What’s in this podcast?
How do you make the case for technology investment when the same budget could pay for improvements to people’s homes?
In this episode of Hub & Spoken, Jason Foster, CEO & Founder of Cynozure, is joined by Matt Cross, Chief Information Officer at Places for People, to discuss using data and technology to improve lives and help fight homelessness.
Matt brings lessons from banking and retail to a sector where understanding customers can have a profound impact. He explains the ambition behind becoming “more digital and more human”: making everyday services easier to access while giving colleagues more time to support residents who need a personal conversation.
They explore how AI could help rethink repairs and how connected homes might support independent living, with customer choice and consent central to both.
They also tackle the difficult balance between modernising ageing systems and delivering results today. How do you show that investment is worthwhile while the bigger transformation is still under way? And how do you keep people’s needs at the heart of those decisions?
Episode timings
00:00 — Introduction
03:53 — From scientific modelling to purpose-driven work
07:29 — Places for People and its social mission
10:34 — Customer obsession and channel choice
15:53 — Becoming more digital and more human
20:24 — Rethinking boiler repairs with AI
25:09 — The five stages of technology transformation
33:22 — Technology-enabled care and customer choice
38:36 — Culture, ageing homes and the future
The following interview transcription has been edited for length and clarity.
00:00 — Introduction
Jason Foster:
Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I have with me Matt Cross. Matt is the Chief Information Officer of Places for People. We’re going to call this PFP for the purposes of the rest of the discussion.
We’re talking about using data and technology to change lives and fight homelessness: an absolutely awesome mission and cause. I’m really delighted to have Matt on the show. Matt, welcome along.
Matt Cross:
Jason, thank you for the invitation.
Jason Foster:
Let’s get you introduced to everyone: who you are, a bit about your background and who Places for People are as well, if that’s all right.
Matt Cross:
And well done for getting Places for People right twice. That’s a good start. My name is Matt Cross. I’m the Chief Information Officer at PFP. My role is to use data and technology to change people’s lives and to fight homelessness.
Let me give you a little bit of background, which might be pertinent to some of the future discussion points. I was performing data science before it was called data science, before it was called machine learning engineering, before it was called AI engineering, when it was called plain old mathematical modelling or statistical modelling. That probably gives you a view of how old I am.
My PhD looked at the impacts of Chernobyl. I modelled the effects of nuclear radiation in the Earth’s environment, which meant I had a nice, cool time travelling around Belarus and Ukraine. But you come out of a PhD with big debts, so I followed the conventional trail into finance and spent a few years in risk departments at a number of banks.
While I was there, I met my wife, who convinced me to trade California for Sunderland. That’s an interesting view into my life. I joined a challenger bank called Northern Rock in 2006 in a role called Capital Management and Stress Testing, which, if you know what happened to Northern Rock, basically meant I spent the financial crisis working seven days a week. I guess I did okay because I was promoted to head of a credit risk division, and Northern Rock was subsequently bought by Virgin Money.
Around 2012, I became really interested in the rise of cloud computing and, specifically, open-source coding. I started moving away from risk analytics and more into customer analytics. That prompted me to move to Tesco Bank, where my role was to set up a division using machine learning capabilities and leveraging cloud computing to deal with big data, such as the Clubcard database.
We were making nice progress, but then COVID came along and knocked us all a little sideways. My role at Tesco Bank subsequently changed. It became: how do we help people who have been furloughed or lost their jobs to pay their debts?
In addition, Tesco was going through a massive change where it had to scale up click and collect. You might remember those days in the midst of COVID when no one could get a delivery slot. We were part of the team working out how to solve and scale that problem, and how to improve the digital infrastructure to create more delivery slots. That was quite a crazy time.
03:53 — From scientific modelling to purpose-driven work
Matt Cross:
Although it was difficult and challenging, I loved the purpose. You might remember that Tesco’s message at the time was ‘feed the nation’. There was a different incentive for coming to work: it was about helping others. As we came out of COVID and things became more normal, I started looking for a more purpose-driven role. That’s when PFP came along, Jason.
Jason Foster:
I like it. We’ll talk about PFP in a second, but that transition from nuclear to financial services, retail and now housing and social housing, and the good you do there: is there a thread of commonality? Is analysing the impact of nuclear reactors the same as analysing risk and people’s behaviour, or are there lots of differences across all of that?
Matt Cross:
I think the thread is trying to make informed predictions. We’ll unpack this as we go through, but I think we in data love this concept: can you understand causality in your data? Is there enough there for you to understand cause and effect? If so, can you make informed predictions about the future?
