We are currently recruiting for up to five new board members, including a new Chair. Scroll down the page to find out more about our organisation, the role and how to apply.
I am delighted that you are considering the opportunity to join the Board at Great Places. We have been providing great homes and services and working alongside partners to make difference in our communities for over 50 years. Throughout that time, our core purpose has remained true. We believe that everyone should have a safe, good quality home to provide a sound foundation that enables them to fulfil their potential in life.
Great Places provides over 26,000 homes across the North West, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, meeting housing need across a wide range of tenures from social rented homes to accommodation with specialist support services that help people to maintain independence and wellbeing. We are incredibly proud to play a lead role in the successful Greater Manchester Housing First pilot, supporting people with multiple and complex needs to take sustainable steps to move away from rough sleeping. We are also one of the largest providers of shared ownership homes in the region through our Plumlife Homes brand, helping people to take their first steps into home ownership.
We put the welfare of our existing customers at the top of our agenda, and we are focused on enhancing the safety and quality of our homes and improving the services that we deliver. We invested £42 million in our homes last year completing major repairs and routine works, and we will continue to invest more to make sure our homes are safe, comfortable, well maintained and fit for the future.
Despite the breadth of our footprint, we pride ourselves on providing responsive local services and our colleagues work from regional offices and local bases across our geography. We provide a ‘patch-based’ management service delivered to customers in their homes and neighbourhoods, and tailored to individual and community needs.
We also take our responsibility towards tackling the housing crisis very seriously, delivering significant numbers of new homes every year. We are proud to be a Homes England Strategic Partner for the delivery of their Affordable Homes Programme. Last year we built 700 new homes across 15 local authorities, and we have an ambitious development pipeline.
Our profit-for-purpose ethos means that our surplus after operating costs is reinvested into added-value services that improve the lives of our customers. Our wide-ranging community investment and support services have provided a lifeline for customers navigating the cost of living crisis in recent times.
We’re passionate about being a Northern housing provider, and proud to be champions for the needs and ambitions of our region, working collaboratively with partners through the Greater Manchester Housing Providers and the South Yorkshire Housing Partnership to ensure our collective voice is heard.
Despite numerous challenges along the way, we have made the most of the opportunities presented to us and we have thrived. Our customers face significant challenges that are increasingly difficult to navigate and we continue to play a crucial role in providing support, practical help and an empathetic ear in the face of adversity. I hope that you can see that our impact has been extraordinary, but there is still much more to do!
I have served as a member of the Great Place Board since April 2020, and took over as Chair in January 2023. As a Board we welcomed four new colleagues last year, and this year we are looking to recruit up to five new members, including a new Chair, as I step down from my role. The vacancies have arisen through natural renewal, and the need for sufficient capacity and the right skills to support our business into the future.
Diverse voices around our Board table are especially important to us. We bring different perspectives and lived experiences and would like to continue to stretch ourselves further on this.
It is important to us to maintain an effective balance of board members from private and public sector backgrounds and we will recruit to maintain this. We have thought carefully about how we shape these roles to attract talent that is diverse, appealing to people who want to be a part of a culture that values inclusivity and innovation.
This is an exciting time to join Great Places as we have recently launched our new and ambitious Corporate Plan, called Here For Our Customers. Our new Board members will have the opportunity to influence and shape the delivery of this over the next few years.
Last year we launched our new Customer Committee, giving customers a direct voice as part of our governance arrangements, and this year we are making further changes with the establishment of a new Growth Committee, which will oversee the work in our Affordable Development Team, Cube Homes and Terra Nova.
We are open to welcoming applications from candidates with a variety of backgrounds, skills and experiences. We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates with backgrounds in:
Also, anyone who has experience of governance or prior experience on an audit committee would be beneficial, as this will be one of the vacant committee roles.
We warmly welcome applications from Great Places customers that have some of the skills that we are looking for.
Please read on to find out more about our organisation and these roles. If you feel you have some of the skills that we are looking for and are aligned with our vision and values, we’ll be excited to hear from you.
Mervyn Jones
Chair, Great Places Housing Group
Great Places is an established and ambitious, values-led housing association delivering a range of high quality services to a diverse customer base in the north of England.
Our roots date back to the rise of the housing association movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we have grown to own or manage over 26,000 homes across the North West, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire.
