Livv and learn: What it takes to regain full regulatory compliance

After suffering a G3 downgrade in 2018, Livv Housing Group is once again a proud G1/V1 housing association. Liam Turner caught up with group chief executive Léann Hearne, brought in after the downgrade to turn things round, to find out what went into restoring faith in the Knowsley-based provider and what others can learn from its recent success.

Just over five years ago, Knowsley Housing Trust (KHT) found itself in the unenviable position of losing its long-held G1 governance rating with the Regulator of Social Housing. Having maintained the top rating since its inception in 2002, the Merseyside provider was downgraded to G3 (non-compliant) following an in-depth assessment from the Regulator, which uncovered governance concerns alongside fire-safety issues in several high-rise blocks.

This was, of course, when fire safety sat heavy in the minds of the sector; when the blackened husk of Grenfell had only just been covered by the ‘Forever in our Hearts’ green-and-white sheeting we know today. Naturally, public perception of KHT was at a record low, with staff morale faring no better.

But much can change in the space of a few years. Knowsley Housing Trust, now named Livv Housing Group following a root-and-branch rebrand, is celebrating retaining top regulatory compliance, having successfully regained its G1 rating in April 2022. Staff are happy, and so are tenants, and while the provider’s former troubles cast a long shadow, its standing in the eyes of the sector is much better than it was just a few years ago.

It has, as group chief executive Léann Hearne agrees, been a rapid road to recovery – but that doesn’t mean it’s come easy.

"We're a really proud G1/V1 business, and we recently got the G1 reapplied just before Christmas. So, it feels like it was really hard won,” she says. “We still remain – and it’s not a badge we particularly want to have – the only housing association to have had to do that rebrand and the whole of that culture change during the pandemic.”

The COVID-19 pandemic did indeed pose a problem for Livv Housing Group, which had spent the past 18 months working to get its ducks in a row ahead of its official rebranding, billed as a major paving stone on the road back to compliance. By early 2020, it had everything ready to go. All that was left was to dot the i's and cross the t’s.

Then, on the 21 March, the first UK lockdown hit, pouring cold water over plans for an official employee launch event, which was scheduled for just three days later.

“At the launch event, we were planning to include some of the fleet vans that we'd had liveried up with the new brand,” Léann recalls. “They would drive in, and then the ‘positive impact, flourishing communities’ strapline would be on the side [of the vans].

“The team, mainly the operatives, were all geared up to do a bit of a surprise fashion show. The repairs team that were normally out of sight, were absolutely at the forefront of it for our colleagues to see, and that didn't get to happen.”

She adds: “Even though we weren't in the building, you could sense feel, taste, touch the disappointment across the airwaves, across the miles. It was really tough.”

With the legal go-live date set for 1 April, stakes were high. Léann and the team had three choices: dilute their rebranding plans, delay the rebrand, or plough ahead with everything as planned – just without the big ceremony. The final option was chosen to maintain momentum and hit legal timelines.

The official shift from Knowsley Housing Trust to Livv Housing Group went ahead on 1 April, backed by plans to invest £116m in existing properties and a commitment to building more than 300 new homes annually. The move paid off, with Livv regaining its compliance with the Regulator’s governance standard in October that year, earning a G2 rating.

Executive director of property Tony Cahill with a newly rebranded Livv Housing Group van

“If we didn't change all of those other things [as planned], the legals wouldn't have gone live on the first of April,” Léann explains. “That meant that governance compliance wouldn't have happened. And therefore we wouldn't have been upgraded to G2 in October.”

She adds: “With the power of hindsight, when we're looking back now, it all went really well. But it isn't until you ask me these questions that I remember the pain of that period. It was a big deal.”

Back to the drawing board

The rebrand played a key role in Livv’s journey back to full compliance. But it was far from the only thing that helped the 13,000-home provider regain its regulatory footing.

One of the first things Léann did when she took over in 2018 was to employ a ‘back to basics’ approach, and to refocus on the organisation’s core purpose as a social housing provider – all of which was outlined in Livv’s initial corporate plan.

To do that effectively, Léann says there were two enablers – People and Communications – which she endeavoured to share with as many stakeholders as possible, from customers to the Regulator.

"We involved everybody in doing it...I communicate with the business every week, one of our executives communicates every month; we do it in rotation. The whole piece has changed about how we engage with our people and how they feed back to us.”

The way in which employees communicate with one another and the wider business online has also changed. Taking inspiration from social media platforms such as Facebook, Livv’s overhauled employee platform enables all c.500 employees to interact and share updates. There’s also the ‘Livvee’ forum, which allows elected members from teams across the business to easily share views and feedback with the executive team.

“It's about keeping those channels of communication open, making sure you're accessible,” Léann says.

Improving communication and engagement with customers – who are “absolutely the most important thing” – was also key to Livv’s success in regaining and retaining its G1 rating. Within the first six weeks of Léann’s appointment, Livv launched a stakeholder perception survey to find out what customers and the wider community thought of the organisation and identify areas in which it could improve. 

I acknowledged where Livv had gone wrong and was welcoming feedback about where we needed to put it right

Léann also spoke at various council meetings, inviting feedback from attendees while owning Livv’s past mistakes. “I acknowledged where Livv had gone wrong and was welcoming feedback about where they thought we needed to put it right,” she explains. 

That commitment to proactive tenant and community engagement has evolved over time. Early on, for example, Léann brought in a system called ‘rant and rave’, which allowed customers to do exactly what it said on the tin. That process has now evolved into a more sophisticated system that comprises more than 80,000 sets of real-time data that Livv uses to inform decisions.