Obviously, we live in a crazy world at the moment, with extraordinary transformations in technology. But I think many people who work in our field love trying to understand and unpack what is in the day-to-day, so they can make good estimates about the future. If you break that down, that’s largely risk management in a bank.
Increasingly, what we see with customers is that, if you can get to the causal behaviour, you can understand how best to help them. With PFP, that really is key. If we understand our customers, we’ve got a better chance of meeting their needs.
Jason Foster:
I love that view. How do you take knowledge about something and use it to predict or infer what might happen, or sit it alongside your own hypothesis, expectations, wants, needs and desires, to help you or a machine decide what action to take? That might be doing nothing, doing something or anything in between.
Matt Cross:
I love it. Increasingly, even if you don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, having that background in statistics means you can at least measure the effect of an action. You can put something out there and then track the data to see whether it has a statistically significant impact.
Jason Foster:
It’s almost about building confidence in what you know. Is what you know reality, or just a perception or memory of what happened in the past? Then, going forward, it builds confidence in the choice you’re making, or at least helps you recognise that you don’t have all the information. You don’t always have all the information needed to make a choice, but knowing what you don’t know is also really useful.
Matt Cross:
At heart, we’re probably both the same. We love the scientific mindset. You put something out there, observe an effect, work out whether it’s statistically relevant and learn from it.
Jason Foster:
Definitely. I love that scientific part, but maybe this feeds nicely into the work you do now. The art is often as important as, if not more important than, the science behind it: the people, the change, the behaviour and the understanding of reality.
Matt Cross:
That’s interesting. I often see that intuition can lead to scientific understanding. In our jobs, we often find that people know what we should be doing before we can evidence it with data. I always find those conversations quite interesting.
Jason Foster:
We could talk about psychology and the psychology of science, but let’s park that for another time. Let’s talk about PFP. Who are they, what do you do and what is your role there?
07:29 — Places for People and its social mission
Matt Cross:
PFP is the UK’s leading, and maybe most impactful, social enterprise. To give you a view of what we do, about 500,000 people live in properties that we own or manage. Most of those properties are affordable.
Lower costs are really important. We’re a social enterprise and we don’t have shareholders. The lower our costs, the more we can invest in the future. The more houses we can build, and the more we can build at affordable rent, the more we can fight homelessness.
Our strapline is that we change lives and support thriving communities. But a community is more than just a home. Within PFP, we don’t just do homes. We manage or own 250,000 homes, but we do many more things. If you think about a community, what else does it need? It needs retirement homes, assisted living and refuges. We run many refuges across the country where people can escape domestic violence.
We run something called the Young Parents Pathway. Where I live in the north-east of England, there’s a deprived area where, unfortunately, young girls get pregnant at a very early age. They’re not old enough to understand and manage their own lives, let alone bring up a child. We give them a flat and teach them basic things, such as how to make a cup of tea. Then we teach them how to raise their baby and eventually support them to get back onto the career ladder.
We also run over 100 leisure centres. Again, if you think about communities, they’re more than just a home and those services. They’re also about mental and physical fitness. You get a sense that it’s a big group. It has big data, and there’s a huge opportunity for us to use data and technology to improve the customer experience, reduce our costs and scale the group. If we scale the group, we scale up those services, and we think that improves communities. Does that make sense?
Jason Foster:
It does. Thinking about your background and the language you use, it’s quite retail-oriented. You talk about understanding the customer and helping people get the most from services.
Has your background served you well? I haven’t seen the switch from retail financial services into housing and social housing very often, but I can see some of the connections. Have you been able to take lessons from your past and apply them in ways the sector already uses or through a new way of thinking?
10:34 — Customer obsession and channel choice
Matt Cross:
Let me give you a couple of lessons. One is customer obsession. What do we mean by that? It’s the belief that we should start by understanding what the customer wants. Then we, within data and technology, can use those capabilities to try to meet their needs.
There’s always an interesting difference between what the customer wants and what the customer needs, which we’ll probably come back to. But that was ingrained in me during my time in retail. Jason, is that similar to your experience at M&S?
Jason Foster:
It is. For listeners who don’t know, I spent much of my career in retail and, before setting up Cynozure, at M&S. One of the things we spoke about a lot was that a customer does some things that are almost factual. They bought something in a shop, went to a website, clicked on something, returned something or bought a particular size. Those are facts.