We have an excellent reputation as a responsible, respected and trusted landlord with an ambitious development programme and a keen focus on tackling the housing crisis in the North. We remain true to our original founding purpose of providing homes for those facing challenging situations and services that improve our customers’ lives. We take innovative approaches to deliver on this through our profit-for-purpose model.
Our property portfolio includes social rented homes and affordable rented homes (65%); supported housing, housing for older people, market rented homes and homes for key workers. We also deliver shared ownership homes, alongside leasehold and estate management services through our Plumlife brand.
We work in collaboration with partners in the neighbourhoods where our homes are to help shape and support local communities, with the aim that they become thriving places where people want to stay, grow and build their own lives. We have our own in-house repairs team focused on delivering a great customer experience, ensuring value for money and supporting local suppliers through our innovative materials distribution centre.
Estate facilities management and grounds maintenance is also delivered in-house, giving us greater control over the quality of these key services that are important to our customers.
In line with our purpose, we play a role in supporting the most vulnerable members of society. We provide specialist supported housing accommodation and expert support services focused on encouraging and maintaining independence and wellbeing across our geography.
Our teams support individuals with a range of needs including young parents, mental health, addiction and homelessness as well as providing specialist accommodation for older people. We are also the accountable body for the Greater Manchester Housing First pilot working together with five other housing associations, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, The Bond Board and Greater Manchester Mental Health. Together we provide flexible, person-centred support alongside a permanent home to enable those with complex needs to begin their recovery and move away from rough sleeping.
We are proud to be one of the leading developing housing associations in the North. We are a strategic partner of Homes England, and are in contract to deliver their Affordable Homes Programme until 2028 which will see 4,500 new homes built during the life of the programme.
Our aim is to maximise our investment in affordable, high quality and sustainable homes, ensuring they meet the needs of customers and enhance local communities. We built almost 700 homes in 2024/25 and are targeting 1,100 new homes for delivery in 2025/26. In 2020 we launched our in-house construction company, Terra Nova Developments, which has quickly established itself to make a significant contribution towards delivering our programme. Terra Nova has successfully delivered five schemes and now has five other live sites that will continue to deliver planned new homes.
Great Places’ ‘profit-for-purpose’ approach means we operate as efficiently as possible, harnessing the power of our commercial activity to deliver on our social purpose. By focusing on value for money, we can reinvest money back into our communities. We deliver a range of value-added services for our customers, such as helping people access employment opportunities through our Community Investment work. Last year we supported almost 1000 people into work, training or volunteering.
We also provide essential financial and welfare benefits advice and offer support through our Tenancy Coach service to customers facing complex and often overwhelming life challenges, with the aim of helping them to sustain their tenancy.
We invest heavily in our communities, with this work ranging from providing financial support to sustain community centres that deliver essential services, to improving the physical environment of our neighbourhoods. We also devote time and resources to partnership work to ensure the sustainability of our places. Alongside our existing support services, we have allocated around £200k in funding from our Hardship and Community Resilience Funds to individual customers and community partner organisations to help tackle the consequences of poverty and austerity. In our anchor neighbourhoods, where we have a significant concentration of homes, we work with customers to understand their priorities for their local area and work together to put action plans in place so they feel connected and proud of where they live.
The majority of our commercial activity is delivered through Cube Homes, a subsidiary company that develops homes for market rent and sale, and a substantial proportion of Cube’s profit is gifted back to Great Places to support our profit-for-purpose work.
Through Cube Homes we are members of two innovative joint ventures working with like-minded partners to maximise our impact in tackling the housing crisis in the two City Regions in which we work. Hive Homes was established in 2018 from investment by Great Places, 9 other housing association partners and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Hive Homes is developing much-needed homes for sale in Greater Manchester. In 2019 we entered into a partnership with four other housing associations in the Sheffield City Region to establish Forge New Homes, developing quality, affordable homes for sale. All the profit each company makes is returned to investor partners to reinvest in activity which support our ‘profit for purpose’ ethos.
We are working to address the challenge of establishing carbon measurement and reduction methods across all our work in line with local and national targets. We place a particular focus on the new homes we develop and on improving the sustainability of our existing homes and to ensure that our housing meets the needs of our customers both now and in the future.
