Hyde Housing – a profitable route to regeneration

Many recent stories focus on the behaviour of housing associations, who are very wealthy and have the ear of local and national government officials trying to find ways to solve Britain’s housing crisis through ‘Regeneration’. Part of the problem is laws and regulations that have not been properly thought through offering loopholes for exploitation. 

Britain has a perennial housing crisis with successive governments apparently unable to act, for reasons including restrictive planning laws, NIMBY protests, conversion of residential accommodation into commercial use via platforms such as Airbnb, and since over 100 MPs earn over £10,000 a year in renting property they are inevitably unwilling to see rents decline. It has reached the stage of public protests in London.

The National Housing Federation points out that the role of HAs is not to make a profit for shareholders but to invest in housing benefitting communities. Their activities include supported housing for vulnerable people, providing rented accommodation at market rents, and in 2018-19 they built one third of all new Housing in England.

They are also committed to supporting local community services, by providing affordable housing. But ‘affordable’ depends a great deal on service charges, and a recent article in The Guardian highlighted the lamentable state of legislation, by which service charges are controlled until the resident moves in, after which the HA is free to raise them, with catastrophic effects in some cases.

In the tax year ending 2024 Hyde Housing had £809 million of surplus cash in the bank. On 31st October 2024 the Inside Housing organisation announced that Hyde had acquired the property asset management company Pinnacle Group, in a move described by Hyde’s CEO, Andy Hulme, as a “game-changing moment for the housing sector”. The price was not disclosed but in 2023 Pinnacle Group declared profits of £23 million

The Prisma reported earlier on an issue in Thamesmead in London, where a housing association has been challenged in court for its failure to adhere to the ideals for which housing associations were constituted. Harry Allen’s acute analysis brings us to some keywords: Gentrification; Storywashing -  rewriting local history to portray housing associations as the hero; Artwashing – marketing an area with affordable housing to impoverished artists who will then unknowingly contribute to raising its cultural desirability to less-impoverished people to set up home, raise their kids and feel they are doing London a favour; and finally the biggest buzzword of them all: Regeneration.

This is one of those improbably good words that it seems churlish to question, until we begin to ask: what is being regenerated, does it need mending, who is benefitting from it and are they in need?

For the present article, The Prisma spoke to John Farley, the secretary and founder member of Bellevue Community Association in Stockwell, London SW9, and what follows is summarised from conversations and documents provided by Mr. Farley.

The full interview has just been published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper, with photographs and can be read here:

https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/03/10/hyde-housing-a-profitable-route-to-regeneration/