what a difference a day makes

It sounds like a sub-plot from Only Fools and Horses, but it happened in Barnet on 3 May 2002. It was the day after local elections in the north London borough and passers-by were surprised to see a portrait of Lenin exiting the leader's office in the town hall. In its place was hung the spiritual choice of the new – Conservative – administration: a picture of the Queen.

The Barnet Revolution raises a giggle, as do apocryphal tales of councils where the biscuit order was upgraded to Kit-Kats in the post-election euphoria. But what happens when it's not just dusty portraits and boring biscuits that get dumped but stock transfers, sites for affordable housing, allocation policies – or people's jobs?

Councils that changed hands last year saw all of the above, and this year will bring another round of policy spring-cleaning alongside the furniture removal. On 1 May, voters in 177 authorities will elect an entire council, and a total of 10,500 seats are up for grabs in 142 others, including several, such as Hull, Sheffield, Walsall and Birmingham, that are known for their troubled housing departments.

Of course, with policy from fair rents to the housing investment programme defined by central government, the impact that a new local administration can make is reduced.

In particular, councils' room for manoeuvre on stock options has been reduced to a three-point turn: arm's-length management organisations, stock transfer or PFI.

But reduced doesn't mean annihilated. Homes, environments and associated issues of antisocial behaviour and regeneration are so vital that housing can still galvanise an election and sway the vote, as Sheffield's Liberal Democrats found to their cost last year. And even if a new administration is a change of style rather than substance, housing officers could be going to a very different workplace on 2 May.

Shocks to the system
In Enfield, north London, where the Conservatives won 39 seats compared with Labour's 24 last May, the Tories flexed their muscle by declining £8m in social housing grant on the grounds that they didn't want to import social problems from inner-city boroughs. "I think that was a shock to the system of some of the other London boroughs," says council leader Mike Rye.

The new administration also rewrote its allocations policy to prioritise key workers.

In neighbouring Barnet, however, the switch from a Labour-Liberal Democrat administration to Conservative control wasn't followed by a major switch in housing policy direction. The Tories won 33 seats to Labour's 24 and the Lib Dems' six and, as deputy chief executive Brian Reynolds explains, all parties felt a policy of trickle-transfer driven by phased regeneration of estates was politically and practically desirable.

But Barnet felt an impact in other ways. Ditching Labour's "Creating Opportunity for All" motto in favour of "Putting the Community First" wasn't just a question of changing a logo and staff newsletter. "There's a different tone and set of messages, even if there aren't major policy differences," says Reynolds. "There's a lot of work to translate the message into policy." For instance, attitudes to graffiti switched from Labour's focus on the clear-up team to the Tories' law-and-order crackdown.

Barnet had been Labour-run since 1994, long enough for some officers to build careers around the policies of the coalition. But in some councils, well-entrenched administrations measure their tenure in decades. "In the [North-west] council I worked in, you hardly noticed any changes after the elections. In fact, you only noticed when one or two of them died," recalls one senior housing officer.

People who have worked under one administration for years can become locked in a particular mindset. Richard Kemp has been a Liberal Democrat councillor in Liverpool since the days of controversial deputy leader Derek Hatton. In 1998, the Lib Dems won control and his wife Erica became chair of the housing committee. He recalls that she wrote a summary of the council's new housing policy and presented it to the director of housing. His response was: "I've been here nine years, and I've never had one of these."

Kemp says: "A change of control creates a whole new series of relationships. For years, the officers saw you as opposing things, and they never built a relationship with you. They spend the first few weeks asking: 'What's he like? What does she think?'"

At Barnet, Reynolds and the other directors had the political experience to deal with the problem. He says: "One of the tasks for people at my level is to treat all members with the same respect, if not the same amount of time. Ward members could be in the cabinet in two or three years' time." But others may not enjoy such cordial relationships. "One of the easiest and quickest ways for a new administration to stamp its authority is to get rid of the director and change the whole emphasis of where the department is going," notes one housing consultant. That was the case in the former Labour stronghold of Lambeth, south London, where housing director John Broomfield was shown the door by the Lib Dem-Conservative administration last June. Broomfield is now working as a housing consultant.

New councillors and cabinet members are often determined to wash whiter than their predecessors. "They can sometimes be contrary, make lots of complaints, ask questions that haven't been asked before. But often that's because it needs to be done," says Paul Wheeler, assistant director at the local government Improvement & Development Agency. That was the fear in Hull, where Labour lost control last May after leaving the Housing Revenue Account perilously close to bankruptcy. Independent councillor Chris Jarvis, part of the incoming Liberal Democrat-independent administration, recalls: "At first there was considerable wariness among officers and worries there might be scores to settle. Some were saying: 'Let's sort out what happened last year.' But in the end, we decided to draw a line under the past." And after 35 years of uninterrupted Labour administration, it wasn't just the atmosphere that changed in Hull's Guildhall but the physical layout. The leader and cabinet members had offices on a particular corridor, with secretaries on sentry duty at the only entrance. But after last May, a locked door at the other end was opened, improving access physically and psychologically. "It's quite significant to be able to knock on the leader's door and say 'have you got a minute?'," says Jarvis.

The impact on housing policy of a change of leadership on 2 May can't be compared with the days of large-scale development, or when councillors took it upon themselves to allocate properties. Nevertheless, authorities where councillors' portrait collections are the only victims can consider themselves to have got off lightly.