Elder statespeople of housing, fear not: your sector is in safe hands. Over the next eight pages, meet the new generation set to take on the housing mantle – as nominated by a panel of senior housing professionals.
Waltham Forest Labour councillor Stella Creasy, 26, became mayor of her borough at just 25. Now she sits on regeneration committees including New Opportunities for Waltham Forest and the Leabridge Gateway project, is a researcher for Cabinet Office MP Douglas Alexander and is doing a PhD on social exclusion at the London School of Economics.
Of her time as mayor, she says: "It was good for me to challenge issues to do with age and gender in local government."
Matt Jones, 27, is principal antisocial behaviour officer at arm's-length company New Prospect Housing and has led a crackdown on nuisance in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Jones trained under Manchester council's Bill Pitt as a nuisance response officer before setting up Salford's antisocial behaviour team in 2001. "I'm very proud that I've managed to set up and recruit a successful emerging team from scratch," he says, "having had fairly limited housing experience and no management experience.
"The positive energy from listening to the experiences of people who've had their lives turned around through their bravery and our intervention can't be underestimated."
Chris Benjamin, 31-year-old housing manager at Gloucestershire Housing Association, made his name tackling antisocial behaviour.
He began as a housing officer and was an estates manager for Cheltenham council before starting at Gloucestershire three years ago.
Although only 32, Catriona Simons is finance director of registered social landlord the Peabody Trust. She trained as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young before joining Peabody in 1997 as special projects accountant.
One of her major achievements was raising £60m in new loan financing from Nationwide building society last year.
Jon Rouse, 35, is chief executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and champion of high-quality design in public buildings.
A member of the urban taskforce and the man behind its report on construction practices, he has helped make design a top priority in social housing. His influence is reflected in the fact that the government this year launched CABE Space to boost the creation of parks and green areas in towns and cities.
Steve Philpott, 35, is manager of the Birmingham rough sleepers contact and assessment team at Focus Housing. Since arriving at Focus, part of the Prime Focus Regeneration Group, in 1999, Philpott's team has successfully achieved more than a two-thirds reduction in rough sleeping in the city. Philpott started his career managing two homelessness hostels in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Later, he developed guidelines on best practice for resettlement projects for Birmingham City Council.
A senior research officer at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 34-year-old Shane Brownie, managed the huge research study into low-cost homeownership launched at the NHF annual conference last year. He has impressed the housing sector with his work on rent restructuring and was responsible for producing the nine regional daughter documents in the Communities Plan. After that task, the deputy prime minister invited him to dinner to express his thanks, which Brownie says is his proudest achievement to date.
Neil Fergus joined Pinnacle Psg as a graduate trainee six years ago and rose rapidly to contract manager for a Westminster council estate. Next month he takes over as contract director, responsible for all of the borough's estates – at the age of only 28.
Architects Stuart Piercy, 32 (below right), and Richard Connor, 30 (below left), are the brains behind the "microflat", designed to increase densities in urban areas. It is yet to be built but their other projects such as housing above supermarkets prompted the British Council to describe Piercy Connor as "one of the most conceptually advanced architectural practices of its generation".
Dawn Smart, 32, is an academic turned development high-flyer. Now development head at Southern Housing Group, she began by lecturing in sociology at Glasgow Caledonian University before moving to Scottish Homes.
Development roles at London & Quadrant Housing Trust followed before she moved to Southern in 2001 as development manager for London.
He's the man behind housebuilder Lovell's benchmarking project across eight regions, and has been promoting Lovell Choice, an innovative form of low-cost homeownership. Yet Marcus Keys is just 32.
Presently Lovell's business improvement manager, he is a former housing association maintenance officer and ex-project manager at best-practice body the Housing Forum.
When your father is veteran housing lecturer Albert Toal, you're almost destined to go far. While service development manager in Sunderland council's housing department, Phil Toal, 34, drew up one of the UK's first housing-based domestic violence strategies and, with Northumbria Police, developed antisocial behaviour order procedures that were later used in Home Office guidance. After the council transferred its stock to Sunderland Housing Group, he became policy and research manager at the biggest large-scale voluntary transfer landlord in England. He is an associate consultant for the Northern Housing Consortium and Housing Quality Network. Another man following in his father's footsteps is Elliot Lipton, 34, managing director of new affordable housing firm First Base. The son of CABE chairman Sir Stuart Lipton, Lipton Junior formed First Base in February this year: "We are looking to sell central London one-bed flats at around £100,000," he says.
Meg Hillier, 34 is a Labour member of the Greater London Assembly and former chair of its affordable housing scrutiny committee. At 30, she was the youngest mayor of Islington, north London. She now chairs the GLA culture, sport and tourism committee.