There are many other ways in which Livv has bolstered its commitment to its customers and the local community, including its quality and improvement customer panel (QUIP), where elected members from the organisation’s customer forum test and scrutinise various aspects of Livv’s service. Léann concedes that Livv isn’t doing anything innovative or different in this regard, “but it's another service that tests areas that customers have said they're not happy with, or that they would like to see done differently.”

“Our community isn't just about our customers, our tenants, it's about other people who are around those areas,” she adds. “So, we needed to make sure we did the basic services well, and better and easier for all of those neighbourhoods and communities.”

The business end

When the Regulator delivered its G3 downgrade back in 2018, it pointed to “weaknesses in governance, and in the effectiveness of board oversight and scrutiny including incidents of inadequate reporting”. 

So, while the rebrand, the reset, and the enhanced stakeholder engagement has played a big part in Livv’s regulatory realignment, it would have likely been for nought if it weren’t for the complete structural overhaul that underpinned it all – a move Léann describes as “critical, an absolute necessity”.

When she joined toward the end of 2018, First Ark, Knowsley Housing Trust’s parent company, had 56 board members across six boards and six different businesses, “none of whom spoke to one another.” Now, Livv Housing Group has just 12 board members who share a line of sight across the whole business and under whom sit committees that scrutinise the detail of proposals and policies.

“Wherever there is an issue, or where there is poor performance that is not quite right, you have a strong committee that will take that away, look in detail, and bring it back,” Léann explains. “So, decision-making is in one single place, all collectively agreed.

“You’ve then got the performance management of the deliverables of that decision-making taking place at committees, and it’s fed back. Everything is utterly transparent. There is absolutely nowhere to hide.”

The rebranding of Knowsley Housing Trust to Livv Housing Group involved simplifying the organisational structure

For Léann, it all comes down to People, Processes, and Systems, a simple mantra she’s carried over from her former professional life outside the sector. “If you’ve got those three things, and you’ve got a governance layer above it that’s checking that those three things are doing what they said they’d do, you write a corporate plan that you’ve agreed, and you have a committee that tests the corporate plan...as long as you keep it that simple, and it’s all triangulated, it should be okay.”

Léann herself was part of the overhaul, having been brought in from Riverside just a few months after the G3 downgrade. Naturally, after serving in the sector for around 10 years at the time of her appointment, she had accrued valuable experience which helped her steward what was to become Livv Housing Group. 

However, it was her experience in the commercial world that most greatly informed Léann’s management approach. “I came from manufacturing, from an international business that was based in Germany,” she says. “They make changes instantaneously.”

“They’ll make a continuous improvement change based on something that is happening, to customer, feedback, or something that’s happening on a factory floor, and they will have a continuous improvement mechanism that hears the voices of its employees at ground level, and they’ll translate that back up, and that change will happen in three-to-six months.”

Similarly, Léann is all too aware that Livv’s customers will be comparing their service to the commercial businesses they use and interact with every day – not other housing associations. When their customers make an order on Amazon or do their local shop at Asda, that’s the level of service that they’re used to and that they expect from all their service providers, commercial or otherwise.

“After COVID, I was more acutely aware of that than ever because I, like everyone else, got everything delivered, and that’s a service they compare us to,” Léann says. “I think it’s critical to understand that.” 

Symptoms of success 

Much has gone into turning what was then Knowsley Housing Trust from a troubled housing provider that had fallen out of favour with the Regulator to one of the sector’s most encouraging success stories.

In less than five years, Léann and her team had managed to dig the provider out of its self-made nadir and rebuild it into something arguably better than before there was even a whiff of regulatory concern. No mean feat, as anyone who’s spent some time working in the sector will appreciate.

The obvious result of all that hard work has of course been a return to full G1/V1 compliance, which was reaffirmed by the regulator in December. But there’s much more to it than that. 

When we gave people that pride back, suddenly the pace at which we got things happening in the business was fast and strong

Since Livv has turned around its fortunes, it has seen improved staff retention, a “dramatic” reduction in staff absences, higher levels of employee satisfaction, and increased interest in new job vacancies. However, one of the outcomes that Léann is most proud of is reducing the average age of Livv’s workforce by 12 years.

“When I started, the average age was in the early fifties, and it’s now come down,” she explains. “What that does is bring different generations into the business, different ideas. You create an opportunity to allow people to bring in initiatives, innovation, continuous improvement, and then we as a business can learn from it.”

She adds: “Our customers are mixed ages, and we have got to have the mentality and the approach and the agility to be able to see that, understand it, translate it, and to be able to deliver a service for it.”

Livv Housing Group contributed to the Northern Housing Consortium's 'Pride in Place' report, which was published in November

All these improved outcomes can only be a good thing for the bottom line, the natural corollary of which is a more reliable service for tenants – which is especially important when you consider Knowsley is the second most deprived borough in the England. However, for Léann, it’s the impact on people, rather than the numbers on a page, that speak the loudest.

“One of our guys in our business, who works in the empty homes team, came up to me in the corridor, and he was nearly crying,” she says, recalling the moment when Livv regained its compliance with the Regulator’s governance standard.

“He said to me, thank you for giving us our pride back. And when I still talk about it now, it gets me in the back of the throat because I've never since underestimated the power of pride and the power of people to move mountains.

“When we gave people that pride back, suddenly the pace at which we got things happening in the business, and the change that came through was fast and strong.

“People felt proud.”

• Read Livv Housing Group’s 2023-26 corporate plan 

Images courtesy of Livv Housing Group