The brenda agenda

"It happens every time before I make a speech," she says of the unlikely chink in her armour. She doesn't quite break out into a cold sweat, but worries that she is getting her message across effectively. "If you care about what you're speaking about, you're bound to be nervous," she says.

Getting tough messages across is what Dean specialises in. She began her career as a secretary for print union SOGAT. By the early 1980s, she was heading the union and facing down her critics in an attempt to broker a deal with newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch during the infamous, ugly – and ultimately doomed – industrial action at Wapping. During her four-and-a-half years at the Housing Corporation, which commands an annual budget of £650m and has 600 staff, she has single-mindedly pursued a modernising agenda to make the rather staid institution, and the social housing sector in general, more "open and accessible". Looking back at her years at the corporation, Dean says she tried to change it from a "sleepy, conventional kind of organisation to one that's always exciting to work in".

To some extent, she has succeeded. One corporation staffer says: "I wouldn't have come to the corporation without the agenda and changes that Brenda brought. I just wouldn't have considered coming here before, as it was too backward. Now it's more confident. The chairman's prepared to stick her head above the parapet and is committed to the housing sector."

But despite Dean's efforts to change its culture, the corporation has been dogged by claims that it is losing its grip. Last year's government decision to make it work more closely with English Partnerships fuelled rumours of an eventual merger. The recently unveiled "traffic light" rating system to assess registered social landlords is regarded by many as an attempt to claw back power lost after the Audit Commission took over the role of single housing inspector last September. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's proposal to reform the corporation's regulatory role, allowing it to send troubleshooting managers into failing RSLs, is regarded as a peace offering.

Key role in the Communities Plan
But Dean's personal future is not in doubt. She steps down in September, but is looking forward to an equally important and high-profile role in the implementation of the Communities Plan, heading the low-cost homeownership taskforce. She is well-placed to cope with issues such as the right to buy, combining the no-nonsense delivery of the union activist with the poise of a politician.

Sitting in an imposing room just off Peers' Lobby in the House of Lords, Dean has firm plans for her new job. "A very active group is what I want, so [the work] should be finished by the early autumn," she says. As part of the taskforce's remit, she has seized the hot potato of the right to buy by accepting the challenge laid down by Prescott to modernise the scheme without alienating suspicious voters in Labour heartlands.

Of the Communities Plan overall, Dean identifies planning and the running of the regional housing boards as two areas that will need to work well if delivery is to be kept on course. The Housing Corporation, she says, has a key role in the plan through its seat on the nine regional housing boards. "The corporation's agenda is much wider than it used to be – such as dealing with the £1bn for key workers and the low-cost homeownership taskforce," she says. "All the highlights of my time here have been working with people who actually do the job of delivering and managing housing on the ground."

Recently, her priorities as corporation chairman have been the controversial issue of rent restructuring – which, she says, was one of the most difficult issues she had to deal with – and campaigning for equal opportunities for ethnic minorities and women in the sector.

Her blunt approach means that she has often been accused of talking down to people. "She's a bit like a school headmistress really, too patronising by half," mutters one chief executive, recalling Dean's broadside at the NHF housing association chief executives' conference last month when she chastised white, male executives for not casting their recruitment net more widely.

There will come a point for the corporation at which the question of a merger with English Partnerships has to be asked

But Dean – known as "chairman", rather than Brenda, to her colleagues at the Housing Corporation – makes no apologies for getting tough on the message of wider intake in the sector. "It's about having a really diverse leadership that meets the diversity of the sector itself," she says. "The communities that housing associations are working with are mixed communities, and the majority of tenants are women."

Industrial action
Another pressing matter of late has been Dean's disgruntled workforce. In a throwback to her days at Wapping, she is once again involved in industrial action – but this time on the other side. Members of public service unions Amicus and Unison are protesting about the restructuring that has been under way at the corporation since a review conducted in 2000 and went so far as to threaten a one-day strike.

Dean is not convinced by their arguments: "I do feel that good judgment has not been applied on this one. I couldn't believe it when I read the reasons why they were considering going on strike. At Sogat, a strike was always the last step that you took. I've said to our staff to stick to the procedures and make sure we answer all the queries people are entitled to have. We don't want any macho industrial relations."

Such straight talking, what one corporation employee playfully calls the "Brenda agenda", could be attributed to her working-class upbringing in Eccles, Greater Manchester. Her mother worked in a textile factory, her father was a railway signalman and she never went to university – "girls like me just didn't do that". These days, she describes herself as "pragmatic" and says she has her "feet on the ground". It's an attitude that wins her friends as well as enemies. One housing professional says: "She speaks as she finds, and I like that."

As for the organisation she will leave this autumn, Dean says: "The future of the Housing Corporation is a good one. We are now working very closely with English Partnerships, so the relationship is now very good. But there will come a point at which the question of a merger has to be asked."

Dean believes that there is still much to be done at the corporation. If it were subjected to its own traffic-light assessment, she says, it "wouldn't come out with a green light on everything". She is certain, however, that it wouldn't have any red lights.

The advertisement for Dean's replacement as chairman of the corporation reads: "You possess vision, charm, drive and can develop a deep commitment to improving social housing … a capacity to open doors, gain access, earn a hearing, be listened to."

Many housing associations may not like to admit it, but Dean meets all these requirements with a good deal to spare.