"People can be awkward when it comes to taking off their clothes". So said Spencer Tunick, the artist who famously draped 1,700 naked people around the iconic Sage Gateshead building on the banks of the River Tyne in 2005.
Despite Newcastle's partygoers having a reputation for being somewhat scantily clad, the thought of such open transparency, in public, was anathema prior to Tunick's spectacle in the name of art. It took his grand vision, and collective participation to make people realise it was okay to open up.
The same can be said for the current debate around transparency in our own sector. The common culture in housing is one where we keep our corporate clothes on. We don't want to bear our bumps and blemishes for others to see. Here at Home Group, however, we took the decision earlier this year to strip back – expose ourselves, if you will, to the gaze of our customers and clients.
In tough economic times value for money really matters and it's simply what they told us they wanted. By publishing all our expenditure, in line with government departments, over £500 – a mere fig-leaf for modesty – we made a clear statement that it was right and proper that people should see how we spend our money.
This was a first for the sector, but the decision sat comfortably with me as it is simply the right thing to do, and something our clients and customers told us they wanted to see. Having worked for a number of years at a senior level in the public sector I've seen at first hand how transparency helps people to understand what you do, why you do it and how you spend their money to achieve it.
Housing associations are not public bodies; we are different from local authorities and other public organisations. But we cannot ignore the fact that a very sizeable slice of our funding is public money – and we need to be accountable for that. More than this, it is incumbent on us all to recognise that we have a duty to show our clients, customers and other partners how we are using our income to best serve the thousands of people we help every year.
This month, we will be taking another major step forward in the transparency agenda: Home Group will publish its Openness Statement, a clear intention of how we will go even further to open our doors to the people that are important to us.
There will be a new level of innovation in transparency in that document which we believe will transfer power back to our clients and customers to help shape the decision-making within our organisation.
When faced with the Spencer Tunick opportunity, there will always be some of us that are too shy to bare all. But, I hope that more of us will embrace it for what it is. We may have the odd wart here or there, but we should be proud of what we do and unafraid to show people how we do it.
Mark Henderson is chief executive of Home Group
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