‘One in five of us is over 65. In ten years, it’s going to be one in four’… Anchor’s chief executive Sarah Jones on why affordable later living housing matters

“This is awful. The economy is on its knees, largely because we’ve sold loads of people stuff they don’t need for money they don’t have.”

These are the thoughts that ran through Sarah Jones’ head at a retail consortium event when she was director of finance at Carpetright during the global financial crisis in the late 2000s. It was something of an ephiphany for Jones, who suddenly questioned the value to society of the work she was doing.

Nowadays, as chief executive of the nation’s largest non-profit provider of housing for older people, she feels her work allows her to have “an immediate positive impact”.

In her first major interview since becoming chief executive of 54,000-home Anchor in August 2022, Jones sits down with Housing Today to share the company’s development plans, the challenges of being in the later living sector, and her passion for amateur dramatics.

“I was really lucky that Anchor had set out a new strategy, which was going to be underpinned by a big refinancing exercise,” she says of her career change.

There are very few of us who are doing social and affordable provision, so we’ve refocused our development strategy on that

“It was serendipity. I was looking to move into the space and they needed someone with some of the dark arts, so it worked quite nicely. I immediately felt like I’d come home.” 

Jones’ personal story is full of quirks, from working at a fish tackle company despite her vegetarianism, to her annual open-air Shakespeare performances at a local girls’ school in Walthamstow.

“Drama is great, it’s a real catharsis. It makes you switch off your work brain because, if you let yourself be distracted by a work thing on stage, you’re in all kinds of trouble.”

Last year, she directed The Tempest – a story of magic and mistaken identity – and hopes to land a role in the Greek Theatre Players’ upcoming performance of Anthony and Cleopatra, which will be run as a “raucous comedy”. Jones’ other interests include her dogs, garden and kids – in that order, “which sounds completely inappropriate,” she laughs.

Her roots are firmly planted in east London, where her dad grew up in a Peabody flat. She was born in Walthamstow and has since set up house in Epping. “There’s an invisible thread for me,” she says of her attachment to the area she calls home. It seems fitting that her job is to help other people find theirs. 

More affordable housing

Anchor, which posted revenue of £629m last year, is certainly on a mission to help people find homes by making later living accommodation more affordable. “In the older persons’ space, there are a lot of providers, and there are a very broad range of price points and tenure and levels of acuity,” explains Jones.

“There’s still not enough of it, even if you add us all together. But one thing that is very clear is that there are very few of us who are doing social and affordable provision, so we’ve refocused our development strategy on that.”

Around 62% of the homes the organisation currently builds are for social rent, but Jones is not content to stop there. She hopes Anchor will push this figure to 70% on all new developments as it aims to build 500 homes annually over a rolling 10-year period.

Furthermore, Jones, in her lively and optimistic way of speaking, says she is “absolutely” certain that Anchor will be able to access the necessary grants to fulfil this 70% social rent goal, aided by support from local authorities.

While she says the company aspires to be a strategic partner rather than continuing to deliver a “series of unconnected projects”, she acknowledges that the gateway to government funding is through securing local support to build a strong base for a grant application.

The business’ current development programme of 2,000 new homes ringfences 90% for affordable housing tenures, broken down into 62% for social rent and 28% for shared ownership. The remaining 10% of homes are for private sale.

But getting spades in the ground is only one way to improve affordability. Jones also discusses plans to flip the tenure of developments on which work has already started, from private sale to social rented housing.

Last year saw 72 homes originally intended for private sale converted to social rent, with the help of the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Hillingdon council. With a further 149 tenure flips in the works across the home counties and East Anglia, Anchor says it will continue to have conversations with local authorities, the GLA and Homes England about further opportunities for conversions.

Challenges of providing later living accommodation

Reducing Anchor’s planned units for private sale, in addition to resident affordability benefits, is also a strategic move to secure investment, says Jones.

“One of the things we’re very mindful of when we’re speaking to investors and when we’re having our credit rating assessed is that there’s an inherent risk in sale, and particularly sale in the older person space is quite challenging [because] the rate of sale is much slower than you get in a general lead space,” she says.

Providing this specific service, as opposed to general needs housing, comes with a unique set of challenges, among them viability.

“Setting shared ownership aside… the older people space is pretty simple,” says Jones. She explains that around 25% to 30% of the space occupied by later living housing is “unlettable or unsellable” due to the need to provide amenities, such as communal lounges, gardens and conservatories.

Simplicity, however, does not necessitate ease as there are still significant obstacles in the way of moulding the perfect homes for those in later life.

If Jones had three wishes, she would ask for planning authorities to consider density to counteract the impact of having communal space requirements. She also points out that grants need to be “commensurately higher” and would like to see 10% of planning and 10% of grant reserved for older people’s housing.

If you create suitable housing for older people that they want to move into in the communities in which they currently live – so you’re not offshoring them somewhere – then that will free up housing of all tenures, which is so desperately needed because we’re not going to build our way out of this

“I can understand [that this may be difficult], particularly in the teeth of the housing crisis when it’s so important to get the units up. Our stuff on paper does look more expensive – you don’t get as much bang for your buck, but it’s the knock-on effects of it [that make it valuable].”

Jones makes the case that investing in high quality retirement housing would soothe some of the pressures faced by the NHS.

“We’ve been making the argument for many years that, if you provide housing specifically designed for older people, you’re going to reduce the impact on the National Health Service and on social care because people are able to live independently and healthy for longer,” she says.

“I absolutely get that’s a really hard argument to make because you’re trying to build a model on the avoidance of a cost.

