The clearest strategic choices in the sector are being made by organisations that had no choice

Post 3 of ? in a series on housing association strategy, post 1 is available here, post 2 is available here

In the previous two posts we discussed the lack of difference in housing association strategies, and the general lack of an explicit theory of advantage in strategies. In this post we will discuss strategic choices, what they are, and why the majority of housing associations that do make explicit strategic choices have had no choice but to.

Roger Martin's second strategic choice cascade question is where will we play? — and the only way to answer it is to say where you won't. A choice that excludes no alternative isn't a choice at all, so a strategy that names no ground it is giving up hasn't answered the question.

Across sixty housing association strategies, seven make a clear statement about where they will not play. Few enough to list in full, which is what follows. The uncomfortable part is what those seven turn out to have in common.

The exclusions

A2Dominion is the sharpest in the sample. Under chief executive Ian Wardle, appointed in 2022, the board concluded it needed to simplify the organisation and return to the roots of a housing association, moving away from being a residential property group. It closed its private-sale brand, refocused development on regeneration and redevelopment of its own homes and neighbourhoods, wrote off a legacy IT programme, and committed £612m to existing stock over five years. Its own language about taking tough calls to reset and pivot is unusually direct for a sector document.
Southern Housing is the most measurable. Its 2026–30 plan sets three dated goals: demonstrable repairs improvement by 2027, the top consumer standards grade by its 2028 inspection, and financial health restored by 2029 so investment is covered by income. It has already exited market rent, reduced student accommodation, is running disposal programmes, and has deferred restarting development until service and finances are fixed.
Guinness exited care activities in 2024 to concentrate on the core landlord business.
Thirteen is moving away from market sale once current schemes complete, and has adopted a more cautious development appraisal.
L&Q is selling its private rented business and transferred 3,500 homes in South Buckinghamshire to SettleParadigm — the largest single stock transfer between two associations to date.
Notting Hill Genesis constrained its development programme to fund existing homes, and put its Folio market-rent portfolio under strategic review, describing it as something closer to an endowment that could be unlocked for deleveraging or investment.
Orbit has been selling stock in outlying areas — to B3Living, to L&G Affordable Homes, to ELM, explicitly to improve the geographical efficiency of its portfolio.
These are real choices. Each one closes something off. Each one will have been difficult internally.

Now look at what they have in common

Five of the seven were under pressure when they made the call.

1. Southern was running costs above income by £75.7m in 2024–25, funded by asset sales and borrowing, and carried a C2 consumer grade.
2. Notting Hill Genesis was judged non-compliant on governance and consumer standards in November 2024 — G3 and C3 — and is now running an eleven-workstream compliance plan.
3. A2Dominion was under regulatory investigation and had fallen into deficit.
4. L&Q's pipeline was slowing under cost pressure.
5. Orbit's strategy was shaped in part by a Housing Ombudsman-ordered review of its damp and mould performance, the first use of that power.

The two exceptions are more instructive than inconvenient. Guinness holds G1, V2 and C1, with no finding of non-compliance. Thirteen holds G1, V1 and C1, the regulator noting only that non-emergency repairs need to get faster. Both chose from a position of reasonable health — and both made the narrowest exclusions on the list. Guinness exited care. Thirteen is stepping back from market sale as current schemes complete and has tightened its development appraisal. Real decisions, but each trims a single activity rather than resetting what the organisation is.

So the pattern is not that comfortable providers never exclude anything. It is that the depth of the exclusion tracks the pressure. Trimming one line of business happens in good health. Declaring that you will stop being a residential property group, as A2Dominion did, or deferring development entirely until service and finances are fixed, as Southern has, has so far only happened to organisations that ran out of room first.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this observation and it isn't the one I'm making. The people running those organisations are doing difficult, necessary work, and several of these decisions are genuinely impressive acts of institutional honesty. A2Dominion's board looked at what it had become and said plainly that it needed to be something narrower. That is harder than it sounds.
The point is not that these organisations chose badly. It is that they chose late, and under duress and that the organisations with headroom mostly haven't chosen at all.

Martin's warning is exactly this. Strategy is choosing in advance, while you still have options. If the only organisations making exclusions are the ones whose options have already been removed, then the sector as a whole isn't doing strategy. It's doing crisis response, sequentially, as each organisation's turn comes.

The choices that aren't being made

Three specific gaps stand out among the generalist providers with financial room.
Segment. Housing association populations are becoming older, more disabled and more complex. Very few generalist strategies say which customers they are best placed to serve, or which needs they will not attempt to meet. Meanwhile the specialists are buying exactly that space — more on which in the next post.
Tenure. Only a handful commit to a proportion. Bromford Flagship LiveWest has an ambition for 50% of new homes at social rent from the 2030s. Orbit's 2030 strategy sets 75% affordable, split evenly between social rent and shared ownership, with 25% market sale. SNG commits to at least half social or affordable rent. Abri to 75% social and affordable. Link Group in Scotland states roughly 70:30 social to mid-market rent with a minimum 10% of new homes wheelchair accessible.
That's five out of sixty putting a number on the sector's single most consequential product decision. A number is a commitment that can be held to and can turn out to be wrong, the same quality that separated Bromford Flagship LiveWest's capacity claim from a statement of intent in the last post. For everyone else, tenure is settled scheme by scheme in the development appraisal, which means it is being decided by viability rather than by strategy.
The value chain. In-house versus contracted repairs is arguably the largest operational choice a landlord makes. Torus runs HMS, Great Places runs Terra Nova, Community Gateway in-housed repairs in 2013 and grounds maintenance the year after, Soha launched Soha Response in 2025. Most strategies don't mention it.

The organisations that don't have this problem

There is a group in the sample for which where-to-play is essentially solved, and it is not a coincidence that they are mostly small or specialist.

1. Housing 21 doesn't have to decide whether to build family housing.
2. Habinteg doesn't have to decide whether accessibility is a priority.
3. Hastoe doesn't have to decide whether to work in cities.
4. Wythenshawe Community Housing Group is bounded to one Manchester district and describes itself as shaped by local people and priorities.
5. Magenta Living is Wirral.
6. Community Gateway is Preston.
7. The Community Housing Group is Wyre Forest.
8. Yorkshire Housing is the largest association operating solely in Yorkshire, and treats that as the point.Their founding purpose answered question two decades ago, and it still holds. Which means their strategic energy goes into questions three, four and five instead — and it shows.

The generalist at scale has the opposite problem. Question two is wide open, genuinely difficult, and mostly left unanswered until something forces it.

The question worth asking now

If you're at a large generalist provider with reasonable headroom, the useful exercise isn't "what should we add?" The last post ended by asking what would materially be lost if your homes were held by a different provider. This is the same question with a deadline attached:
If we had to divest 15% of our stock tomorrow, what would go, and why haven't we done it already?
If you have a clear answer to the first half and no good answer to the second, you've located your strategy gap. And you've located it while you still have the option of acting on it deliberately, which is more than most of the organisations in this post had.

Next in this series: the one deal in the sample where both sides called it a return to core purpose — about the same 1,567 homes.

This series draws on a review of 60 UK housing association strategies conducted in September 2026.