Paul Taylor

Reciprocity , The Social Contract, and Talking About Tomorrow Today

About ten years ago Bromford introduced something called The Deal.

It was a simple concept. Offer someone a home, see what they could contribute to a community: make a deal.

New residents completed an online assessment where they were asked to share their skills and their hopes for the future.

Goals were then set around what they wanted to achieve , in their words.

Many had amazing skills, that could be shared with the local community.

It caused a mini-backlash online. Not from our residents, but from others in the sector.

“How dare you ask people to do things in return for a tenancy?”

“This is like a return to the poor house”.

Such was the backlash, that today you can find little mention of the the Bromford Deal online.

It’s been memory-holed.

So, why am I posting links to the content?

Three reasons.

One: You should never deny your history and your early efforts. We know that we learn most from our failures.

Two: With hindsight, the language was clumsy and the cartoon characters ill-judged. But the intention behind it still stands up.

Three: The idea of promoting reciprocity is a good one and is not something we talk about enough.

Reciprocity is a fundamental social principle where people feel obliged to repay actions in kind. If someone does something for you, you feel a sense of obligation to do something for them in return. In a world sometimes reduced to transactions , this simple concept has profound implications for individuals, relationships, and society as a whole.

In this edition of Let’s Talk Ideas , I talk to Tom Knox, a Netherlands based solicitor and consultant whose knowledge spans Dutch and UK affordable housing.

Tom introduces the idea of solidarity and collaboration being fostered by three-way agreements between the Government, local institutions and and people.

Known as the ‘Polder Model’ this involves open discussions and negotiations between different stakeholders (government, employers, unions) to reach agreements on social and economic issues. While this encourages compromise, it also requires a willingness to directly address conflicting viewpoints.

This ‘enforced collaboration’ sounds top down (and it technically is), but as I say in the podcast, collaboration rarely happens by accident in institutional settings. Anything that provokes collaboration is a net gain.

Tom cites an example from the Netherlands where a social landlord wanted to engender community reciprocity and asked applicants why they wanted to live in an area. At the same time they agreed to give back to the local community eight hours per months of community activity.

An experiment with the social contract. ‘You’re getting a social housing home. The waiting lists are very high. What are you going to give back?’

As Tom says:

Do you want to enjoy where you live? Who won’t say no to that? But don’t be so reserved or concerned about asking the next question.

Well, what do you need to do as an individual to ensure that you can live in a place where you’re happy?

The Dutch tend to be more direct in addressing social issues, but this directness is rooted in cultural values of openness, pragmatism, and a desire to find practical solutions.

For instance, “talk about tomorrow today” is a Dutch initiative aimed at encouraging people, particularly those aged 60-75, to discuss their future care needs and wishes with loved ones.

It’s based on the idea that having these conversations early can help ensure that people can continue to live fulfilling lives as they age, even if they require additional support. This kind of conversation is sadly lacking in the UK, which is counter-productive, as it means we become increasingly reliant reacting to problems or lean on state intervention or provision.

The Dutch can make statements such as ‘you build a community by getting the community to help build it‘ They can say this without fear that someone is going to saying that’s being unfair to people who may be regarded as ‘vulnerable’, or economically disadvantaged.

The Bromford Deal might be a distant memory, but its core idea – reciprocity – remains as relevant as ever. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, or maybe we just weren’t ready to have those frank conversations about what it means to be part of a community.

But as we look to build stronger, more resilient societies, we can learn a lot from the Dutch. Their direct approach, focused on open dialogue and shared responsibility, offers a refreshing perspective. It’s a reminder that building a thriving community is a two-way street. It requires not just providing homes, but fostering a sense of belonging and mutual contribution.

Paul Taylor Avatar

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Paul Taylor
I’m a facilitator, innovator and designer. I work with organisations to identify problems and solve them in ways that combine creativity with practical implementation. I established Bromford Lab as a new way for the organisation to embrace challenge and adopt a ‘fast fail’ approach to open innovation. Nearly everything the Lab works on is openly accessible at www.bromfordlab.com. I’m a regular contributor to forums , think-tanks , and research reports and a speaker or advisor at conferences and events.
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7 responses to “Reciprocity , The Social Contract, and Talking About Tomorrow Today”

  1. Simplicitly Avatar
    Simplicitly

    This is such a mis-remembering of how the Deal was received in and around the sector, and the idea it has been ‘memory-holed’, whatever that means, is frankly ridiculous. Like all coercive controllers, Bromford have retreated, via this blog, into making it sound like they are the victims.

    The reality of the Deal’s disappearance was simply that Bromford stopped doing it because it wasn’t a very good idea. It was basically copying other landlords like Yarlington who had attempted to introduce an additional layer of conditionality alongside the tricky process of qualifying for social housing and social security in the first place, and Bromford stopped doing the ‘Deal’ because it didn’t work, after Yarlington had pulled their effort, too.

