Lead DIGIT Lab Academic: Prof. Mark Thompson

Housing Associations (HAs) are not-for-profit ‘landlords with a social conscience’, and together with councils, they manage 17% of housing (4 million households) in the UK. Collectively, the UK’s 1,600 HAs handle around £20bn a year, but each operates independently from the others, developing its own policy and processes, procures and builds or acquires its own technology, interprets changing legislation in its own way, and runs its own ‘special’ back office, which consequentially has a high cost base.  Professor Mark Thompson has been doing a sectoral ‘deep dive’ to assess the opportunities for radical digital transformation of the HA sector using a common digital platform ‘back end’ to replace the 40% approx. overhead of all the siloed corporate structure that is currently’ baked in’ to the way they’re structured. We have held a very successful workshop working with experts from two HAs, and are currently writing up the findings.