Then we asked them things. We did research and said: customer, what do you want? Where do you like to shop? What do you like about M&S? There was lots of research and qualitative capture of information about what customers said. We had the facts and what they said, but neither necessarily gave us the whole picture. There were also inferences.
What did they write on social media? Was that different from what they said and bought? What were they sharing with friends? You built up this picture to make the best estimate of what was right for them, whether that concerned an offer, pricing, sizing, an email or the range in a particular store or locality.
One of the big lessons I learnt was how to understand the difference between what someone says they want and your understanding of them, then track, monitor, measure and react as you take action.
Matt Cross:
I love that. Having spent 20 years in finance and a few years in retail, you understand that, if you don’t understand your customers and aren’t meeting their needs, you’re outcompeted. You quickly realise that, if you’re not focused on the customer, you’re not doing your job very well in data and technology. You’re in a doom loop.
That really resonated with me. We are here to help our customers. Whatever part of the technology stack you’re working in, you should be able to trace what you’re doing every day back to whether you’re helping the customer.
Jason Foster:
There’s also the question of product or channel versus customer. Are we thinking about what product we should sell, or how we should interact with customers?
There may be similarities here. The phrase ‘housing association’ might lead the sector towards homes and looking after houses, property and assets. That’s quite product- and service-focused. But you’ve approached it from a different perspective: who are our residents? What is the community? What outcome are we trying to create? How do those customers live within that and what do they need? That’s quite a different way of looking at the business.
Matt Cross:
It’s set from the top. My boss, the CEO, is very customer-focused. We’re trying to transition from being a company obsessed with the home and the house to one that’s obsessed with the customer. It is a transition, and it’s not without challenges.
For example, I firmly believe in digital enablement. Customers should be able to meet their needs through their channel of choice. That’s very much the language of retail, but it isn’t always how we work in housing, particularly social housing. We’ve had many conversations about whether we should meet our customers’ needs through an app or digital channels.
Yet, when I stand outside people’s homes while visiting communities, I see groceries being delivered by Amazon and people being picked up by Uber. I can see that our customers live that way. Why shouldn’t we help them through their channel of choice?
Jason Foster:
Choice is important. You can force technology on people for problems that didn’t need to be solved with technology. I was at a restaurant the other day and, when they brought me the bill, it had a QR code for payment. I thought, why not just bring me the card machine so I can tap it with my phone? You’ve put 14 steps in place when one was fine, just because of technology.
Technology is great, but it needs to be used for the right job, and people need a choice about whether to use it or something else. There’s a cost to having multiple ways for people to interact. But when you put the customer at the heart of the problem statement, I think you accept some cost to doing things in the way that serves them best.
15:53 — Becoming more digital and more human
Matt Cross:
One hundred per cent. That brings me to my next big lesson. It sounds really simple, but it’s the importance of having a clear vision and focusing on outcomes. We live in a world where I think we become obsessed with the rise of analytics, machine learning and generative AI.
In this disrupted and transformed world, it’s more important than ever to know what you’re trying to achieve and to have a view of your purpose. Having worked for 25 years, I’ve seen disruptive technologies arrive. I’ve seen the advent of cloud computing and, specifically, mobile, and what they did to industries such as retail and banking.
I remember being in a room and spending far too much time discussing whether we should use cloud computing in a bank and whether it was safe enough. We spent two years talking about it before we stepped into it.
I’ve seen companies such as Revolut dismissed when they entered the marketplace because of their focus on customer experience over the balance sheet. I’ve also seen the rise of Amazon in retail and what that has done. Some listeners won’t remember that, in 2005, Amazon’s market capitalisation was similar to Tesco’s.
It’s fascinating to see what disruptive technology is doing. Against that background, it’s fundamental to have a view of what you’re trying to achieve. I don’t think ‘achieving the business plan’ is a good answer. It has to be bigger and broader than that.
Jason Foster:
How does that sit with a social enterprise, an organisation for good? The examples you’ve given are commercially driven, shareholder-led organisations that are very focused on return on investment, and most have huge capital behind them.
Does that translate into your work and the role technology, digital and data can play in helping your communities and customers?
Matt Cross:
One hundred per cent. I don’t see it as an ‘or’; I see it as an ‘and’. I think we can deliver a step change in customer service through data and technology. We can deliver faster and more consistent services. They’re safer because they have an inherent audit trail, and they’re also lower-cost.
I’m not saying every interaction with a customer should be digital. But, if we can take 20 or 30 per cent of customer interactions and deliver them instantly and automatically through technology, all the cost currently tied up in manual work can be reallocated to areas that are difficult to replicate with technology. That could mean talking with a customer on their doorstep about problems in the neighbourhood, empathising and solving problems.