“What is really compelling is if you look at what’s happening with homelessness and temporary accommodation and the costs of how much that has accelerated.”

In August of last year, the government released figures showing a 29% increase in the amount councils were spending to provide emergency accommodation to homeless families between April 2023 and March 2024.

The sharp incline from £1.77bn to £2.2bn does not only represent an enormous shortfall of affordable housing, but also a gap in the older person’s market that can often go undetected.

“We know from ONS that about 80% of homes are under-occupied and it’s no good saying to people, ‘move out the way, we need your homes for families’ if people have got nowhere to move to that suits them.

“If you create suitable housing for older people that they want to move into in the communities in which they currently live – so you’re not offshoring them somewhere – then that will free up housing of all tenures, which is so desperately needed because we’re not going to build our way out of this.”

Meeting needs

Anchor has taken housing shortage matters into its own hands by partnering with local authorities to offer what is known as the “extra care” model of accommodation, where the housing association provides the building and landlord services and a care provider regulated by the Care Quality Commission manages the social care. 

As well as the added social care Anchor offers to meet the needs of its residents, it has optimised its customer service to provide support that goes beyond walls and ceilings.

Each of the organisation’s customer-facing colleagues is responsible for the queries of 50 residents, whereas this ratio could be as high as 500 to one for general needs services.

“We’re increasingly occupying a space that other services have had to retreat from,” says Jones.

She explains how the company has “bolstered its community safety team and financial inclusion teams, with the latter unearthing about a million pounds a month in unclaimed benefits that they’re supporting residents to find.”

Against the backdrop of the new government’s mass withdrawal of winter fuel payments, many older people, “particularly in the home ownership space” are reclaiming financial aid that they “previously wouldn’t have considered themselves or, in reality, been eligible for.”

From a retail point of view, you’re always trying to remove all of the barriers that might prevent someone buying a thing [and] it is certainly the case for some really basic [housing] services

“It’s a challenge because these are people that are largely on fixed incomes and I think there’s [a] narrative that there’s a golden group of pensioners who have got the defined benefit schemes and housing wealth. They exist, but that’s not the majority.”

Jones says that Anchor’s services have been tailored because “the older people of today are not like the older people of yesteryear”, and neither is customer service. 

The London-based housing association has signed a 10-year deal to use Plentific’s housing management software product to allow customer-facing colleagues to raise repairs directly with contractors. The Plentifc software is the central hub for the approximately 200,000 repairs work orders raised by Anchor a year.

Jones’ background in retail appears to have served her well since her transition to social housing. She began her career journey at the Burton Group, before it became Arcadia, and went on to have senior finance roles at HMV and technology company Spicers.

“From a retail point of view, you’re always trying to remove all of the barriers that might prevent someone buying a thing [and] it is certainly the case for some really basic [housing] services.

“We put a lot of barriers in the way, and quite often from residents and customer-facing colleagues alike, you’ll hear that it feels like it can be a bit of a battle to get something done.”

Jones describes the typical model of dealing with maintenance concerns as an “Amazon” or “Uber version of a repairs marketplace”, where people bid for the repairs before being selected to carry them out.

Under the new model, customer service staff or location managers are able to raise a repair directly with the contractor who completed the building work in the first place. 

“Instead of going out to the marketplace… like the Uber on the other side, it will be directed to the correct contractor for the location from where you’re raising the order. What that means is that you can immediately have visibility and traceability as that’s the thing that so many people struggle with.”

This is coupled with a move towards a fixed-price model with contractors.

“At the beginning of the financial year, you agree with your contractor how much you’re going to pay per property for anything that happens during the course of the year,” says Jones.

This model “passes the risk of a failed visit to the contractor, so it’s in their interest to get something right the first time”. This means, Jones says, that it is in the contractor’s interest to get jobs done correctly the first time.

Bridging the gap

Jones hopes the changes to the repairs booking processes will help improve the sector. Among other things, our nation’s ageing demographic means the sector must also start getting things right. “One in five of us is currently over 65. In 10 years, that’s going to be one in four. We’re all living longer, but those years aren’t necessarily lived in great health,” warns Jones.

She believes the term “retirement housing” is due to become outdated, with 20% of Anchor’s residents in employment “because they choose to be or because they have to be.”

For Jones, age-appropriate housing is “safe, affordable, well-maintained and based in a community where people want to live”. 

Going forward, she is hopeful for cross-sector collaboration to “bridge the gap” between health and housing in the name of delivering housing for older people that is more than just “suitable”.

Some people will talk about older people as if they’re another species, but it’s just all of us. It’s all of us with miles on the clock

Some local authorities have been known to be less receptive to delivering homes for older people – asking how building fewer units that cost more money is worthwhile – while envisioning a flock of older people flooding in to their district on the hunt to drain local services. But the reality is that most councils are responsible for people who need the kind of support Anchor is offering, which would in turn, reduce the reliance of older generations on local resources.

”Some people will talk about older people as if they’re another species, but it’s just all of us. It’s all of us with miles on the clock.”

Jones is optimistic that “a lot can be done without primary legislation”, but she is “looking very favourably on a new administration that is, overtly, very supportive of social [housing].”

If housing associations like Anchor are to do their best, they must find a way to overcome stigma along with unevenly distributed government wealth and frustrating planning processes, with changing attitudes towards older people’s housing high up on the priority list.

The challenges are formidable and it is not surprising that Jones turns to a pursuit such as amateur dramatics for escapism.

Even the company’s name itself is synonymous with weight. But, seen from a different angle, it could feel more like security.