    At one point the Deal was due to be revamped into a second iteration, but it never got released. This was nothing to do with the reaction of ‘others in the sector’, but just because it was functionally incompetent. Not only was it a lot of right-wing rubbish, but the actual implementation was essentially bored housing officers turning up at people’s homes with a clipboard and literally ticking boxes to make it seem like tenants agreed to ‘reciprocity’.

    There are a number of problems with the notion Paul outlines above. Comparing systems in the UK to those in the Netherlands ignores the fact that people in receipt of social security there have more than three times the disposable income after housing costs as those in the UK. If tenants in the UK had the same financial security as the Dutch, perhaps they would feel emboldened to tell their over-reaching, privileged landlords to get stuffed when they came up with ideas like this.

    Threatening people’s housing security through measures like the ‘Deal’ – an abuse of the power imbalance between landlords and tenants – seems glamorous when, like Paul, you work for the landlord. When you’re a tenant, ‘enforced collaboration’ is simply a form of coercive control, where the abusing partner is choosing to put the kind of pressure on tenants commonly seen in instances of economic and psychological abuse.

    ‘The Deal’ might resonate now that another new government is coming up with ridiculous and wrong notions about conditionality in the welfare system, but the main outcomes of the kind of policies that led to it being briefly considered have been an enormous increase in poverty. Poverty is often broken down into housing, food, fuel or child poverty, but all the ground made fertile for the Deal has simply resulted in much wider poverty in the UK.

    Paul wrongly assumes that housing providers have a place in making communities. At best they should offer financial support to design their own community plans, as the Big Local project did at a similar time to the Deal. Many other landlords have managed to support communities in this way, and indeed to bring tenants and residents into their decision-making processes, something Bromford have failed to do even after the Grenfell Tower fire and its wider regulatory implications.

    As an aside, I have some family members who are Bromford tenants. They have been spectacularly failed by Bromford on issues of Damp and Mould. Even after Bromford featured prominently in Daniel Hewitt’s ITV investigations on Squalor in social housing they have, as an organisation, been unable to change their systems to perform their basic duties as a landlord.

    I often wonder whether the millions of pounds spent on indulging the Bromford Lab in their failed ideas, none of which have had any impact across the housing sector or even at Bromford when compared with other landlords, would have been better spent on staff training and resourcing basic housing management.

    Reply
    1. Paul Taylor Avatar
      Paul Taylor

      Rob thanks for commenting. There’s a few points here worth coming back on.

      I had no intention of bringing up The Deal ever again until Tom Knox mentioned the example from the Netherlands and it made me think of both the positives – and the negatives – of such an approach. I didn’t do this in the podcast as I didn’t want to take it down that alley, so wrote about it here in the context of ‘enforced collaboration’ and the Polder Model.

      When I say ‘memory-holed’ I’m being slightly mischievous in referencing 1984 and the deliberate revision of history to serve propaganda interests. The irony is hardly anyone within Bromford today remembers The Deal – maybe a handful of people – and that’s probably for the good for many of the reasons you point out.

      I’ve written in response to Alison Inman on LinkedIn that the notion of linking personal tenant circumstances to conditionality of a tenancy should never have happened and was a failure. It was not part of the original intention but she is right that it was voiced publicly and that was damaging. Many colleagues at the time would have agreed. Thankfully it was never acted upon to my knowledge and by 2015 it was all over. It did move to a second phase – the role of the Neighbourhood Coach – and that original approach was abandoned as you say.

      On the rest of your points I’m largely in agreement. Personal opinion: the traditional reactive non personalised sector model is broken. It needs either breaking up or turning upside down, which is what we are trying to with a move to place-based approaches which devolve power and resources. Whether the system rejects that remains to be seen.

      As for the millions spent on Bromford Lab – I wish. However I’d certainly do things differently with hindsight. Your comment and the ones from Alison, and Giles below, have made me think. The fact that The Deal is not remembered within Bromford but clearly is outside of it (and not fondly), is interesting. There’s a question there about the negative impact of experimenting in public and the unintended consequences of ‘thinking out loud’.

      I’d hope on that at least we’ve matured. Thanks again.

      Reply
      1. Simplicitly Avatar
        Simplicitly

        I’m not sure I can read anything on LinkedIn as I’m sure I’ve deliberately avoided having an account there to date, but I’ll try and check what others have said.

        I don’t think there is a problem with ‘thinking out loud’ or having and developing ideas in public. Loads of other organisations do it, and even some housing organisations have had structural rethinks – SOHA going mutual a few years back, Eastlight Community Homes realising it had failed tenants and the local communities, leading to it reaching out to residents to re-design services which have invigorated engagement without any kind of coercion involved.

        I don’t think that ‘neighbourhood coaches’ are necessarily a bad idea but in essence they perform the roles of housing officers. They have no more power or influence further up the management chain in Bromford than housing officers, so I don’t know what the point is in giving them a different name and pretending they do something different. Its paternalism remains at odds with post-Grenfell ideas about how landlords treat and mistreat tenants, and the changing shape of consumer standards and protections implicit in the Regulation of Social Housing Act.