That’s what we’re getting to the heart of. It’s about using technology. The strapline we use within PFP is ‘more digital and more human’.
Jason Foster:
The ‘more human’ part makes it real. It makes it about the customer, not the technology, which goes back to your original point. In my silly restaurant example, they forgot that when they deployed the solution.
There were two people who had hopefully had a nice meal and good service. But, right at the end, when we were deciding whether we’d enjoyed the evening, they dropped something on the table and hurried off to another customer. It didn’t make us feel good. The human part is really important.
20:24 — Rethinking boiler repairs with AI
Matt Cross:
Can I give an example to bring it to life? Some people may be perplexed about what social housing is and what data and technology mean in that context.
It’s early October and we’re beginning to get into autumn. The chill is starting and people are turning on their boilers for the first time. A customer turns on the boiler in one of the 250,000 homes we manage, but it doesn’t start. It’s cold in their house.
What do they do? They pick up the phone, because that’s our conventional channel at the moment, and call the PFP call centre. It’s a cold morning, everyone else is turning on their boiler and many other boilers may not be working, so the call centre is inundated. They sit on hold for five or seven minutes in a cold house, with their children getting cold, worried about whether it will be fixed.
After waiting for seven minutes to Greensleeves or whatever we have, they get through to one of our call centre agents. The customer probably isn’t an expert in boilers. The call centre worker, although very well trained, may not be an expert either. They’re having a strange conversation in which the customer says, ‘My boiler doesn’t work’, and the agent tries to triage and understand why.
Let’s say they muddle through the conversation and agree that someone needs to visit. A gas engineer is rerouted because it’s a priority: it’s a cold house with a parent and children. Within a couple of hours, the engineer arrives and says, ‘I know the problem, but I don’t have the parts. I need to go to a store.’ They go to the store, but it doesn’t have the parts. They have to return and tell the customer, ‘I know what the problem is. I can fix it tomorrow because the part will be in stock then.’
As a technologist, you look at that problem and think: can’t we do better than that? If Apple or Amazon did social housing, would it work that way? No. We’d probably open Gemini or Claude, take a picture of the boiler and ask what’s wrong with it. Claude or Gemini would look at the error code and identify what had happened. You could ask whether you can fix or restart it yourself, and it would probably give you a step-by-step guide.
If the error code requires a part, Gemini could tell you which one. That’s the world I imagine PFP needs to move towards. I’m not saying it works for everybody, but imagine if we had an app where the customer authenticates. We know their location and their home. They take a picture, we triage it instantly and give them advice. We could have a van arrive at their property with the right part very quickly.
Jason Foster:
It’s a great example because those problems have been solved by other industries. The insurance sector has begun solving simple claims using photographs of minor crashes, without much human intervention, or with a person simply checking the result. Quick delivery, stock control, supply chains and logistics management have all been solved by other organisations and industries.
How engaged, bought in and clear is the sector, or PFP if you’re comfortable talking about it, about that vision? How clear are they about wanting it, knowing how to reach it and putting the steps in place to make it real?
Matt Cross:
As a quick sidebar, you’ve summarised the key part of my job: I copy and paste from other industries. Why wouldn’t you? Some other industries are excellent at customer service. Why not look at what they’re doing and say, ‘That works. How do I bring it into my industry?’
Jason Foster:
Is that how you’ve started educating and bringing the organisation along with you, by showing them what good looks like?
25:09 — The five stages of technology transformation
Matt Cross:
I don’t think I do anything innovative. I take good practice from other industries and bring it into Places for People.
The story I often tell people within PFP is that the evolution of IT has largely happened in five stages. The first stage was calculations. We put systems in place and began digitising records such as payroll or customer records. Then, once the information was digitised, we moved to transactions, with enterprise resource planning systems and supply chains.
Once all of that was in our systems, we tried to understand the descriptive element and what was happening. That was the information engine. You could probably say the information age began when I started working, around the millennium. We had enough information in our systems to start using broad statistics and analytics. We had business intelligence and all that good stuff to help us understand what was going on.
Then, from around 2007 to 2010, we had the rise of digital. Thanks to the iPhone and our customers’ connectivity to the internet, we began digitising access to services. That was almost the fourth stage.
Now, I think we’re entering the really exciting fifth stage, which is about true innovation. How are we going to put automated intelligence into those digital customer journeys? In some industries, you’re beginning to see what that can look like. We’re seeing a fascinating level of disruption and transformation.
