Late last year Paul was featured on the Raising The Roof Podcast hosted by Nick Atkin to discuss how housing has only innovated through building safety and energy efficiency rather than through a fundamental change to the operating system.

Paul compares innovation in social housing with other industries, explaining: “In the social housing space, you’ve got the people – the tenant (the customer) – you’ve got a housing officer, you’ve got an engineer. You’ve got a physical asset – the home. You’ve probably got some emerging self-service portal or something like that. But we haven’t got a machine in the middle of it. We haven’t got something like Google have done where they’ve planted an AI (Artificial Intelligence) within our lives to make things fundamentally easier for us.”

Highlighting the new possibilities and benefits technology could offer customers and the wider social housing sector, Paul says: “If you think about how we could plant a machine in that loop and think about how people can run their home more efficiently, look after the home more efficiently. I think that is a huge possibility. It’s one of the things I really want to collaborate with other housing associations on.”

You can hear the whole episode here on Spotify