We successfully secured £1.4 million in funding from Wave 2.1 of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF), which will allow us to fund a range of works to get an additional 396 of our homes in Greater Manchester and Sheffield to an EPC C rating up to the end of March 2025. We have also invested over £1m of funding from the Heat Network Efficiency Scheme fund to enhance the district heating system at our Richmond Park flats in Sheffield. Bids for a further £9m have been submitted for Wave 3 of the SHDF programme to improve over 1,000 homes up to March 2028.
We know from customer feedback that enhancing our existing homes and services is important to them and we are focused on enhancing the quality and performance of our homes to ensure that they continue to meet the needs of our customers now and into the future. Last year we spent £42 million on maintaining and improving our homes, including £3 million on fire safety, and we plan to continue investing substantially in our homes. .
We prioritise getting the basics of service delivery right. Despite the breadth of our footprint, we pride ourselves on providing responsive local services and our colleagues work from regional offices and local bases across our geography.
We raised £425m of new debt last year to enable us to deliver our planned programme of new affordable homes. We work hard to demonstrate our A grade investment credentials to ensure that we can continue to borrow sustainably to allow us to continue to invest. We are an early adopter of the Sustainability Reporting Standard (“SRS”) and produced our first ever ESG report under that standard in 2021. We have made considerable progress in 2024/25 in realising our commitments. You can read more about our approach to ESG here.
We regularly report on our financial and operational performance, and on how we continue to strive to meet our ESG commitments and publish these on our website to maintain transparency in line with our value to be fair, open and accountable. You can download our quarterly performance reports here.
We couldn’t deliver on our ambitious plans without our hard-working and dedicated people. We know that in order to deliver a great service for our customers, we need a committed and engaged workforce who believe in our vision, and deliver on our values in the work that they do.
We value our people; they are the key to our success. We invest in developing our colleagues’ capabilities, skills and behaviours to ensure that we remain high performing. We trust and empower them to work collaboratively towards achieving our ambitions and we ensure all our colleagues have a meaningful voice and a say in how we do things.
We work hard to foster a sense of belonging to Great Places and we value the diversity of the Great Places team, recognising the benefit that this brings in helping us understand and meet the needs of our diverse range of customers and in driving the continued success of our business.
Our recent colleague survey told us that 95% of our colleagues believe in the vison and work of Great Places and 91% are fully motivated to do a great job each and every day.
| Stock by tenure (owned and managed) |
2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social Rent | 10,921 | 10,894 | 10,763 (42%) | 11,318 (43%) |
| Affordable Rent | 5,142 | 5,430 | 5,883 (23%) | 6,233 (24%) |
| Total general needs housing | 16,063 | 16,324 | 16,646 (65%) | 17,551 (67%) |
| Low cost home ownership | 2,753 | 2,894 | 3,328 | 3,464 |
| Supported housing | 1,871 | 1,871 | 1,873 | 1,863 |
| Intermediate rent | 382 | 338 | 315 | 304 |
| Other (mainly leasehold) | 3,323 | 3,481 | 3,311 | 3,269 |
| Total | 24,392 | 24,908 | 25,474 | 26,451 |
| Top 5 local authorities | GPHG Stock | % Total |
Great Places has a material presence in 36 local authorities as shown in the map, plus a total of 62 minor holdings in 13 other local authorities.52% of our homes are in the 10 Greater Manchester districts, and 54% are concentrated in 5 local authority areas – as can be seen in the table. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheffield | 3,532 | 13% | |
| Manchester | 3,326 | 13% | |
| Salford | 3,156 | 12% | |
| Oldham | 2,245 | 9% | |
| Stockport | 1,903 | 7% | |
| Total | 14,162 | 54% |
Purpose
To add value to Great Places’ business by contributing experience, expertise and insight to determine strategy, direction and control in the interests of tenants, other customers/service users and the wider community.
Our values are integrated into our expectations for these roles:
Thank you for your interest in these posts. In order to apply you should submit:
Applications should be sent by email to Neemar Search as below.
Applications must be received by 12 noon, Friday 2 May 2025.
If you wish to have an informal discussion about the role and organisation, or if you have any other questions to help you decide whether to apply please contact:
|
Tom Neely |
Eliot Jeffries |
