Identifying project success criteria for UK social housing asset management schemes

Embedding the principles of sustainable development and sustainable communities into social housing organisations represents one of the biggest challenges faced by the sector over the last decade. The increasing recognition of the limitations and failings within existing practice has led to calls from both external policy stakeholders and the National Housing Federation for project appraisals to consider an ever increasing number of non-financial benefit enhancing features of UK social housing projects. An important stage in this transformational process will be the identification of the main project centric criteria against which community benefit can be appraised. Relevant literature relating to sustainable communities is reviewed, resulting in the identification of over 400 theoretical features of neighbourhood sustainability. In an attempt to refine these criteria into a more pragmatic list the results of 11 semi-structured interviews held with senior professionals drawn from across one typical social housing organisation, together with the results of 7 validating interviews are reported. Analysis of the collected data established an emergent list of 6 principal success criteria and a further 49 sub-criteria against which project centric benefit can be appraised. The paper concludes by proposing further work relating to the development of a suitable methodology for the appraisal of community benefit in practice.