Shadowing Peabody: patch sizes, furniture poverty and anti-social behaviour with one of the UK’s biggest landlords

It is close to freezing when I meet Peabody’s tight-knit north-east London housing management team in their Leyton office, and the hardships ahead are on everyone’s minds.

Neighbourhood manager Elaine Daley is already in the throes of rolling out the housing association’s winter programme for residents, including providing extra food support; delivering essentials packs with gloves, scarves and hot water bottles; and organising ‘winter warmer’ visits for older residents.

Dramatic changes at Peabody since 2023 have made this kind of hands-on work with residents much easier for management staff, even in the face of growing pressures from the cost-of-living and housing crises. 

Despite a huge expansion – in April 2023, Peabody absorbed Catalyst in one of the sector’s most ambitious mergers, taking it from 67,000 to 109,000 homes, supporting 220,000 residents – ambitious plans pioneered by chief executive Ian McDermott have seen Peabody’s operating model overhauled, with its services decentralised and heavy investment in a new localised, responsive delivery model.

The change saw the establishment of 140 local patches across Peabody’s portfolio, each with its own plans tailored to local needs.

“[These days] it is much easier to get to know the tenants on your patch,” says Ms Daley, who manages 779 homes across several low to mid-rise estates in Leyton (before 2023, patch sizes could average up to 1,200 homes). New, tailored services mean there are “lots of different methods of communication available to residents now”, she says. 

We delve straight into the core challenges for Ms Daley’s residents: the cost of living, and resulting food, fuel and furniture poverty. The neighbourhood manager says that, along with a growing need for fuel vouchers, it is sadly becoming “more and more common” for residents to need support with furnishings, particularly white goods.

We visit a Peabody resident whom Ms Daley has been supporting with a range of issues, including furniture poverty, since social services flagged her case several weeks ago.

“I’ve seen Elaine three times since my social worker introduced me,” explains the mother of two, who moved from another large housing association via a mutual exchange. “She’s been very active in my life.”

After organising basic repairs to the house – including repairs to a broken toilet and a mould wash – Ms Daley secured funding to replace the damaged and sticky lino flooring, and is now seeking funding for carpeting to make the house “more homely” and warmer for winter.

“I’m grateful because I did take it as a mutual exchange, so when you do take it, you have to take it as whatever,” the resident explains.

“There’s no way I would have been able to afford [the flooring] and to be honest, the kids deserve it as well. We’ve been through quite a lot the last couple of years.”

While the resident was initially sceptical about repairs timeframes, she has been impressed with Peabody’s “prompt” repairs service, with problems being fixed “normally within a week” of reporting them, and emergencies addressed “within three or four hours”. 

Repairs on this patch are carried out by Peabody’s in-house contractor, Peabody Group Maintenance, which operates in certain London boroughs. But Peabody also uses a mix of external contractors, including Wates and United Living, as part of its new local approach, with regional contractors managing repairs in specific locations.

Ms Daley later tells me that navigating this resident’s fear of eviction has been tricky. “[She thinks], ‘if I do anything [wrong] Peabody will get rid of me, I’m going to lose my home’,” the neighbourhood manager explains.

But, according to Ms Daley’s boss, north-east London area manager Liz Bennett, tenancy sustainment is a huge focus for Peabody now, and “eviction is a last resort”.

Ms Bennett, who was a Peabody neighbourhood manager herself for nearly 30 years before she stepped into her current role overseeing seven of them, says that compared to earlier in her career, “Peabody is now taking more accountability and ownership, wanting [staff] to work in teams to improve services for our residents”.

Ms Bennett says decentralising services is enabling staff to provide a much better service to residents – from making it much easier to find a surveyor (“now they’re all localised so we know who to go to”), to giving them more time to “jump on things quickly”, such as calling a risk assessment conference in response to a safeguarding issue.

Being able to provide a more streamlined and responsive service is particularly vital when Peabody staff, like their peers at many London landlords, are spending more and more time dealing with rising levels of anti-social behaviour (ASB) on their patches.

Ms Bennett says ASB is most concentrated in certain areas – often where high numbers of people are sleeping rough – and close partnership work with the police, as well as homelessness service StreetLink, has become essential for the north-east London team to tackle it. 

Haringey neighbourhood manager Sharmane Clarke says she has been working closely with the police to deal with a spate of vehicle-related crimes on her patch, as well as low-level ASB, including people using a particular hotspot to urinate during football fixtures.

When we meet, she has just attended a quarterly multi-agency meeting in the local town hall, with police and 20 residents. Ms Clarke also has high hopes for Met Engage, a new platform launched by the Metropolitan Police in June to “allow residents to connect with their local policing teams, receive updates and provide feedback on local policing priorities”.

“I’m really excited about [Met Engage, because] people can just report things more [and] feel connected,” Ms Clarke says.

She hopes the platform could be a game-changer for housing management headaches like the one she is currently battling, which involves a non-resident who keeps parking two caravans on an estate in her patch. 

While the estate has a wider issue with parking abuse (Ms Clarke is in the process of getting new entrance gates and CCTV installed), this man’s behaviour has escalated from ignoring TORT notices and putting his own locks on the public gate, to aggravating neighbours, threatening to take Ms Clarke to court and even verbally abusing a Peabody contractor who was removing one of his locks.

Frustratingly, a planned joint visit with the police is proving difficult due to Ms Clarke not knowing when the caravans will disappear and reappear, but she thinks that if residents can use the reporting function of the Met Engage app for instances like this, they could be monitored more closely.

Regarding the man’s abusive behaviour, I ask how Peabody staff are encouraged to respond to abuse, verbal or otherwise. As well as having personal safety devices with built-in recording software (an increasingly popular tool to tackle rising abuse), staff are generally encouraged to report any kind of abuse against them, according to Ms Bennett.

If the perpetrator is a Peabody resident, depending on how severe the abuse is the response can range from a caution, to raising safeguarding concerns, to banning staff from lone visits to the property.

I end the day by speaking to Peabody’s head of neighbourhoods, Ben Siegert, about the biggest challenges facing his workforce.

Persistent overcrowding is one of the biggest challenges for Peabody staff – although the provider is doing its bit to alleviate the housing crisis, having completed 658 homes for residents to move into (at a cost of £215m) in the first six months of the financial year, and with a further 5,500 homes in the development pipeline. 

Costs, too, are a growing pressure. 

“We are having to do more and more with less money,” says Mr Siegert. “There’s lots of repairs that need to be done [and] lots of investment that needs to be done. We've just got to be really, really smart about how we use our money in the best possible way, so that we can help the widest number of residents.”

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