what has been written focuses on harder outcomes and is often represented by organisations supporting the co-operative and community-led housing movement. There was a noticeable gap in the evidence when it came to the voice of residents themselves.  If we want to gain a fuller understanding of the wider benefits attributed to living in co-operative and community-led housing then it is imperative that we ask residents.

In total, 53 residents or prospective residents from 22 co-operative and community-led housing schemes across England and Wales took part in the research. In addition, 14 staff from nine housing providers in England and Wales were interviewed in a separate part of the research.

From its outset the research sought views from residents with a variety of different lengths of experience in co-operative and community-led housing. This ranged from residents who were still in the exploratory stages to those with decades’ worth of experience, as the following graph shows (note that participants are ranked by length of tenure in ascending order, with those still at the exploratory stage marked at zero towards the left hand side of the graph):

 

 

Providers interviewed were similarly varied, both in their size and type, as well as in their experience of managing or helping manage co-operative and community-led housing schemes to date, in order to capture the full range of provider experience. (Some had had very successful schemes in their portfolios, others had had mixed experiences.)

 

Key findings – residents

Residents living in co-operative and community-led housing schemes identified in their own words a large range of benefits that they have gained from living in their schemes. The chart below is broken down by the type of benefit residents felt they had gained.

Some 10 per cent or more of the research participants felt that they had benefitted in the following ways:

• Improved skills
• Increased confidence
• Better physical health
• Improved mental well-being
• A better financial situation
• Less loneliness/isolation
• Employability skills
• Greater community feeling.

In their own words, residents said:

‘I have found a very supportive community of fellow housemates, receiving support during a period of illness and subsequently helping new members to find their feet in the household.’

‘There is a sense of pride; empowered individuals; there is self-esteem and confidence in tenants; getting things done, no red tape; resolving social and relationship issues; some friendships have been built for life.’

‘The most important thing is having secure housing, especially as I had a young child when we first moved in and it meant he could stay in the area where he was growing up’

‘We’re so fortunate that we live in a community where people care for each other’

‘I love sharing meals, tools and all sorts of resources with other likeminded people and being part of an extended family: “it takes a village to grow a child”.’

‘It’s often said we’re poor in this country at problem solving. We don’t understand consensus decision making and conflict resolution, and are poor at empathy. Housing co-operatives offer an alternative, but are not understood by many.’

‘Overall, there are advantages over traditional housing. Sharing resources and problems means you can tackle most things together and there is a real pleasure to been had out of working together.’

‘I was able to learn new skills participating within a management committee. My scheme works very well as it is very community based with family connections and networks, and enables me to continue to live within the same area. The biggest change is the employment opportunities afforded to me

Key findings – Providers

Providers interviewed for this research also identified a wide variety of benefits arising from their CCLH schemes, these included:

• Greater ease of letting of properties / reduced number of void properties
• Lower incidences of rent arrears among tenants
• Reduced number of complaints from tenants
• Fewer instances of antisocial behaviour
• Increased levels of resident engagement
• Improved community cohesion.

 

In their own words, providers said:

‘There is no turnover, everyone has stayed, even though there have been big issues within the community; there is pride in their environment, gardens, drives always tidy; it has influenced our organisation’s approach to community development in general.’

‘There is a sense of pride; empowered individuals; there is self-esteem and confidence in tenants; getting things done, no red tape; resolving social and relationship issues; some friendships built for life.’

For providers as well as residents in this research, there were many common perceived advantages of CCLH compared to other forms of housing, even given the variety of schemes and world views that go to make up the sector.

The Welsh policy context

The literature review made the following links between co-operative and community-led housing and the Welsh policy context.

Welsh Government’s target of building 20,000 affordable homes by 2020 includes support for co-operative housing and enabling the co-operative and community-led housing sector to take part in affordable schemes.

The Housing (Wales) Act 2014, also made it possible for fully mutual co-operatives to offer residents secure tenancies and make other changes to ‘create certainty, assurance, protection and security for residents of fully mutual housing co-operatives’, as well as ‘a better environment for fully mutual housing co-operatives to exist’ that will ‘allow them to develop more robustly and independently’.

Broader links between housing and wellbeing outlined in the Young Foundation’s Being Well Together report finds its reflection in two pieces of legislation in particular in Wales.

The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, encourages local authorities to help social enterprises, co-operatives and third sector organisations provide care and preventative services. The Act’s underlying principles, such as co-production, prioritising the needs of the end user, supporting people to achieve their own well-being and the relinquishing of aspects of top down control, are ones shared with co-operative & community-led housing.

The Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 likewise advocates new ways of working and changes to public services, including making greater efforts towards collaboration, future proofing, and involving people in the public bodies that serve them.

Recommendations:

Recommendation 1 – More legal, financial and governance support for ‘exploratory’ individuals and groups looking to set up community-led housing schemes.

Recommendation 2– More training and other support for ‘existing’ individuals and schemes to develop their ‘living together in co-operative and community-led housing’ skills base.

Recommendation 3– Greater support for ‘established’ individuals and schemes to help them retain high resident engagement levels, particularly in terms of board and other formal governance group membership.

Recommendation 4 – Stronger networks of peer support among all types of schemes and residents be encouraged and resourced, including building up peer research capability within the sector.

We welcome these recommendations and are starting to address these through the Communities Creating Homes programme.

In addition The Wales co-operative Centre would like this research to:

• provide a clear understanding of co-operative and community-led housing to policy makers and planners.
• encourage more local authorities and registered social landlords to consider their role in enabling more co-operative and community-led housing schemes across Wales.
• encourage any public sector land that is being brought forward for the development of affordable homes to include an allocation for co-operative and community-led housing, where there is ‘local’ interest.
• ensure housing polices and strategies make reference to and recognise co-operative and community-led housing as a ‘housing option’
• influence mainstream financial institutions to make lending more accessible to co-operative and community-led schemes.

The sector now has clear qualitative evidence of the benefits it can bring to individuals and communities so what next

In a world full of social media we sometimes forget that people can still be experiencing isolation and loneliness even though they are ‘connected’ to others.

Community-led housing naturally provides opportunities to develop friendships, interact with fellow residents, learn new skills and build confidence and knowledge in a supportive environment. All of this can play an important part in improving a person’s mental health and wellbeing and addressing loneliness and isolation.

CeIf you would like to find out more please contact the team on co-op.housing@wales.coop and follow this link to read the report wales.coop/assessing-the-potential-benefits-of-living-in-co-operative-and-or-community-led-housing-cclh/

Jocelle Lovell is community-led housing co-manager at Wales Co-operative Centre