Written by Jas Bains (MBE) with Matt Leach

A few months ago, shortly before I moved on from my last CEO role, I sat through a housing association board meeting that would have been entirely recognisable to me a decade ago. Rent settlement. Decarbonisation costs. Awaab’s Law implementation. A new Regulator inspection on the horizon. Good people, diligently working through a substantial agenda, making considered decisions about the year ahead.

What struck me was what was missing.

Nobody asked whether the assumptions underneath the business plan still held. Nobody raised the fact that defence spending across Europe is rising in a way that will compress public investment for a decade. Nobody mentioned the 140 data centres queued to connect to Britain’s power grid, but unable to get online due to capacity issues. Nobody asked what happens to a thirty-year asset management plan in a climate that is warming faster than the plan assumes.

The executive and board weren’t to blame. Rather the meeting reflected a sector still operating to a set of rules and assumptions built up iteratively over the last twenty years. At a time when, looking beyond housing, rule books and expectations are being shredded and thrown away.

I have spent more than two decades running housing associations, and one assumption has held throughout: the world might be difficult, but it was broadly predictable. You could plan and manage risk. You could, if you were competent and careful, keep your organisation on a steady course. The hard truth is that those assumption no longer holds.

What has actually changed

The forward operating environment for housing associations in 2026 is not a harder version of what came before. It threatens to be structurally different. The pressures bearing down on the sector are not cyclical; they will not ease with the next spending review or the next rent settlement. They are the local expression of global forces that are reshaping what governments can afford, what communities need, and what institutions must be capable of doing.

Six of those forces are converging at once.

Energy and resource competition has not been resolved by the green transition; events in the middle-east threaten immediate economic prospects. And longer term competition over supply chains for lithium, cobalt and rare earths promise to increase geopolitical instability.

 NATO rearmament commitments are likely to significantly compress the fiscal space in which housing, welfare and public services have historically operated.

Political instability, driven partly by forces well described by historian Peter Turchin looking across a thousand years of history, is producing shorter policy cycles and weaker cross-party consensus at precisely the moment long-horizon investment is most needed.

Demographic decline is reshaping the kind of housing that is needed, in what places, and for whom, whilst putting further pressure on medium term public finances.

Climate change is no longer just a standalone risk but an accelerating meta-threat, making it harder to deal with all the others.

And AI, sitting on top of all of it, is simultaneously both an opportunity and a workforce disruption for a sector whose analogue operating models were not designed to absorb it, even before we look at its impact on the jobs our residents rely on.

Each of these challenges is consequential on its own. But together they compound and amplify one another. Defence spending squeezes the fiscal space for energy investment, which constrains AI infrastructure, which competes with housing and public services. Demographic decline weakens the tax base at exactly the moment fiscal demands are greatest. Political instability produces shorter planning horizons at a time when long-term investment is most needed. Climate change worsens every other pressure on the list.

The challenge for housing associations is one of navigating all of them in the context of operating models, governance arrangements and risk frameworks built for an era when you could address one significant pressure at a time.

Compound, not cyclical change

The UK Government’s 2025 Resilience Action Plan, to its credit, acknowledges this as a reality at a national level. For the first time in a UK policy document, it introduces the concept of ‘chronic risks’ – risks that pose continuous challenges over a longer timeframe, gradually eroding economies, communities and security. The Plan calls for a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to resilience, recognising that government cannot deliver it alone.

Housing associations manage four million homes in England. In many of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the country, they are the single largest institutional presence: the landlord, the employer, the convenor of local partnerships, the visible face of public purpose. If the government’s whole-of-society resilience ambition is to mean anything in practice, housing associations sit close to the heart of it.

That is the opportunity but it is also the problem. Housing associations, as currently configured, are not equipped for the role that the moment demands of them. Not because their leaders are not capable, but because the sector’s business model, governance conventions, regulatory constraints and measurement habits were designed for a very different operating environment.

Whilst policy signals are shifting – the Resilience Action Plan, the NHS 10-Year Plan committing to neighbourhood health teams, Pride in Place investing in over three hundred disadvantaged areas – the institutional response inside housing associations remains largely unchanged. Boards still meet, quite reasonably, to work through the agenda in front of them. Often defined by complex regulatory and compliance regimes, some of which have arguably lost track of their original purpose. Whilst nobody is asking whether the agenda itself is still the right one or indeed properly aligned with wider emerging challenges or priorities.

The case for looking up 

I am not arguing for panic or rebellion. Rather I am arguing for perspective and proactive planning. Radical realism in the face of a combination of external pressures unlike any we have faced before. The organisations that will navigate the next decade well are those that begin, now, to look up from the immediate agenda and ask a different set of questions. What does our operating model look like if current fiscal trajectories are derailed by major new demands on the public purse? Which of our assumptions about demand, supply chains, workforce and community need are robust to the forces I have described, and which are not? Where is our fragility most concentrated, and what would it cost us to reduce it whilst we still have time?

Change is not coming. It is already here. The question is whether the sector will keep working to an agenda with its roots in the last decade, or start designing for the ten years that are to come.

This post was originally featured on the new Substack from Matt Leach and Jas Bains. Matt has a career spanning housing, central government, national agencies and the charitable sector, most recently as a member of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods and chief executive of the Built Environment Trust. Jas spent two decades as a chief executive running housing associations through successive waves of change.  

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