Attitude adjuster

Fusty old civil servants had better hold on to their hats. There's a new chair at English Partnerships and she's got no time for misplaced egos. "I was at a meeting yesterday with a man from another public sector body, who said to somebody in a colleague organisation: 'If this doesn't work we'll want our money back.' I just hit him like a tonne of bricks. I said: 'Excuse me – your money? I thought it was taxpayers' money, actually.' I just hate that attitude that 'we'll be in partnership but our chequebook's bigger than yours, so we'll call the shots'. I have very little time for people who are precious about their turf and their budget."

The regeneration quango's formidable new chair, Margaret Ford, is so animated as she recounts this tale that she seems almost angry. A businesswoman used to modern working practices – she is chief executive of an internet publisher that specialises in human resource advice – Ford is determined to forge better, closer working relationships with other organisations and to drag the traditionally bureaucratic and awkward body into the 21st century.

Ford's no-nonsense demeanour will be a welcome change for English Partnerships.

In the past, its approach to housing associations has been described by at least one observer as "incidental" and "limited" and it has been criticised for being hostile to innovation. That's all about to change.

"One of the things that I've had no patience for since I came into this organisation is our own people who think they might behave in that way," Ford says.

"I heard before I came into the job that English Partnerships had an attitude problem. I've been saying to staff at all levels that I don't want to hear that any more. If they've got an attitude, then lose it, and lose it damn quick because I've no time for it."

The spotlight has been on English Partnerships since John Prescott returned to lead on regeneration and housing issues at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Now that Prescott is driving housing up the political agenda, English Partnerships looks set to take centre stage. Last year, it spent £170m. In March this year, a government review suggested that English Partnerships' land should be given to local authorities and that the quango should be remoulded as a land assembler and project pioneer.

Ford joined in April, replacing Sir Alan Cockshaw, who departed English Partnerships in October 2001. Her contract runs until April 2005, giving her just three years to deliver on government promises of hundreds of thousands of new homes across London and the South-east, and on the regeneration of low-demand areas in the North and Midlands.

This means English Partnerships' relationship with the regional development agencies – hived off in 1999 from what became English Partnerships – has come into sharp relief. Ford says:"We shouldn't be second-guessing what regional agencies are doing locally. It's not our job to go in and call the shots on their patch. Where we are developing more expertise is around the more difficult sites. English Partnerships should be used at a very early stage to do the remedial work – and then butt out."

One of Ford's first acts at the helm of English Partnerships was to finalise the disposal of the Millennium Dome to a consortium of developers. She describes the removal of this massive ball and chain from around the government's leg as the most challenging aspect of her time in the job so far. The dome will be transformed into an entertainment arena surrounded by retail developments and 7000 homes.

So, can Ford carry on with this kind of decisive action and deliver the "step change" in housing that government is calling for?

People who have worked with Ford in the past testify to her ability to change organisations. Eileen Scott, a former colleague who is now director of corporate services at Communities Scotland, says of Ford's stint there as a director in the early 1990s: "Scottish Homes [Communities Scotland's former incarnation] was looking for a breath of fresh air and Margaret brought that. She is very determined, enormously clever and able to see beyond the current situation. But she is aware of the difference between setting grand goals and actually achieving them – she aims to achieve them."

Anthony Dunnett, chief executive of the South-east England Development Agency and formerly in charge at English Partnerships, says Ford is a "strong leader" and describes her appointment as "brilliant".

Another regeneration and housing expert says: "She and the rest of the organisation are making the right noises, whereas before that wasn't the case."

He adds that the recent signing of a "memorandum of understanding" between the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships was "highly significant".

Bringing a commercial mindset to the public sector is really helpful, and bringing a service ethos to the commercial world is helpful too

"This is something that wouldn't have happened in the past," he says. "It's English Partnerships making a statement that it wishes to engage with the housing sector. The previous relationship between housing associations and English Partnerships has been incidental. In terms of long-term relationships it has been very limited."

When Ford talks about the memorandum, she leans forward to emphasise that she means business. "Where we can selectively acquire and selectively demolish and play the land assembly and infrastructure role, we will do that in order to prepare the ground for the Housing Corporation to come in and fund registered social landlords to create new communities.

"Previously, we might have done things independently of one another, but in those areas we will work very closely and we will play a distinctive role in terms of our expertise and funding." English Partnerships will need to appoint a new chief executive before it can make good its vision for more coherent working relationships. Previous chief executive Paula Hay-Plumb resigned in June after eight years in the job. Interviews are set to start next week, with a view to an appointment being made "in the next few weeks" according to one source.

Experience and passion
Ford herself comes with a hefty, if unconventional, CV. She is a former director of Lothian Health Board, a non-executive director of the Scottish Prison Service and qualified economist and management consultant formerly with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

She describes her career to date as "eclectic"but confesses to having a deep-rooted passion for housing, describing it as "incredibly important and compelling". When the job at English Partnerships came up, she says, "everything just seemed to fit".

Ford's passion for housing shows when she launches a stinging attack on NHS Estates for its recent disposal of 4800 acres of land which will now be turned not into affordable housing for the many NHS workers who struggle to find accommodation, but instead into luxury flats. All but banging her fist on the table, Ford calls the decision "absolute madness".

She also has strong feelings about the future of stock transfer and shows obvious pride about her role in the pioneering work into large-scale voluntary transfer done by Scottish Homes in the 1990s. "I think we are coming to a second wave of stock transfers and it seems to me absolutely right that regeneration techniques should be brought into play alongside it. I'm a pragmatist in that I'm interested in doing things that work in specific situations."

The stuttering Glasgow stock transfer is also close to Ford's heart as her own home town is not so far away, in the Ayrshire town of Glengarnock. "I actually don't think the Glasgow Housing Association model is a particularly smart model. What would have worked better is to have had much smaller community-based landlords. If I'm a fan of stock transfer, I'm more of a fan of transfer to community-based housing associations."

Ford is a fiercely private individual. Her entry in Who's Who – she's rather chuffed to be "under Harrison Ford" – is about all that she will give away about her non-working life. She sees this privacy as a crucial way of allowing her to relax. Once asked why she didn't keep any pictures of her family on her desk, Ford replied: "Because I haven't got pictures of my filing cabinet on my fridge."

Ford smiles as she says this, but she isn't joking. She takes work very seriously and tries to cram as much into her week as possible. Flitting between homes in Edinburgh – where Ford's internet company, Good Practice, is based – and London, would exhaust most people, but Ford revels in it.

"I would hate to do just one thing – it would drive me nuts. The idea that you can have two very different lives appeals to me enormously and it always has. I think the one helps the other and I think bringing a commercial mindset to the public sector is really helpful and bringing a service ethos into the commercial world is helpful as well."

At the Urban Summit at the end of this month Ford will speak at a forum on the future of urban development. English Partnerships will of course have a key role to play in this future, whatever it may be.

Ford says there are a number of areas that she is currently working on to shape that future. One is the use of the controversial provision of gap funding. The European Commission only recently permitted the government to press ahead with this means of ensuring otherwise inviable projects went ahead, after concerns that it was an inappropriate use of public funds.

"As we speak we are working up the bones of the regime so we can start putting it into place as soon as possible. It's absolutely essential. If we're going to get developers to accommodate the percentages of affordable housing that we want, we are going to have to use gap funding to ensure the rate of return is acceptable to them – so it couldn't have come back at a better time as far as I'm concerned."