Incommunities is one of the UK’s biggest social landlords, providing homes for one in ten households across Bradford. As the housing provider celebrates its tenth birthday, Claire Armstrong looks back over a decade that saw it transform from a straightforward landlord into a multi-faceted organisation, offering services from jobs advice to help for people who fall in their homes

One in ten of the district’s population lives in a home either rented or leased from Incommunities.

The housing provider manages almost 22,500 properties across the district, making it one of the largest social landlords in the country.

But today it is a very different organisation from the one formed in 2003 under the name of Bradford Community Housing Trust.

Incommunities’ chief executive Geraldine Howley, who has been leading the organisation since its inception, described the way it had changed over the years from a landlord into a group offering a wide range of community services.

She said: “It has evolved. In the beginning, what we had to do as our first priority was to deliver improvements to the homes. It was very much a landlord business in the first instance.

“Then we moved on to building homes and then we thought, ‘What more can we do for our communities?’ “We realised employment was an issue. About a third of our customers are of working age and are on benefits. We wanted to assist our customers, we wanted to get them into work.

“We started to do a lot of that maybe about four years ago. We have got hundreds of people into jobs, so I am really proud of what we are doing there.

“At the same time, we started to look at some of the services we could offer to local people so we could bring income in that we could plough back into the organisation.”

Mrs Howley said Incommunities would soon be forming a commercial arm, aimed at selling services such as home adaptations for the disabled to other housing associations or organisations.

She said: “Ninety-six per cent of our income is from rent, but we are getting some from selling other services. We want to do more of that. While we are a not-for-profit organisation, I like to say we are a ‘profit for purpose’ organisation.”

Incommunities is celebrating the milestone birthday with an event at Valley Parade tomorrow.

Falklands War veteran Simon Weston, who suffered severe burns in a bomb attack and went on to become a high-profile charity fundraiser, is giving a motivational staff on overcoming challenges to all the organisation’s staff.

Incommunities is also holding a larger-scale version of its annual staff awards ceremony, with workers invited to nominate deserving colleagues for a gong.