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I joined the columnist team at 24dash.com for a purpose. Housing Today had just closed and I was concerned that there weren’t enough specialist media titles taking Social Housing seriously.

Variety, in the media world, is not just the spice of life, it’s an essential foodstuff.  We need to be able to get our news and opinions from a range of sources that are not all under the same ownership.

Variety is also a necessity to us in the Housing sector, whatever might be convenient for regulators.  If we don’t have a good selection of Housing providers, from very large to impressively small we won’t have the degree of flexibility and innovation we need to develop the new solutions required by an environment where rapid, discontinuous change is the only certainty.

I like to think that through the Housing Associations Charitable Trust (hact) we’re enabling some of the smaller service providers to hold their place in the innovation league table.

So why does variety become expendable when it comes to recruitment consultants?

I’ve nothing against the big names. Indeed I’ve worked with or paid for the services of most of them over the years. But it feels like we’ve put too m any eggs in too few baskets. I can see how it happens. If we’re finding a new Chief Executive, for example, it’s a pretty big decision.

And it comes at a time when we’re feeling most vulnerable. It’s easy to lose a grip on the goal of identifying the best possible person and to fall back on a combination of both a safe process, “nobody can criticise us if we use the same consultants as everyone else” and a safe pool “they’ll give us access to the same candidates that others get”. It’s understandable, but there’s a huge gap between understandable and excusable.

A few years ago I was part of a Working Party looking into the low numbers of women and minority ethnic Chief Executives of Housing Associations. Because most Associations use a consultant to help fill such posts we looked at who was doing it. Two organisations had between them the vast majority of the work. And one of those was much bigger than the other.

To none of our surprise, the Associations felt the problems was that consultants only put forward middle aged white men, and the consultants argued that it was the Associations who were only interested in such candidates.  Where the blame lies doesn’t really matter.

But I can’t get away from the thought that if the work was being spread around a bit more there would have been a better chance of somebody finding a solution.

So let’s hear it not just for the Hertz and Avis of the Housing consulting world but for the number 3, or 7 or 15.  Let’s spread today’s work around so that tomorrow’s work will be done better for all of us.  Get out there and hug a consultant.  A small one.

David Walker,
Bishop of Dudley.