'If you make people laugh, you can achieve quite a lot'

Traipsing back to the playground after football practice, the teenage Tom Manion spotted a lunchtime scrum in front of the ice-cream van. Inquisitive and unwilling to stand on the sidelines, he jostled his way into the heart of the throng. Several seconds and a few scuffles later, the 16-year-old captain of the football team was dragged from the mêlée by teachers and excluded.

"It just went off," recalls Manion in his scouser drawl of the playground tussle over who was first in the queue for ice cream. "Kids were pushing to get to the front, there was a bit of messing about, a bit of name-calling. As captain of the football team I was supposed to be a role model for the younger kids – so I guess they had to make an example of me." Excluded a few weeks before his O-levels, he finished his studies at night school and says the incident taught him not to take his education for granted.

More than 30 years on, some would say Manion is still a mischief-maker who cannot resist being centre stage. Driven by a desire to improve communities – he grew up in a Liverpool council house – he made his name at Manchester council as a bolshie union leader and housing officer who would drag his team out of bed at 4am to carry out unannounced inspections on the city's shoddy bed and breakfasts. At 6500-home housing association Irwell Valley where he started as chief executive in 1996, he has launched "gold service", a supermarket-style tenant loyalty scheme, put a prisoner on the payroll to advise staff about housing ex-offenders and invited an 80% tattooed American motivational speaker, called the Scary Guy, to talk to staff.

Manion is applauded as a breath of fresh air by some; he was named housing public servant of the year by the Cabinet Office last year. Others see him as an overbearing, cocky showman. As one ex-colleague says: "There's a split between people who think Tom's a bit mad and those who see him as a radical thinker. Personally, I think it's a sad day when we can't have a challenging and inspiring person working in housing. Surely we don't just want the usual grey suits?"

Now Manion's latest move has set tongues wagging. It was announced just over a week ago (HT 30 January, page 9) that Irwell Valley will rejoin the National Housing Federation in April. The organisation walked out on the federation two years ago, over what Manion saw as its Southern bias and lack of support for Irwell's gold service. While his peers wonder what effect this return to the NHF's fold will entail, Manion will only say that he is keen to help boost recruitment and improve the image of social housing as a career.

Manion's personal style can be as unorthodox as his management style: until last year he wore his hair in a trademark pony-tail (now ditched in favour of gelled-up spikes) and, when we meet at Irwell Valley's Manchester headquarters, he sports a (fake) diamond earring to reflect, he explains true to cheeky form, the extension of Irwell's gold service. Now, tenants who remain loyal to the gold service for two years can upgrade to "diamond" and order repairs directly from contractors.

Irwell Valley's gold service, launched four years ago, is what Manion is best known for.

What other business knows the names of its bad customers, not its good ones?

It offers incentives to good tenants, such as weekly bonuses to those who pay rent on time. Although maligned by some as a hare-brained scheme, other registered social landlords have adopted it and Manion claims Irwell Valley saves £2 for every £1 spent.

He began instilling the philosophy behind building good customer relations on his first day as chief executive, sending staff an email informing them that their pay would be two weeks late. "It was a joke with a serious purpose. I got 47 emails asking what was going on. But if we're so vigilant about our own wages, and we always pay them on time, what about how we treat the people who are paying those wages? We should treat people how we'd like to be treated."

He denounces his critics for failing to focus on good tenants: "Landlords know their worst tenants, they tie up all the staff, the resources, on people who wilfully withhold rent and know and milk the system. What other business knows the names of its bad customers, not good ones? How can you run a business that has a modicum of respectability when all staff talk about is arrears and voids, grafitti, vandalism and curfews and not customer service?"

Why, he asks, should tenants who are late with rent or vandalise their homes receive the same treatment as the rest? "You wouldn't tolerate someone at a table in a restaurant next to you eating a three-course meal and not paying, and the restaurant owner saying 'no problem sir, you leave without paying, that's fine'? So why should we?"

So proud is Manion of gold service, in fact, that he has become rather adept at name-dropping a list of high-profile people who have praised it. There's "Allan" (Leighton) and "Tom" (Bloxham), for example. Treasury minister Paul Boateng also visited Irwell Valley last year to see the scheme – although Manion wisely draws the line at dropping his name. Such praise is all very well, but is Manion worried about being a one-trick pony? "We never started it with an intention to overwhelm the nation," he says. "The aim was to provide tenants with a service that made them feel valued. If you treat people with dignity, you'll get positive results."

Manion welcomes the extra cash and recognition of regional difference in the Communities Plan, but isn't prepared to drop his favourite subject. "It's fine to talk about physical improvements to housing, but that doesn't tackle the basic problem of antisocial behaviour." It is a barely veiled hint that gold service should have been on Prescott's list.

The recurring mantra is that customer loyalty fosters good relations and good relations make better neighbourhoods. "It's no problem for me at all to let the worst house in the best neighbourhood, but I can't let the best house in a problem neighbourhood," he says.

This passion for trust and community relations was fostered partly by growing up in a close-knit Irish family in Liverpool, and partly by the job he took in a steelworks to pay his way through night school. Ferrying molten metal up and down the length of the factory every day taught him the value of teamwork and trust. "The people I worked with knew exactly how to work together and look out for each other. There was a culture of camaraderie." While he was there, one worker fell through a skylight on to a stack of red hot ingots. "When you've seen things like that, the tension and the danger …" he fails to finish the sentence. Then he points to an old photograph of the steel works – a huge concrete monstrosity – that he keeps in his office, and jokes: "I look at this whenever I'm depressed about the Housing Corporation."

This is the thing with Manion, he can sound authoritative and passionate one minute and turn into a stand-up comic the next. Why? Isn't such exuberance likely to make some people cringe? "You can't work on the basis that you don't want to make a mistake. Life isn't a popularity contest – my tenants don't pay my wages to win a popularity contest."

He admits he is a bit of a performer, but believes that sometimes drama and shock can move people's perceptions. "If you make people laugh, you can achieve quite a lot. But you've got to do it competently," he adds, "or you end up looking like the village idiot."

As Eamonn Boylan, strategy director for regeneration at Manchester council, says: "Tom courts controversy, but he does that to get across some clear points. He's always challenged preconceptions." You don't always agree with Manion's message, or his methods, but you have to give the man credit for trying – and, on a one-to-one basis, Manion does rein in much of the exuberance that dominates the public platform.

So, given his unorthodox approach, you can almost guess Manion's bugbear: public sector bureaucracy. He moans that his Peak District council recently ordered him on a "wheelie bin monitoring scheme" when he asked for a bigger dustbin. This is just one example, he says, of a regulatory framework that has lost its way. "There are more things that control housing associations than they control themselves. The issue is what do you want this sector to do, how do you want it to do it, and how much trust will you place in the people? I'm not talking unregulated laissez-faire, but in certain neighbourhoods we have to act quickly – and we're not allowed to." He is a fan, for example, of the American system of on-the-spot ASBOs issued by housing staff and police officers.