        Similarly, I don’t have a problem with place-based working, the problem isn’t necessarily what things are called or what their structure is, it’s that every idea has a motivation, which people should be able to question, and more importantly ideas that are implemented have outcomes. There’s no indication that place-based working changes any of the dynamic of paternalistic top-down structures present at places like Bromford. Giving people different job titles does not disseminate power of funding within organisations, and it certainly doesn’t empower communities to improve their own neighbourhoods.

        It is gravely concerning that these.. low/no-impact changes are considered to be sufficient at organisations on the scale of Bromford. The entire housing sector has had seven and a half years to rethink how landlords work alongside communities, and it’s just so disappointing to see such a lack of ambition in genuinely empowering communities.

        On the topic of how much the Lab has cost in total since its inception, you would know better than I its total staffing, office space, heating, travel and opportunity costs, but given its lack of overall impact it’s difficult to think it wouldn’t have been better to spend the money on homes.

        Reply
        1. Paul Taylor Avatar
          Paul Taylor

          I agree with this “I don’t think that ‘neighbourhood coaches’ are necessarily a bad idea but in essence they perform the roles of housing officers. They have no more power or influence further up the management chain in Bromford than housing officers”.

          One of the mistakes we made – the major mistake we made – was to introduce that role without doing anything to “change any of the dynamic of paternalistic top-down structures present at places like Bromford”.

          We are at the very early stages of an approach that seemingly does change the dynamic. I can feel the friction already. The experiment is really whether you can take on those power dynamics in large organisations and flip them. The odds are against you but there are organisations that have done it.

          So, tenants are supportive of us trying, it’s what they want. Ultimately it will come down to that challenge that Lizzie Spring always offers “will the organisation give power away?”.

          Reply
          1. Paul Taylor Avatar
            Paul Taylor

            *appear to want. Doing much more mass engagement on this next year

            Reply
  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Oh dear.

    1) It isn’t ‘reciprocity’ when a landlord demands further conditions for the grant of a tenancy over paying the rent and abiding by the tenancy agreement. It is one party dictating to another.

    2) What of the ‘reciprocity’ of a landlord keeping to its obligations under the tenancy, like providing and keeping the property fit for human habitation. Something on which, it has to be said, that Bromford do not have a good record.

    3) Social housing providers are providers of housing. They are not and should not attempt to be social engineers. The attitude to tenants stinks in most of the sector as it is. Your attempt to shrug off the ‘clumsy and ill judged’ material misses the point that the material exhibited exactly the landlord’s attitudes to tenants that should disqualify them from even starting to think of themselves as social engineers.

    4) If a social landlord is serious about community building, then it should listen to, encourage and support (including financially) initiatives coming from its tenants (recognised residents associations, communal facilities like meeting/function rooms and so on). “You build a community by helping people build it’ – well yes. Not, and I have to emphasise, NOT, by making even the basics such as a stable home (hopefully, but unfortunately not necessarily fit for human habitation as legally required) conditional on a landlord set ‘contribution’.

    I find it somewhat concerning, but also not surprising, that you still appear to grasp that ‘reciprocity’ is not an imposed condition.

    I won’t even start on the legal problems with the ‘Bromford Deal’, which would have seen Bromford spend a fortune on legal costs in the High Court if it had gone ahead.

    Regards

    Giles Peaker

    Specialist Housing Solicitor

    Reply
    1. Paul Taylor Avatar
      Paul Taylor

      Thanks Giles for commenting. I’ll try not to repeat my comments I’ve made to Rob in the thread above.

      Point 1. Agreed. I’ve acknowledged that we should never have done that, and it was abandoned after a very short time. However I concede the negative impact. We were not very strategic in our thinking back then. Regarding the Dutch example cited by Tom in the podcast, I’ve not looked into how they are operating it in practice. He did acknowledge the legal problems with such an approach.

      Point 2. Agreed that reciprocity only occurs when there is a basic level of trust. And if there’s no basic level of service there’s no trust.

      Point 3. I disagree – but only because I think the social engineering argument is flawed. Housing associations that own a majority of social homes in a local authority are anchor institutions. Like it or not their actions are inextricably tied to the wellbeing of the populations they serve – for good or ill. I’m not shrugging anything off, the actions – and words – of landlords has impact. So I’m saying they are ‘social engineers’, but they need to work alongside other grass roots engineers at community level.

      Point 4. Agreed. No argument

        I 100% understand reciprocity although from my final comment ‘perhaps we were ahead of our time’ I can see why you’d doubt it. I was tempted to go back and edit it but that makes a nonsense of the comments.

        The conditionality aspect of ‘The Deal’ was there only for a fleeting moment, but as I said above, maybe I’m misremembering its impact.

        Thanks again

        Reply

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