Lord Kerslake: ‘The sector has lost a supremely powerful voice’

At my first encounter with Lord Kerslake – at 52 already Sir Bob Kerslake – he was still running Sheffield City Council. But he had just been appointed as chief executive designate of the government’s new housing and regeneration superagency, the body that would go on to become Homes England, and it was immediately clear why this softly spoken and dryly humorous civil servant was being given the task of running a £5bn a-year start-up agency – one of the most powerful across Whitehall.

Launched in the teeth of the global financial crisis, the Homes and Communities Agency under Kerslake’s leadership was within two years funding the construction of more than half of the homes built in England – such was the vigour with which he set about his task.

Bath-born Sir, and later Lord, Bob Kerslake was someone about whom no-one in the housing sector seemingly had a bad word to say. After just two years in charge at the agency, he was brought in-house in recognition of his effectiveness to run what was then the Department for Communities and Local Government as permanent secretary.

Such was his evident success there, that after just another two years he was again promoted, to share the top job in the whole of government, as head of the civil service. But even through this period he retained his deep interest in housing, and on his departure from that post, not only did he become a crossbench peer in 2015, but he also took on the chairmanship of one of the UK’s largest and most historic housing associations, Peabody.

He also became chair of Barking and Dagenham’s local housing company Be First, was a president of the Local Government Association, and chaired the UK2070 Commission focusing on city and regional inequalities in the UK.

Kerslake always talked quickly, with focus and purpose and energy: he always had a million places to be. Colleagues talked in awe about his legendary ability to seemingly be on top of every single issue in an organisation at any time.

But he also – in a way that I still find unique in such a senior leader – approached his work seemingly entirely without ego.

Kerslake always talked quickly, with focus and purpose and energy: he always had a million places to be. Colleagues talked in awe about his legendary ability to seemingly be on top of every single issue in an organisation at any time.

OK, so maybe “whispering Bob” wasn’t the world’s best public speaker. But he took the word “service” in the ‘public servant’ ethos incredibly seriously – he was at all times a servant to the outcome he was trying to achieve. In any moment he was simply bending his superior brain to the task of finding the best way to achieve it, instead of looking for ways to advance himself.

Through nearly two decades of reporting on the built environment, housing, planning and sustainability, I can say that Lord Kerslake – Bob – was bar none the most effective and impressive public sector operator I have ever encountered.

As a crossbench lord, Kerslake made important contributions to numerous pieces of legislation, not least to the 2016 Housing and Planning Act. But with many of these contributions putting him in opposition to the government, and given his deepening distaste for the antics of the Conservative Party since Boris Johnson’s time as PM, many Tories have in recent years derided him as a Labour stooge. That is to entirely miss the point.

>>See also: Tributes paid to ‘remarkable’ Lord Bob Kerslake following death

>> From the archive: Lord Kerslake: our 2008 interview with Britain’s busiest man

He never got involved in party politics. But if the committed public servant in Kerslake was angry and disappointed by politicians playing fast and loose with the administration and institutions of government simply to advance their own careers, it was to his credit that he was principled enough to say so. In contrary, his dedication to proper administration of the country is what made him so effective an operator.

Kerslake’s death robs the sector of an enormously powerful voice, and a supremely proficient operator. We are all the poorer for his passing.

Joey Gardiner, contributing editor for Housing Today and Building