Alan Park is director of finance at Home Group, and qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst and Young
Take care with data protection and have a scrutiny plan in place: We obviously want to be certain our release of data is compliant with best practice and doesn't breach data protection requirements. We've found the guidance from the Department for Communities and Local Government pretty straightforward. There is some work involved in scrutinising the data to ensure we protect individual personal details. Where an individual receives a payment, we take care not to name them unless they're a sole trader in which case we disclose the payment and their name. But if they're not a sole trader, for example, a private landlord, we anonymise their name but still explain and quantify the payment.
Don't be afraid to publish spending, be open and comparable: A lot of our business relates to care and support services rather than just straight provision of housing. Within this sector, the move is towards personalisation – clients having far more say on where their care budget is spent. Surely it's fitting that as an organisation, we should also be more open to scrutiny? And given we enter into business with local authorities that publish any expenditure over £500, we're happy to reflect this too. In a digital age, expectations are higher. We haven't just published a set of figures – we've made them available in an open source format for people to use and compare against other providers.
Steve Burns is director of asset management at Saffron Housing Trust
Transparency is about more than publishing spending: More details of more expenditure could be published along with ever more minutes of meetings. I'm not sure that this really helps the transparency process though which to me is more about understanding why something has happened. If a customer doesn't like a decision that has been made, having access to more details about the organisation is unlikely to change their view. We work hard to generate customer involvement and there are real opportunities to understand and to influence what we do and how we do it. But many of our customers simply want us to provide competent and efficient housing services so they can get on with other parts of their lives.
Colin Wiles is a board member of Howard Cottage Housing Association, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Housing
Allow tenants to dictate the level of transparency required: In the spirit of localism perhaps the best way forward is for this issue to be left to tenants. If tenants want to know how much their staff are paid and how much the CEO spent on his new office suite then they should be entitled to know – at the same time they can balance this against the cost of revealing the information. I'm not convinced that publication of spending makes associations less competitive either. But there needs to be a national framework that would allow this to happen and the role of the Tenant Service Authority is crucial here.
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more like this direct to your inbox.
