Our CEO Nick Atkin has been steering the Yorkshire Housing ship for a whole five years this month.
Big on delivering innovation and with a clear customer-obsessed focus, Nick’s leadership journey so far has seen us developing strong partnerships with the right people in housing and health and local authorities, and hosting our podcast, Raising the Roof, where he tackles topical issues head on - in the housing world and beyond.
Alongside having big conversations, he's also been committing Yorkshire Housing to building affordable homes for our future customers while maintaining a low-carbon focus. To mark this five-year anniversary, we took an opportunity to ask Nick how things have gone for him while he’s been here.
- What is your proudest moment so far at Yorkshire Housing?
I’m going to cheat and say I have three proudest moment…so far - but loads more still to happen!
Firstly the way everyone responded to the pandemic during what was nearly two years of Yorkshire being in lockdown. The way we managed to continue to deliver services for our customers at what was a very strange and unique period in time was nothing short of humbling.
The second highlight was moving into The Place and seeing the look on people’s faces when they first walked in and realised just how far we had come in leading on the Future of Work debate.
The third highlight was the #WeAreYorkshire event which was held in February 2023. For those colleagues who’ve joined us since then this was the first time the whole organisation had come together. It was just a fantastic day from start to finish and the buzz and feedback during the event absolutely blew my socks off.
- What stands out as your biggest achievement at Yorkshire Housing?
Wow what a question! I came to Yorkshire Housing as it had the scale and ambition to deliver what I’d always wanted to achieve for the housing sector – that is to completely transform the landlord service offer from being reactive to pre-emptive. So, for me seeing this laid out clearly in our Business Strategy and being underpinned by a really bold ambition to be the UK’s Best Housing Provider has to be right up there as one of my absolute highlights. This will be surpassed when we make that transition – so watch this space!
- We know you've had some great days - what was your worst?
I don’t have many bad days here but the day we were downgraded by the regulator just eight months after I’d started was a real blow. But looking back this did us a huge favour. We already knew we weren’t where we needed to be and so it enabled us to make changes further and faster than would have been possible during ‘normal times’.
- Thinking about the next five years, what would you like to achieve?
Really simple…to transform the landlord service offer from being reactive to pre-emptive. I need all 800+ colleagues to really buy into this and that’s why we’ll be doing loads and loads more on this from 2025 onwards.