Thames Valley Housing Association has been using Clearview’s business intelligence and reporting suite in order to assess the financial impact of the government’s right-to-buy and pay-to-stay policies on its operations by building a financial model.
Chris Roberts, data analyst, Thames Valley Housing Association, said, “We chose to use Clearview because it is perfectly suited to the task we faced. We needed to combine and blend a number of data sets, identify where we had holes in our data, and then supplement the model with data to ensure we could effectively assess the impact of all aspects of the policies by fully considering all eligibility and restrictions imposed.”
Regarding right-to-buy, Roberts said, “We started with our property data and then added length of tenure to it from our Civica housing management system. We then included fields to help us identify properties specifically built for older people, where the council had imposed restrictions on a property’s use, and also whether a property was part of a section 106 agreement or adapted for those with a disability or rural support. Clearview was great for this because it was easy to combine data sets and add extra columns and filters. We were also able to see early on where we had missing data.
“For pay-to-stay, we needed more data about tenants and also an assessment of what the market rents were. For this, we identified a data set of average UK rents from gov.uk and used it in the model. We expanded our tenant data with historical rental payments information, looking at arrears, those on benefits, and so on, to assess eligibility.”
