Board Member Jonathan Bunt Reflects on His Time at CAHA
I joined the Christian Action in 2023 shortly after it had been downgraded by the Regulator of Social Housing and it was, to be honest, fairly easy to see why. To be clear, the organisation at the time was doing a number of good things and there were some very good members of staff but, for a variety of reasons, it could not always show it was doing the right things or why those were the right things for tenants.
As a result of that, my time on the Board has largely been focussed on helping to get the quite boring but really important stuff right. Using my professional experience, we have seen improvements to the financial position of Christian Action, how the finances are managed and how we plan to use the money in the future. That required making some quite hard decisions on what was and wasn’t important to spend on and holding managers who were overspending to account for their decisions.
Through a combination of support and challenge, we have seen an enormous increase in the understanding of your homes and you as our tenants so we can deliver better services to you and invest in your homes. There has also been an entirely different approach to reviewing things such as complaints so that they are not seen as something we need to defend ourselves on but, instead, to know why our tenants had to complain so we can look to avoid the same issues in the future.
We have also completely changed the understanding of risk and how we plan for things that could go wrong to minimise the possibility of such incidents occurring or, if they do occur, minimise the impact they have. This could definitely fall in to the boring box for Board work though it is absolutely key to avoiding the sorts of problems that led to the criticism by the Regulator in late 2022 and early 2023.
This may all sound really obvious and, to some extent, that is true. However, if we do not have all of those basic bits right – sound finances, good information on our tenants and homes – we cannot know how to deliver the right things in the future.
Over the last three or so years, some of the Board and staff members have left and, in some cases, that was right for all involved. Importantly, those who stayed as well as those who have joined have shown an absolute commitment to improving the organisation and delivering better homes and services for our tenants. There is still work to do and there always will be but I believe that Christian Action is now well placed to be the type of landlord it wants to be.