Our starting point is understanding the organisation’s needs and aspirations and where they are on the journey towards a strategic partnership. This ranges from ambitious growth strategies and exploring natural synergies to proactive horizon scanning and pre-empting regulatory challenges. We facilitate workshops to help clients understand routes to partnership, explore scenarios, begin potential partner searches against agreed criteria and ensure that there is sound and robust reporting to enable decision making and take the next steps.

Once an in-principal decision has been made, we assist in establishing project governance arrangements to ensure that both parties are working collaboratively towards a common goal but also ensure clients remain accountable to their respective organisations. We play a pivotal role in providing project leadership, project management and operational support and help with the development of a shared vision for the partnership and the creation of the outline and final business case.

We offer support through the due diligence process, from developing the scope and approach; balancing internal and external workstreams; commissioning external expertise; providing specialist quality assurance on any internal work; giving guidance and support to workstream leads; analysing risks and mitigations to inform decision making; and supporting action planning and reporting to decision makers.

We provide expert support for developing the combined financial plan, including advice on agreeing common assumptions and stress testing; evaluating short term costs and medium-longer term efficiency savings; assessing treasury impacts including golden rule and covenant compliance; scoping the potential to renegotiate covenants, generating more headroom and seeking new facilities; shadow credit ratings; portfolio management; supporting lender negotiations and securing necessary consents.

We offer support to ensure partnership plans meet the Regulator’s expectations. We can bring expertise in effective governance and housing association leadership to advise on governance structure implementation, inspection preparation, economic and consumer regulatory assurance, board selection and development, and risk management and mitigation. Our team comprises ex-RSH leadership and our understanding of regulatory principles, practice and grading decisions is through experience and involvement in developing regulatory approaches. 

We can draw upon Savills’ extensive experience in all aspects of strategic asset management to support decision-making throughout the partnership process. This could include stock condition surveys, landlord health and safety compliance, testing data accuracy, integrity and consistency, building safety, development, valuations, procurement, programme development and delivery.

We develop communication and engagement plans which capture key principles, core messaging and audience segmentation, including formal co-design consultation with customers and informal engagement with colleagues and external stakeholders. 

Finally, we emphasise the importance of day 1 and early years integration planning. Organisations that do integration well, and quickly, are more likely to deliver partnership objectives and customer services are less likely to be impacted. We also provide post completion support to a wide variety of workstreams for continuity and consistency.