I explain that this is the evolution of IT. We’re not going backwards. I fundamentally believe in the increasing trajectory of data and technology. I sit with other people in PFP and say, ‘That’s what’s happening in every other industry. We have to move through those five stages as quickly as possible because the opportunity to remove friction from the customer experience and help our customers is off the scale.’
Jason Foster:
The value of doing it is high when you look through the lens of the purpose statement and from a practical, operational investment-case perspective.
Matt Cross:
Going back to it, it’s no longer an ‘or’ question. It’s an ‘and’. We can improve customer service and reduce costs. Thankfully, I have a very good executive team supporting me as we try to move through those five stages.
But moving through them is hard. It’s a full technology-stack transition, particularly for legacy organisations that weren’t born in the cloud. You have to go through cloud transformation. You probably have to move your technology stack from small applications into platforms. You have to digitise an organisation, which is culturally difficult. That then enables you to move into your data, so that’s the fourth transformation you have to make.
Eventually, once your data is in a good place, you reach this promised land of using GenAI to deliver automated intelligence. If I look tired and have bags under my eyes, I think it’s because we’re doing those five transformations at the same time.
Jason Foster:
They don’t have to happen in that order. You don’t have to wait until you have perfect data before using AI, or until you have a perfect technology stack before producing insights. You can edge your way towards transformation without rigidly following steps one, two, three and four.
In some ways, it’s even better when it’s driven by a customer problem like the one you articulated. We can solve customer problems along the way instead of simply transforming platforms and only later worrying about their impact on the end customer.
Matt Cross:
You sound like someone who runs a start-up. You have to pay your way. Data migrations are costly and the monetary benefits aren’t easy to quantify in the short term. While you’re sorting out the foundations of your stack, you have to deliver a few use cases that bring in value. Any portfolio needs to consider defence and offence. I guess that’s what you preach in your job.
Jason Foster:
It is. I always say you have to earn the right to spend a company’s money, whether you’re a start-up, a large enterprise or anything else. You’re almost obliged to say, ‘If we spend one pound, we’ll get two, three, four or ten back’, then prove it and do it consistently.
It’s very easy to spend money. Some people find it very easy to obtain money when there’s a buzzword such as AI. Others find it hard because they can’t prove that it will produce a return, and I think that’s right. It leads you towards testing and validating whether spending money creates value, and then scaling it.
That’s common in the start-up world, but it’s also important to be focused on outcomes and customers, and careful with money in a social enterprise or any enterprise.
Matt Cross:
It’s one of the key challenges. I’m not in this for one or two years. I want to support deep digital foundations for PFP. I believe AI can remove friction from the customer experience, so we want to change the technology stack within PFP.
We look at some of the big players and can see that we want to move towards platforms and agentic architecture, but that costs a lot of money. I have a CFO who has to choose between a data migration project and 10,000 new kitchens for our customers. That’s a tough choice.
You have to be very clear that the investment in technology will improve the customer experience. Going back to your point, the best way to do that is to show them: deliver a few projects that demonstrate value while you pursue your big transformation plans. Again, it’s an ‘and’, not an ‘or’.
Jason Foster:
I’m a big advocate of that. I’ve seen organisations work best that way. It isn’t just a good academic idea; it’s where this genuinely works.
Matt Cross:
That’s the trick. Everyone can have the McKinsey playbook, but it’s about putting it into practice, delivering results and working through setbacks. We’re doing okay and making good progress. I think we have a view of our target reference architecture. We’re about 70 per cent of the way there, but there’s always more to do.
Jason Foster:
The line you’re heading for shifts to the right as you get closer to it. But that’s where the opportunity really accelerates. Once you have strong foundations, and I don’t just mean technology foundations, but strong routes to build from, the value you can deliver increases.
33:22 — Technology-enabled care and customer choice
Matt Cross:
This is where it becomes exciting as a technologist. I’ve worked in technology for 25 years, from coding in a university laboratory to coding by talking to a computer. I’ve never seen this pace or level of capability. The opportunity it creates to help our customers is amazing.
We’re conducting a thought experiment because it’s important for the CEO and executive team to understand what could be possible in the next couple of years. Society has an interesting challenge: we have an ageing population, but we’re not building more retirement homes. They’re expensive, the cost of a place in a retirement home is increasing and more people are getting older. How are we going to solve that?