Clive Tritton, 34, director of regeneration company Renaisi, put urban renaissance on the agenda in east London. A former adviser to Hackney's City Challenge improvement scheme, in 1994 he was one of the founders of the Thames Gateway Partnership, Europe's largest renewal initiative. At Renaisi he oversees a plethora of schemes in Hackney.
High performance in housing management from housing services manager Lee Daley, 33, and her team helped ensure RSL Innisfree was chosen as BME partner on flagship London schemes such as those at Arsenal and White City.
Daley worked as a housing officer at various inner-London councils before joining Innisfree four years ago.
Dr Rebecca Tunstall, 34, is tipped to be a future leading light of housing policy research. A lecturer in housing at the London School of Economics, Tunstall is currently on sabbatical at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. After a social science degree and an MA in urban design at Oxford Brookes, she runs the university's MSc/Dip housing course.
Want to know about antisocial behaviour policy? Ask 33-year-old Ruth Lucas, senior project officer for the Local Government Association's housing team and a fast-rising expert on the subject.
After an MSc in politics and administration, Lucas worked as a research assistant in the House of Commons and spent seven years at Redbridge council, where she developed her interest in the social side of housing.
Shared ownership specialist Tower Homes has a clutch of Charter Mark awards, largely because of 35-year-old assistant director (operations) and low-cost homeownership guru Steve Nunn.
After setting up Tower's customer services team in 1993, Nunn rose to become head of homeownership in 2000. He also chairs the South-east Homeownership Group and is secretary of the London Homeownership Group.
Naseem Malik, 35, head of legal services at Knowsley borough council, has made her mark fighting and researching nuisance cases.
After qualifying as a solicitor in 1994, Naseem worked in private practice, specialising in civil and criminal litigation, before going into local government at Blackburn and then Oldham councils. In 1999 she was asked to join the Cabinet Office's social inclusion unit, looking at cases of antisocial behaviour, and took up her role at Knowsley.
James Brown, 35, masterminded the setting-up of a dedicated affordable housing department at property agent FPD Savills earlier this year.
Director of the agent's affordable and student accommodation projects department, Brown is a chartered surveyor and the former head of social housing business at Chesterton.
Berwyn Kinsey, 28, has been regulation manager at the Housing Corporation for the last two years – not bad for someone who started as a temp at RSL Circle 33 in London in 1997. He rose to head of policy in just four years and is now known for his work on equality and diversity issues.
Gera Patel, 34, executive assistant, Horizon Group
“I always wanted to be an Indian dancer,” confesses Gera Patel (left). “But my mum said it wasn’t a proper profession.” Instead, Patel has made a name for herself specialising in research on community development and black and minority ethnic exclusion issues. Patel came to the attention of her peers in the public sector while campaigning on BME issues for charity the Children’s Society, but only entered housing in 1994 when she became a researcher for the Federation of Black Housing Organisations. There, she interviewed BME associations on the private finance market, working with Christine Whitehead, professor of housing economics at the London School of Economics. During four years working as a freelancer, she conducted research for Tamil Community Housing Association and the London Research Centre, interviewing 1000 Tamil refugees – the largest project ever done on the issues affecting this group. In December, she became executive assistant at Horizon, working in a “right-hand” role to chief executive Ben Wilson, drawing up future housing policy, researching new business and overseeing group-wide strategy and initiatives.
Ed Barnes, 32, regional officer for the east, National Housing Federation
Nominated as a rising star for his expertise in grasping technical policy issues and explaining them to his peers in plain English, Ed Barnes (centre) has also seen his fair share of front-line action. One day, when he was a Huntingdonshire council housing officer, he had to evict a nuisance family. “When we got there, the police had two armed response vehicles, a police helicopter and three riot vans. The bailiff and I were walking up the path and there was a plethora of police behind us,” he recalls. “The challenge and the adrenalin – well, you don’t tend to get that with collecting rent in a sheltered scheme.” Barnes began his working life in the less gritty world of estate agency, but after seven years decided to jump over the fence into social housing. “The real crunch came one day when my boss turned up in a brand-new BMW and I had queues of people saying ‘what can we afford to buy for £60,000?’,” he says. With that in mind, he moved to Howard Cottage Society in Hertfordshire to become a housing officer and moved up the ranks to senior housing officer. He shifted across to Huntingdonshire council to do the same role and then, in May 2000, joined the NHF. He says his current job has given him the policy overview he needs to achieve his ultimate goal – becoming a housing association chief executive.
