Our pick of the best Housing Today interviews from the past 12 months
Throughout 2025, Housing Today brought you exclusive interviews with the biggest names in the sector.
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Best of 2025: features, data and reports
Below is our pick of our best interviews from the past 12 months.
10. ‘The government’s pro-development agenda is really helpful overall’: HBF CEO Neil Jefferson on delivering through economic turbulence
Published in April
Certainty is a scarce resource in 2025. You digest the news in the morning along with your cornflakes, but by lunchtime the world always seems to have moved on.
Neil Jefferson, chief executive of the Home Builders Federation (HBF), was recently on the sharp end of this problem, being required to produce some documentation for his organisation after a meeting with government officials. “Every time I went to sign it off, things had moved on again,” he recalls.
The HBF’s members deliver around 80% of new homes built each year and, as its chief, Jefferson is responsible for representing an industry that has historically thrived on stability as it navigates these uncertain times. But, while the global picture has everybody scratching their heads, back home Jefferson has some cause for optimism.
9. ‘Are we putting customers at the heart of our decision-making?’ Phil Andrew reveals Orbit’s transformation plan
Published in February
“You know, when you get to a point where you think your whole life has been building up to something?”, says Phil Andrew.
Not everyone manages to achieve their life’s purpose, but Andrew has reached exactly where he wants to be in his career, and he is understandably happy about it.
The chief executive of Orbit Group is in his first ever full-time role in the social housing sector (he was previously on the board of Raven Housing Trust) having joined in July 2023, and he has been moving quickly to put better customer service at the centre of his plan for the 45,000-home landlord.
He has already overseen or set in train a blizzard of activity to achieve his customer experience improvement aims, from changes to governance, new hires, investment in technology and bringing tenants onto the organisation’s group board. Where does this energy, focus and desire to make a difference come from?
8. ‘We brought Livv back from the brink of destruction’…Léann Hearne on personal and professional challenges and what comes next
Published in July
“I can tell you exactly when I made the decision [to step down] … I remember the moment because I was waiting outside the operating theatre to see if my husband was going to survive or not,” says Léann Hearne.
The chief executive of Livv Group, a housing association on Merseyside, announced in April that she was standing down as leader of the 13,000-home landlord after seven years in response to a series of “personal challenges” involving her family.
Hearne’s husband had a serious medical event involving a heart attack and suspected cancer. “He was whipped off, so I’m waiting in the relatives’ room for them to come and tell me if they saved him in surgery. I sat there and thought, ‘I have prioritised work so much for so long. Now I need to prioritise family.’ It was an instantaneous decision,” she says.
Published in November
Shepherding more than four sets of fingers worth of housing associations into co-ordinated action might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but for Claire Griffiths the task has a degree of a personal importance.
Since the end of the summer, the chief executive of 6,000-home housing association Cobalt has also been charged with the aforementioned task in her new position as chair of the Liverpool City Region Housing Associations (LCRHA). “It’s not a very snappy title, is it,” Griffiths notes as she joins Housing Today for a discussion of the role and the challenge of social housing provision on Merseyside.
Though she grew up in nearby Chester, Griffiths moved to Liverpool in the 1980s and considers it her hometown - a fact which contributes to her excitement about the new role. “I’ve lived here for more than 30 years and to be given that opportunity to try and put all I’ve learned over the years into practice and take the organization and the community forward, was just a brilliant opportunity for me,” she says.
Published in October
“I think there are many parallels between karate and leadership. You know, it’s about continuous improvement, never giving up if something is important to you, it’s about perseverance. It’s about learning from mistakes.”
Chan Kataria is pondering life after he stands down as chief executive of EMH Group at the end of this week. He is looking forward to having a bit more time to excel at karate, read books and travel the world with his wife Chrissy. This is in between doing non-executive work of course, more on which later.
One of social housing’s most-well known and charismatic leaders, Kataria sits down with Housing Today to share his reflections about his four-decade housing career, what’s next and where he sees the sector currently.
5. ‘I went back into the workplace with a new lens’: Amplius’ CEO Julie Doyle explains how her grandson’s disability shaped her vision
Published in October
When housing associations Longhurst and Grand Union merged to form Amplius earlier this year, Julie Doyle’s responsibilities doubled seemingly overnight.
Going from chief executive of Longhurst, which had 25,000 homes pre-merger, to heading a 40,000-strong organisation, you might expect Doyle to feel some pressure. But the level-headed CEO appears calm about the challenge. After all, this isn’t the first time she has stepped into a life-changing leadership role.
By the time she was 19, Doyle had two daughters, one of whom gave her a grandson, Harry, who’s presence in the matriarch’s life has become instrumental in shaping her vision for Amplius.
4. ‘Not just transactions’: Richard Blakeway explains how he wants to work with the social housing sector to ensure complaints are a catalyst for real change
Published in September
Richard (Rick, as he likes to be known) Blakeway is explaining the profound effect on him of a visit to meet survivors of the Grenfell Tower a few years ago.
“It’s absolutely imprinted on my mind […] listening to survivors’ experiences and their experiences in the complaints process was really powerful and I came away with a strong impression that a complaint is more than a transaction and if you are on the board of a landlord it’s a strategic tool, it’s so powerful”, he says.
For Blakeway, Grenfell and the reports of residents’ not being listened to, was a catalyst for a “big change” at the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS).
3. How private landlord giant Grainger is preparing to ride the build-to-rent wave
Published in September
Helen Gordon’s interest in building homes began at a very early age. “My parents built their own house when I was three and I thought It was the most exciting thing,” she laughs, citing this as evidence that this was what she always wanted to do.
Fast-forward a few decades and Gordon is now the chief executive at Grainger, the largest listed private landlord in the UK, with more than 4,500 homes in its build-to-rent investment pipeline.
Along the way she has qualified as a quantity surveyor, worked on the development of Milton Keynes and held senior property positions at John Laing Developments, Legal & General Investment Management and Railtrack. Immediately before joining Grainger in 2015, she was global head of real estate asset management at Royal Bank of Scotland.
2. Innovation, collaboration and the search for capital: Greg Reed outlines what the social housing sector must do post-spending review
Published in November
It is around lunchtime at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool and Greg Reed is surrounded by tables full of piles of children’s toys, clothes, pyjamas and toiletries.
He is showing his support for the Buddy Bag Foundation, a volunteer-led charity which supports children forced into emergency housing due to domestic abuse and which his organisation, Places for People (PfP), backs.
A short while later and Reed is in a room yards away giving a talk to housing professionals about new models for attracting finance into the social housing sector.
1. ‘I’m going to deal with this’ - Riverside boss Paul Dolan opens up about personal and professional resilience
Published in May
Paul Dolan was on his very first day in his “dream job” as chief executive of 76,000-home housing association Riverside last May when his phone kept ringing.
“I was out doing the meeting and greeting, out and about with the direct labour organisation [staff] and the management team when this number kept coming through on my phone”, he explains. “I ignored it once and then twice. It was a number I didn’t recognise.”
When Dolan eventually felt able to take the call, it was to receive some very concerning news. It was the hospital, phoning about the results of a capsule colonoscopy test he had had the day before.
“They said, ‘we’ve found an abnormality, we think you need a full colonoscopy’,” Dolan explains. A couple of weeks later he was in hospital looking at images of the interior of his colon on the monitor.
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