I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you what I’m doing in my personal life. I have two old parents. They might not like me using that term, but they’re quite vulnerable. As a technologist, what do I do? I installed a Ring doorbell. My dad has heart problems, so he wears an Apple Watch that I can connect to and use to see his heart rate. My mum is diabetic and has all her information in an app that I can access.
We’ve installed an alarm with video in their house, so I can see where they are, and motion sensors in some parts of the house, so I know what’s happening. Because my dad is quite careful with his money, I have access to his heating app and can see whether he turns the heating on in the morning.
That gives me a broad understanding of what’s happening in their home, even though I’m 300 miles away. I like that comfort because, if something happens, I can see it in the data, pick up the phone and have a conversation: ‘Dad, is everything all right? I see you put the heating on this morning. What’s going on?’
That works for me, and it isn’t too difficult to replicate across 250,000 homes. If I can do that on a shoestring for my parents, why aren’t we doing it? All the technology exists. Could we have the sensors, data and intelligence to make sense of it? The answer is yes. So what’s stopping us? Maybe a lack of ambition.
Jason Foster:
Is that what’s stopping us? There’s a potentially creepy line you can cross. You and your parents have an agreement, and I assume everyone is comfortable with it. But an organisation providing a service to a customer has to consider ethics, approval and opt-in differently.
There’s a psychological leap in becoming comfortable with it, followed by the question of how we help customers feel comfortable with it too.
Matt Cross:
So, if I play that back, just because we can do something, that doesn’t mean we necessarily should.
Jason Foster:
Yes. That goes back to your point about choice.
Matt Cross:
Why that matters is that we have elderly customers living in their homes whom we phone once a day to check in. That’s a good service. If the phone isn’t answered, we can send someone round.
But is that a good use of people’s time, or is it something we’ll automate in the future? I still think it’s important to check in with customers, but does it have to be a person? What do you think, Jason?
Jason Foster:
It depends on how you go about it. As you said earlier, choice is important. Some people like that human connection. Others don’t want it, but do want the security of knowing they’re being looked after.
Particularly if there aren’t enough places in retirement or care homes, how can you provide a kind of comfort blanket around people who have opted in and want it, using creative methods? I think there’s a place for that. If people have opted in, it could be a really interesting way of delivering the service.
Matt Cross:
I think so. We’re seeing some very interesting businesses enter that space. It’s a huge market, and it’s socially and societally important, but it’s also very achievable now as technology evolves.
38:36 — Culture, ageing homes and the future
Jason Foster:
The last area worth discussing is the biggest challenges to moving this forward. You say these ideas aren’t innovative, but I think they’re very innovative within the sector, and generally innovative ways of thinking about solving problems.
But that comes with challenges. Where have the biggest challenges been so far, and do you think they change as you move into execution mode?
Matt Cross:
There are many. One of our biggest internal challenges is cultural. Are we all aligned on what a good outcome looks like for our customers? Going back to customer obsession, do we know enough about our customers, their requirements, needs and wants to provide the right outcomes?
I don’t think we’ve reached a great answer. The point is that it’s about choice. We want to give customers choice. We also need to recognise that our service levels aren’t good enough today. Across the industry, what we’re doing isn’t good enough. Industry benchmarks show that satisfaction levels are falling, not rising. That’s a real prompt to change our approach, and I hope data and technology will play a role.
The other major challenge concerns our homes. We’re not building enough social homes in the UK. That’s a big issue around housebuilding, but, in the absence of enough new homes, our current stock is getting older. Most listeners will know that older homes tend to have more problems than newer ones. How do you gain a really good understanding of the health of the home?
You could retain the traditional approach and send a surveyor round every five years to assess the quality of the house and make recommendations. Or you could take a different route and use technology. If you took a picture of your kitchen and put it through Claude, or walked around your home using Gemini video, it could provide a relatively accurate assessment.
We’re beginning to ask whether our approach to asset intelligence changes with technology. None of this will be ready in the next couple of years, but part of our job is to consider the art of the possible and where we’ll be in 2030.
Jason Foster:
This is definitely a medium- to long-term challenge. But, going back to changing lives and fighting homelessness, unfortunately there’s an ongoing need to work on that problem. Anything we can do now that lasts beyond today’s challenges will be important.
Matt Cross:
I think so. Anyone leading in this industry at the moment has to solve today’s needs while thinking about how we can be better in the future.
Jason Foster:
I’m glad you’re part of that, because your approach and the way you think about solving problems are great. It’s been fascinating talking to you. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your views and thoughts. Thank you.
Matt Cross:
Thank you for the invitation, Jason.