Tarig Hilal, 26, policy manager at Crisis
Being given just 20 minutes’ notice to present a speech on hidden homelessness at the Labour party conference in 2001 is a moment Tarig Hilal (right) won’t easily forget. “The speech was on behalf of the organisation in front of 60 people, and I had to write it, memorise it ... so much pressure. But it was one of the most exciting moments ever – and I pulled it off,” he says, grinning. Hilal’s ability to think on his feet and persuade others of his point of view make him a rising star. As policy manager at homelessness charity Crisis, it’s his job to devise research to push homelessness to the top of the political agenda – the charity’s lobbying on the “hidden homeless” or vulnerably housed has already influenced the government to crack down on the number of families living in bed and breakfast hotels. The impetus to get involved in social housing came from moving to the UK after growing up in Sudan. “I can’t believe a country as wealthy as Britain has homeless people,” he says. “I wanted to do something.” It was enough to galvanise him into joining Crisis as a policy officer, in February 2001, after a stint as vice-president of Nottingham University’s student union. In the future, he hopes to eventually take his lobbying skills onto an international arena – and he’s aiming high. “I’d love to work in international politics. I want to be head of the UN, the next Kofi Annan.”
Terry Stacy, 31, executive member for performance, Islington council
At 31, Terry Stacy (left) is already a local government and community action veteran. His first brush with the sector was at the tender age of 18, when he ran a campaign to get asbestos removed from his east London estate. After becoming secretary of the residents’ association, his star has continued to rise. After joining the Liberal Democrats, Stacy became a councillor in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets in 1998. He spent the next four years juggling his roles as opposition housing spokesman and leader of the council’s stock transfer commission with day jobs in councils, housing associations and regeneration projects. He planned to hang up his political hat after moving to Islington, but council leader Steve Hitchins persuaded him to stand there and he was elected in May 2002. As executive member for performance, he is battling to turn around Islington’s poor comprehensive performance assessment rating and win the borough’s bid for an arm’s-length management organisation. It’s going to be a tough year, but this time, he’s determined to stick with local government for good. “I made the joke to the leader of the council that he needs to be careful about the people who might want his job,” Stacy says. “But I don’t want to be an MP, there’s no doubt about that. I like local government; you achieve more.”
Michael Holmes, 18, youth associate for the Tenant Participation Advisory Service
“The local councillors said young people had enough to do in the area,” recalls Michael Holmes (right) of his first community campaign (which he began at the age of 13), “but I said, ‘how many 18-year-olds do you see playing on the swings for six or seven hours a night?’” The teenage activist founded a 300-strong campaign group to lobby Newark council for more youth activities in his area, proposed converting a former school into a leisure centre and helped write a proposal that secured £8.6m of lottery funding. The youth club based at the centre now has 500 young people on its database. Although not yet out of his teens, Holmes has racked up five years of community work with young people. Since leaving college last year, he’s been doing consultancy work for the Tenant Participation Advisory Service, training councils in good practice for working with young people and has written a white paper on youth compact agreements for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. His proudest moment, he says, was accompanying his youth group to the International Youth Festival in Germany in 2002, where they performed a piece of dance theatre on the dangers of drug use. “They were representing our country and mixing with the other kids. We were plastered all over the German newspapers.” Michael is hoping to repeat this success next year and is organising the next festival in Newark.
David Ireland, 35, private housing service manager, Hammersmith & Fulham council
Fans of the film Trainspotting will appreciate David Ireland’s claim to fame. Ireland (left), the brains behind the concept of compulsory leasing, is currently trying to lease back the dingy hostel used by Trainspotting’s motley crew of drug addicts on their trip to London. “The building has been used for residential and commercial use and it’s still empty, but we’re on the case,” he says. “It’s fascinating to find out the past use of empty buildings.” A government consultation paper last month championed the idea of compulsory leasing, a legal tool to force reluctant owners to recycle empty properties. Ireland is a key player in the government’s drive to crack down on shoddy private sector landlords and a member of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s working group on empty homes. Ireland, who describes his job as “improving people’s lives through housing”, started his career in 1989 as an environmental health officer, first at Islington council and then at Westminster. He joined Hammersmith & Fulham in 1996 and worked his way up to developing the council’s private sector housing strategy. If he weren’t in housing, he might have become a botanist, he says: “I like gardening, it’s a good way to relax, although with a two-year-old boy and another baby on the way, it’s hard to find the time.”
Jon Sawyer, 26, executive adviser for regeneration and housing at consultant KPMG
“I don’t think my friends have a clue what I do,” says Jon Sawyer (right). “A lot of my university friends went into banking or accountancy and are very commercially driven. I often just tell people I’m a surveyor, just to make my job easier to understand.” Like David Ireland, Sawyer has made his mark through his work on empty homes. He helped draw up strategies for councils on how to bring empty buildings back into use, and the work was published as Office of the Deputy Prime Minister guidance last month. He sits on the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ regeneration policy panel and on the board of the Empty Homes Agency. He got hooked on regeneration as a teenager on work experience at a Birmingham surveyor’s practice – so much so, that he went back every summer from the age of 15 until 21. The firm sponsored his land economy degree at Cambridge, after which he went into consultancy work with KPMG. In his spare time he cooks a mean curry – korma is his favourite dish. “Like most people immersed in their careers, I find it hard to come in from work and just sit on the sofa, ” he says.
