Beyond Data: Designing Services That Work Part 2

This is part two of host Lee Reevell’s conversation with Professor Richard Harding, at the Hartree Centre and Visiting Professor at UCLan. In part one, Richard shared his career journey and the importance of linking housing, health, and care. Here, the focus shifts to the future — and how emerging technologies could reshape the sector. 

Key themes include: 

• Trusted research environments (TREs): how housing and social care can learn from health to enable secure, role-based access to data. 

• Scaling collaboration: why metro mayors and regional devolution could help housing–health partnerships move beyond postcode lottery outcomes. 

• Digital twins: modelling retrofit, net zero, and climate impacts — and why capturing data early is critical. 

• AI guardrails: the promise of chatbots and ambient voice tech, weighed against the risks of bias, hidden workloads, and lack of transparency. 

• Quantum computing: why optimisation challenges like repair scheduling could be quantum’s sweet spot — but only once housing masters today’s methods. 

Explore more on National Digital Twin Programme and UK Quantum Strategy. 

Practical steps for housing providers 

• Build data capability in-house to engage with future technologies. 

• Prioritise impactful use cases (e.g. asthma, retrofit) to demonstrate the value of shared data. 

• Collaborate regionally to create scalable, shared data governance models. 

• Improve asset data quality now to prepare for digital twin applications. 

• Apply ethical, transparent standards when exploring AI-driven tenant services.