Last week, at the Grosvenor hotel in the city’s west end, CaCHE hosted a Housing research conference with 150 delegates over two days. We had more than 50 workshop papers and three excellent plenary sessions. It was throughout informal and relaxed, but always thoughtful and curious. Personally, I left the event with some new ideas bouncing around my head and the need to read new (to me) writing highlighted in specific sessions.

Why did we do this event? This is the final year of ESRC funding for CaCHE, so there are plenty of things to do to capture what we have done, what we are doing and crystalise what we hope to do in the future. Our three plenary panels reflected meta themes we have focused on throughout our nine years of funding: evidence and policy, devolution of housing and lesson learning thereof, as well as equality, diversity and inclusion.

The historical or continuity versus change discussions appeared in several papers, notably one presented by Mark Stephens about the history and critical junctures of housing benefit, as well as one concerning the housebuilding industry by Pat MacAllister. The ‘evidence into policy’ plenary unexpectedly focused on council tax reform as a long overdue legacy of an early 1990s political fix. Political disquiet, populism and housing’s centrality within such debates was also foregrounded on multiple occasions as an unsettling future uncertainty for us all. 

Other CaCHE-friendly themes present in the conference included workshops on decarbonising housing, private renting, prevention, systems thinking, affordability, the housing emergency and post-pandemic homeworking decisions.

While it was great to see old friends and colleagues, it was refreshing and exciting to meet so many new housing researchers and practitioners (new to me at least).

There was a palpable buzz and enjoyment in the sessions and during the breaks which was just what we wanted, and hopefully a lot of new network nodes were created including possible future collaborations.

What were my substantive takeaways from the event?

First, housing research in many respects is in good health but it has to continue to find ways to translate findings and analysis into actionable insights.

Second, many of the papers and sessions were permeated by more or less deep examples and illustrations of system thinking analysis applied to the housing and adjacent sectors.

Third, there was a wide range of methods and approaches on display but speakers made real efforts to communicate potentially technical or obtuse topics and expositions in inclusive ways that supported our understanding and discussion of their ideas. And we all know that is not guaranteed at any conference.

We are grateful to all the speakers, chairs, session participants who made it work. These events are not possible without a lot of work behind the scenes and the CaCHE office team of Calum, Kirsty and Kalina were unflappable and fantastic throughout.

There will be a short conference video on our website in due course. Watch out for it.