Chloe Fletcher, 28, housing policy manager, Association of London Government
Although not yet 30, Chloe Fletcher (right) has earned her spurs as a policy hotshot who can turn complex legislation into easily accessible information for professionals twice her age. She manages a 13-strong team and is responsible for advising on and researching housing policy. “Her ability to deliver and to grasp quickly the latest initiative coming out of the ODPM has impressed me,” says ALG interim housing director Michael Irvine. “She has good political nous and learns quickly – which are two key attributes to going onto bigger and better things.” Fletcher worked at Pinnacle as a trainee housing officer and rose to be estate manager, then went to Lewisham council in south London as regeneration policy officer before joining the ALG as principal policy officer in 2001. She has been policy manager since last November. All those hefty documents don’t put her off the written word when she gets home. “I like to escape into interesting novels. I love George Eliot, she’s a fantastic storyteller.”
Pippa Hack, 32, principal strategy officer, London borough of Greenwich
When Pippa Hack (left) isn’t drawing up plans for the future of inner-city housing stock, she is something of an intrepid traveller. She spent a year travelling alone around Africa in her 20s, has recently visited Egypt and is planning a trip to Costa Rica. “I’m interested in different cultures and environments,” says the woman described by one of her peers as an “intellectual whizz-kid”. “The best place I’ve visited so far is Uganda, because of the lush landscape and friendly people.” Hack was bitten by the housing bug after working part-time in a day centre for the homeless while a student at the London School of Economics. Before joining Greenwich, south-east London, three years ago, she was a policy officer at registered social landlord Novas. “I wanted to do something intellectually stimulating but that would also have an effect on front-line services. My strategic role now allows me to do that. “What I like about Greenwich is that it’s an urban authority and there’s a lot of diversity.”
David Saxon, 32, neighbourhood relations manager, Brent Housing Partnership
If David Saxon (left) wasn’t running an antisocial behaviour unit, he’d like to work in sales and marketing. Marketing the value of his work to tenants, “selling” the notion of curbing nuisance, persuading witnesses to come forward and promoting his ideas to colleagues are the high points of his job, he says. And he’s got a great product to sell. Since 2001, he’s been in charge of 12 housing officers, tackling neighbourhood nuisance across 3000 properties. His department has just secured the country’s largest antisocial behaviour order, against a gang of eight youths – no mean feat, given how complex and lengthy the ASBO process can be. Saxon joined Brent council in north London as a temp on a two-week contract in 1993, and still hasn’t left. “I’ve got friends who go to the office, it’s always the same, and they’re looking at the clock,” he says. “But when I get to work, whatever I’m worrying about in my personal life is forgotten. Being busy is a wonderful cure for whatever you’ve got on your mind.”
Janette Powell, 30, community resettlement manager at HMP Winchester, seconded from Portsmouth council
Janette Powell (centre) started as a YTS trainee at Fareham council more than 10 years ago, and has made her name building up resettlement services for offenders at Winchester prison. After working at Portsmouth council as allocations officer and homelessness adviser, she took the Winchester job almost a year ago. As manager of new housing and employment initiatives, she rehouses potentially dangerous people all over the country – and Portsmouth has just agreed to a three-year extension to the secondment, allowing Powell to become the prison’s initiatives manager, developing new projects around housing and employment. She has a degree in housing and social work and says: “There’s not enough communication between agencies. I thought if I had an insider’s view of social services, I might have a half a chance.” Of the prisoners she works with, Powell says: “They’re good as gold. A lot of the stuff on the outside is because they’re drunk or on drugs. But inside, they’re sober. They’re pretty sociable characters really.”
Stephanie Doylend, 32, executive assistant, Flagship Housing Group
Stephanie Doylend (right) is one of a clutch of women in housing who have reached executive status early on in their careers. Her sweeping role includes investigating private sector partnerships, troubleshooting on equality issues and being responsible for marketing for the entire group. “The image of housing is that it’s dominated by older men, but there are some talented young women coming through now,” she says. Doylend started as housing officer at South Norfolk district council 10 years ago before becoming a development officer at Wherry Housing Association in 1994. Just two years later, she was promoted to development manager at Anglia Housing Group, of which Wherry is part. She began at Flagship in 2001 as associate director of development and by October last year had won the role of executive assistant, working closely with chief executive Paul Tabiner and also heading the employee wellbeing taskforce. Doylend recently set up the first forum on equality and diversity issues for the East of England. She worked with the Housing Corporation and National Housing Federation to create the group that brings together councils and RSLs to share best practice on gender, race and disability issues. A keen golfer, she founded the networking group the Society of Housing Associated Golfers six years ago. Members include councils, contractors, consultants and developers.
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