Designing Out Failure, Not Residents

How understanding capability and motivation can transform service delivery, trust, and outcomes in social housing. 

In this episode of Making Housing Better, host Jenny Danson, CEO of Healthy Homes Hub, is joined by Naomi Sweeting, Director of Customer Research and Insight at Places for People, to challenge a hard truth, service failure in housing is not inevitable, it is designed in. 

Drawing on behavioural science and lived experience, Naomi explains why housing has normalised disconnected processes, repairs, compliance, arrears, retrofit, and then blamed residents when engagement breaks down. Her award-winning customer segmentation model reframes residents not as “hard to reach” but as people with differing capability, confidence, opportunity, and motivation. 

Key insights include: 

• Why counting activity is not the same as measuring outcomes or wastage 

• How siloed services erode trust and drive no-access, rework, and cost 

• Why “one-size-fits-all” communication fails, especially for damp, mould, and retrofit programmes 

• The risk of gaming Tenant Satisfaction Measures rather than using them to genuinely improve services 

The message is clear: healthier homes require services designed around real lives, not organisational convenience. 

Practical steps for housing providers 

• Map end-to-end customer journeys across repairs, compliance, and investment 

• Measure and report service wastage, not just volumes 

• Use segmentation to inform service design, not label individuals 

• Redesign communication channels to reflect customer capability and confidence 

• Rebuild trust before asking residents to engage in complex programmes