2nd opinion: Experience is golden

With the next comprehensive spending review due out this summer, we need chancellor Gordon Brown on side. He's got something we want – in billions – but what can the housing sector offer him in return?

The answer may be found lurking in the consultation version of the NHF governance code, which members will be encouraged to adopt. Paragraph C1(4) implies that anyone who has served in a senior governing position for nine years should step down and let someone else have a go.

I can already picture the scene as the connecting door in Downing Street bursts open and Brown comes thundering through, crying: "It's not only me that says you ought to be on your bike, Tony, it's Jim Coulter and Richard Clark too!"

Surely such significant support to the Brown cause must be worth an extra half-billion on the annual development budget? I hope I'm right, because it's the only sensible reason for putting such a restrictive clause into the code. Of course, there are board members up and down the country who aren't giving good value, but in most cases this is obvious by the end of year one, not year nine.

Anyway, the problems surrounding board competence are actually dealt with just three paragraphs later, in the section of the code that commits us to individual and corporate appraisals on an annual basis. I've been chair of one housing association or another for most of the past decade, and if I wasn't up to telling old so-and-so that they'd dozed their way through their last set of board papers, I would seriously doubt my ability to hold senior staff to account – and ditto if they weren't able to say the same to me.

So let me put the same case in favour of long-serving board members.

In the first few years in any organisation, we learn about its culture. From a leadership position, be it as governing or executive officer, some of the more obvious and tractable problems can be addressed.

The credibility needed to work through deeply ingrained issues that lie at the heart of whether an organisation can realise its vision only comes later, after gaining experience and winning confidence.

For tackling the hard stuff, the best period is between year seven and fifteen. When I first became a chair, I had spent six years on the board and we had a new chief executive – hardly time to move on.

Many associations still claim to be driven by values (unlike Groucho Marx, who famously said: "These are my principles.

If you don't like them, I have others"). One of the principle tasks of the board is to act as the guardian of values. The NHF's draft code says so in paragraph D1(1). Of all the organisations I have worked in, the one that had most difficulty over values had an inexperienced board. Veterans are better suited to holding onto underlying principles, just as newer arrivals can challenge the validity and interpretation of these values in a changing environment.

If I was really a conspiracy theorist, I would assume the NHF's real motive is akin to Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey Appleby's belief that government ministers should be moved regularly so that civil service rule wouldn't be challenged by them mastering their brief.

Instead, let my final reason for doubting the wisdom of time-limited board service be that no one would dream of bringing in the equivalent for senior staff.

But if I was right first time, don't forget me, Mr Brown, at the next honours list.