At Bromford we’re moving to “place-based working” as one of our strategic objectives, which essentially means we won’t organise ourselves and deliver services in the same way across our whole geography. We recognise that a one-size fits all approach doesn’t work that well, and adapting ourselves to what the community wants from us is key for thriving customers and cohesive neighbourhoods.
So that begs the question, where are those places and what exactly do they want us to do differently? I’ll be updating you on some of our early work to try and answer the first bit of that question.
How to find out where our places are?
Currently the way we split up our geography is based around neighbourhood coach patches and localities based on region. We wanted to see if there was a method of dividing up our properties in a way that is more meaningful to the people that live there. Our properties are not evenly spread across our geography – there tends to be some tight clusters of properties around more urban cities like Birmingham & Bristol, and towns such as Cirencester, Lichfield & Tewkesbury. There are also much more thinly spread homes dotted around in between – the villages in the Cotswolds and our smattering of homes in Herefordshire are good examples.
The places where we have a high number of homes very densely populated are likely to yield more of a “community feel” when we group them up, as well as a more concentrated impact from the deployment of the same resources. We also have resource constraints – for example we can’t allocate an engineer or coach to every property, and therefore there is likely a minimum number of properties we could consider a dedicated “place-based working” team to.
So our question is how to identify the places that are both:
Small and tight knit enough that customers living there and colleagues working there recognise it as a distinct community.
But large and manageable enough that it can be serviced by dedicated Bromford colleagues.
Where are our places?
Some very clever work by our colleague Henry Waters in the data science team has helped us visualise this and see where in our geography places that fit the criteria above are located. He helped us in the working group establish some mathematical rules to split every property we have across our whole geography into groups, or clusters, such that:
Clusters must be contained within the same local authority, to make handling the relationships and collaborative processes with external partners straightforward and manageable for place-based teams.
Clusters should be on average 450 properties in size – the minimum required cluster size to serve with a dedicated place-based team.
We assigned each cluster a score of how tightly packed it is, in order to rank those most likely to feel like a distinct community.
The results we achieved looked like this. Each coloured cluster of dots represents a different place:
In this early visualisation, we can see that some clusters still span a huge geography, and some clusters are very small in terms of the number of homes within them. There is even one cluster with just a single property in it. Neither of these extremes are able to fit the brief of feeling like a proper community or big enough for us to dedicate “place-based” colleagues, so the next step was to trim off the unsuitable clusters. This leaves us with fewer clusters, and they are both bigger in terms of number of homes and less spread out.
This “trimming” exercise above left us with 34 clusters, with an average cluster size of c.750 homes. Here is the summary map:
What the results tell us
The exercise conducted above tells us that we have at least 34 geographical communities, that cover about 60% of our total homes, that are sufficiently densely populated and large enough to be serviced by dedicated place-based teams.
On the flip side, this means we also know that around 40% of our homes do not fit these criteria, and are therefore unlikely to sufficiently benefit from a dedicated place-based team.
What we still don’t know and next steps
We think this is a good starting point to think about where our places might be, but we also recognise that the maths can only take us so far. Whilst this is a solid base from which to begin, what really matters is what our customers and colleagues in these places think about the results above.
The next step is to engage with our stakeholders who are already place-based – principally these are our neighbourhoods & communities colleagues and of course our customers who live there. We need to know what they think and make necessary changes, so the way Bromford groups up homes reflect their feelings of community as much as possible to ensure maximum engagement. Telling someone else which community they live and/or work in is a bit daft – they will know much better than us where the borders are and help shape a workable solution most suited for the success of place-based working.
There is also the pretty glaring question about what to do with the 40% of homes that aren’t currently big enough or tightly packed enough to be served effectively in a truly “place-based” way. We might be able to move some of these properties into other “place-based” clusters, but it is highly likely that most will not be. The truthful answer is we are not sure what to do with these properties, just yet. We are hoping an answer will emerge as we establish a pilot area with more sparsely spread properties, such as which different operating model will best serve it and what of interaction. It could be a more digital offer, or it might look similar to how we deliver services now – that’s all to be worked out.
Hopefully that’s been a useful summary of some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves, how we’ve come up with some answers, which questions remain unanswered, and what we plan to do to next to try and find them.
See below for more place-based working content, including a webinar that goes into the process of clustering our properties in a bit more detail: