Sizing up the district

Size isn’t always everything. With a little creative thinking, Maldon District Council is building its capacity to provide residents with the kind of delivery expected of a much larger authority

The district of Maldon is situated on the East Essex coast, comprising some 36,000 hectares with a population of around 65,000, and is predominantly rural. Diminutive, maybe, but the demands it faces are no small matter.

The council no longer has housing stock, having transferred them in the early 1990s, but it still has to deal with issues such as homelessness, determining housing need, boosting the levels of affordable homes, and so much more. On top of this, it has to face up to the challenges of an ageing population. Within 20 years it anticipates half the district’s residents being in the 55 and older age group.

“As a small authority, it’s easy to think ‘we could never do this in a 100 years’ but we have worked smart to do what the big authorities do,” said Paul Gayler, the council’s strategic housing manager. The trick to juggling all the plates, in essence, is to ‘sidestep’ the conundrum of delivering all the services itself, in favour of positioning itself at the hub of a web of relationships and information, so that it can facilitate partners to deliver services on its behalf.

“We know we can’t provide all of the services, but we can help by explaining what is out there – by becoming a focal point to have a more enabling role,” Gayler added. “If we operate as a broker, then it’s a different level of working and it’s a little bit further removed from providing the service, but it’s rewarding because that means we can do a whole lot more for people than if we tried to provide it all the time ourselves.”

Making this strategy work demands a high degree of ‘self awareness’. In effect, that means knowing what goes on beyond the departmental ‘silo’, working with other agencies, be that other council departments, councillors themselves, or external partners. It works with a range of partners, including Essex County Council, Moat Housing Association, the Guinness Trust Home Improvement Agency and more, working with them to gather information as much as to disseminate it. The council is working with Anglia Ruskin University, giving its students welcome experience and using them to help with its research into some issues that even much larger authorities would struggle to cope with.

The key to Maldon’s approach is collaboration and this is underwritten by the gathering of firm intelligence. This is where the authority’s smaller scale comes in handy, making it relatively easier to identify potential partners, to communicate, and to forge strong working relationships compared to larger and more populous areas. One area where it has worked dividends is bringing forward sites for development – as affordable homes.

As Gayler explained: “We’ve been able to work with small developers on schemes that were too small for a planning gain of affordable housing. Because of the recession the developers were concerned and needed to maintain their cash flow, so we were able to introduce them to partner housing associations. They were able to come in and help meet the cost, so it’s helped to bring forward
schemes that not only would have been held up, but wouldn’t have given us any affordable housing, but are now going ahead as affordable schemes.”

The Older Persons Housing Strategy touches upon a crucial issue for the district now and into the future; it also provides a telling example of its chosen modus operandi across the areas of service delivery. The authority is looking to establish further Extra Care provision for older residents.

“To do that, we need to understand everything that’s out there in the first place, Gayler said. “It’s an awful lot of work, but it’s going to be very helpful for us because it includes things like smaller almshouses, the use of aids and adaptations for older people, and the whole ‘toolkit’ of things that are available for older people.

“It’s really only once you’ve got a picture of everything that’s available in the district that you can provide that picture to older people themselves, the community, and other agencies as well. You can also then see where there are any gaps, look at the size and shape of any schemes, and assess what is needed where.”

And that doesn’t necessarily mean only buildings. The process has led to the provision of IT training for older people, ostensibly to enable them to access web-based choice based lettings schemes, but it also benefits them with wider access to services – not just the council’s – accessible via the Internet. Given that so many of the population live in rural locales, that ability can be a lifeline to the wider community. “Being a small authority we’ve had to work a lot harder, but in a local community that is not so large, in some ways it’s been easier for us because we’ve known who to go to,” Gayler added. And as the saying goes, it’s not so much what you know but who you know – and that’s reaping the benefits for the district.