Fiona Cruickshank started out teaching maths to teenagers. Today, the sums she does are a little bigger. Chloe Stothart met the woman who controls the Housing Corporation's £1.4bn investment budget.
Looking at Fiona Cruickshank, you would not suspect that she once held sway over classes of unruly teenagers. Softly spoken with a Scottish burr, she seems altogether too genteel to have been a teacher at an inner-London comprehensive, which is how her working life began. But under this exterior lies a quiet determination, befitting the woman who wields the Housing Corporation's £1.4bn investment budget.

As the corporation's director of investment and regeneration policy, Cruickshank holds one of the highest-profile posts in housing. Yet the 46-year-old remains something of an enigma. She bats away questions about her life outside the office with a pleasant "No". Even her interest in gardening – she recently judged a housing association gardening competition – is off limits. "The point is how I do my job," she says firmly.

Her route to the corporation started in the classroom. After five years teaching chemistry and maths in London, she spent four years at an international school in Japan. Bored with teaching, Cruickshank then took a master's degree in computing; jobs in IT and government relations at British Telecom followed. Her next move was to join the civil service fast track for future high-fliers, starting off in the-then Department of Environment and progressing through departmental upheavals to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, where she worked in local authority finance and housing.

'I didn't know housing was an option'
Cruickshank had not considered a career in housing before being placed there by the civil service. "Like many people I didn't know housing was a career option," she says. "The housing job was my second job in the department and I really enjoyed it."

Bitten by the housing bug, she departed for the Housing Corporation to become assistant director of investment strategy in June 2000. She was promoted to her present position in January 2002.

This makes Cruickshank one of the few women to have broken through housing's glass ceiling. "I find it encouraging when I see women at a senior level in housing associations and bodies like ourselves," she says. "It encourages junior members to think: if they can do it, I can too."

Colleagues past and present testify that Cruickshank is intelligent, likeable and meticulous but has a strong will. "She's friendly and quietly spoken but assertive when she needs to be," says a former colleague, who worked with her for two years. Says another: "People would regard her as very straight. She doesn't play games."

A former boss adds: "She's pretty tough. She's pleasant but there's an iron fist in the velvet glove, in the nicest possible way."

It is Cruickshank's responsibility to set the criteria that determine who gets Housing Corporation money. She is behind the corporation's national investment strategy, which sets out the principles for allocating approved development programme funds. She has also written the corporation's policies on rural housing and homes for older people, and is set to bring out its regeneration policy in autumn. "The policies help to inform allocation discussions," she says. "The job is about overarching policy, but also specific things, like the best way to help older people or how housing associations contribute to regeneration."

While remaining characteristically guarded on the details of forthcoming regeneration policy, Cruickshank acknowledges that what housing associations in the South want is for regeneration to cease being the poor relation to housebuilding. "Regional housing strategies will be setting out priorities for the region," she says. "I think we will be looking across all priorities for the region but bearing in mind that we need to get more houses in an area that is under pressure."

The truth is, nobody really knows how regional boards will affect us. It’s natural that some people will be concerned that they will lose out

Cruickshank, who believes regeneration is moving up the political agenda, sits on the executive of the Oldham and Rochdale market renewal pathfinder. "It gives me practical experience of a major regeneration project, which can only be helpful in developing regeneration policy," she says.

Getting out to see policy in action is something that she is at pains to promote. She has done several impact assessments for the corporation, which involved finding out what problems schemes have had and what effects they have had on the lives of their tenants. Now she is sending her managers out to do the assessments too. "It's very important because policy mustn't be developed in a vacuum," she says.

One of the corporation's present hot topics – whether to pay grant to private developers – would come under Cruickshank's remit if the proposal got the go-ahead. "The idea has always been around," she says. "There are extremely varied views on it, even among developers. If it were decided to proceed, then we would decide what the purpose is, where we would use it, and what the criteria for getting it would be. I would help to work out the criteria but for something as big as this, we wouldn't just look at the policy side but the performance and regulation too."

What will happen next?
Like many in the sector, Cruickshank is still uncertain about the impact of the regional housing boards, another hot topic. For the corporation, it could mean either more power or a diminished role, while councils, in particular, are worried that they will lose money when their funding source, the housing investment programme, is absorbed into the regional housing pot from next year.

"It's a difficult one," Cruickshank muses.

"I was talking recently to Wendy Jarvis – the ODPM divisional manager for local authority housing finance – about regional arrangements and how it would affect us, and the truth is nobody really knows. Of course people are concerned about the change. It's natural that some people will be concerned that they will lose out."

Some people already feel that they are losing out. Critics have accused the corporation of not putting enough money into rural housing, pointing out that the number of affordable new homes built in rural areas has halved during the past five years. (HT 9 May, page 10). Cruickshank disagrees. "Investment is steadily increasing and taking up a bigger share of the programme. We are getting it up the agenda. Rural associations say there's not enough money, but London associations say there's not enough in London as well."

The corporation has put £458,000 into funding 50 rural enablers who work with councils to get rural housing schemes up and running – an idea that came out of an innovation and good practice paper sponsored by the corporation. Cruickshank herself looks after the £10m innovation and good-practice scheme and says it helps feed into corporation policy.

Source

Housing Today