Concrete plans

All jokes aside, a wet November evening complete with a gale warning is probably not the time to see Croydon at its best. I fight my way towards the concrete monolith which is the town’s council offices, dodging trams and cars whizzing along the six-lane road running alongside it. It is this bleak town centre that Jon Rouse, Croydon Council’s chief executive, wants to transform.

The 1960s council headquarters will be the first thing to go, replaced with new civic offices built by an innovative 50:50 joint venture between the council and private developer John Laing. Mr Rouse hopes that this urban regeneration vehicle, the first in the country, will also build some of the thousands of new homes that Croydon needs.

Of course, Mr Rouse knows about the UK-wide need for new homes, especially affordable ones. He headed the Housing Corporation for three years, before leaving to run London’s largest borough in July 2007. It was a controversial exit. Though by then the writing was on the wall for the corporation - set to be disbanded to make way for the Homes and Communities Agency and the Tenant Services Authority - it was a full 18 months before the new duo assumed the Corpy’s funding and regulatory functions. Mr Rouse expressed a ‘twinge of guilt’ for jumping ship in a letter to his staff.

He has had no direct involvement with the social housing world since. But his legacy lives on - a member of the Corporation’s transition board, his fingerprints are all over the structures of the HCA and TSA. Some even credit him with the latter’s creation, devising it as an alternative to the Audit Commission assuming control of housing regulation.

Today Mr Rouse explains that even he was surprised by the timing of his departure, leaving when he did only because his ‘ideal job’ came up. Croydon, he says, hasn’t disappointed. ‘If there’s a better job in public service, I don’t know what it is,’ he smiles.

He’s at once developer, planner, educational reformer, negotiator - as a cupboard in his office stuffed with outfits attests. Among a jumble of clothes are a morning suit, bow tie and cummerbund and a neon yellow visibility jacket. You can imagine it’s hard to wrong foot Mr Rouse, who gives earnest and considered responses, pausing to search for the exact word to express his aspirations for Croydon.

There is no doubt that those ambitions are bold - and many would say that Croydon needs that. Built in the 1960s with plenty of the aforementioned concrete, it has lacked a coherent development blueprint since. When Mr Rouse arrived, there was no live construction and Croydon’s building plans made the national newspapers for all the wrong reasons - bickering, inefficiency and inertia.

The previous regime’s lack of dynamism is unsurprising: its chief executive of 14 years, David Weschler, had been at the council for 39 years. Then in 2006 the administration switched for the first time in 12 years, from Labour to Conservative.

Mr Rouse agrees his predecessors made some bad mistakes, many of which he has tried to undo. The most high-profile example is Croydon Gateway, an area near the railway station, which endured years of delay when the council’s unpopular choice of developer ended in a public enquiry and the government refusing a compulsory purchase order. ‘In a completely admirable desire to get things moving, they got into bed with some wrong developers,’ he explains.

Croydon’s few wider development plans lacked substance. ‘We were presenting [something] to the outside world that I found out very quickly was a great story on paper but actually didn’t have any real grounding,’ Mr Rouse says.

Even so, he is quick not to blame anyone for what he describes as a ‘tough ask’ in regenerating Croydon. This seems typical of the Rouse approach: he will happily criticise past ideas or decisions but stays firmly away from blaming individuals, apparently believing instead that everyone is doing their best.

The approach has won him friends throughout a successful career. At 32 he occupied the top spot at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, followed by a move to the Housing Corporation three years later, where his comparative youth raised a few eyebrows.

Joanne Roney, formerly Sheffield’s housing chief and now chief executive of Wakefield Council, remembers when Mr Rouse took over at the corporation. ‘My first impressions were that he was very innovative and had lots of fresh ideas. He is very strategic and focuses on outcomes. I predict that he will stay at Croydon long enough to see projects through and make a difference,’ she says.

Croydon facelift

After two and a half years, Mr Rouse is just getting started. His arrival in the borough that gave the world Kate Moss but not a lot else, forced him to start from scratch. Zeitgeist architect Will Alsop had already been commissioned to produce an overarching vision for Croydon when he arrived. But that needed practical underpinning: a planning framework, five local area plans by different consultancies, a transport strategy and infrastructure plan are all now in place.

Croydon needs an extra 25 to 30 thousand homes over the next 15 to 20 years. Also essential, according to Mr Rouse, is building more family housing. During the past decade, 82 per cent of the homes built in Croydon were one and two bedroom flats. ‘It ain’t gonna cut no mustard,’ is Mr Rouse’s verdict.

Now, at least, some of these homes will be built by the urban regeneration vehicle: the council pledges assets, John Laing raises equity, and they share profit and risk between them. Croydon is pioneering this model will go onsite in spring. The first part of the project - new council offices - is designed to keep things ticking over during the recession. The other four sites assembled so far should be built out by 2017.

Tunbridge Wells, in nearby Kent, has set up a similar model and Mr Rouse says there is interest from other councils. ‘There are two big advantages: we’re not relying on the private sector to make things happen, and we share in some of the uplift, so we can recycle that into other projects,’ he says. Of course, he will have to wait until the economy picks up before he starts seeing that promised uplift.

In the meantime, he is keen to access cash that will let councils build directly. Croydon has completed 32 new homes and has just won funding for 80 more from the HCA. The initial plan was to do this through a housing regeneration company, although that won’t be needed if the housing revenue account is reformed as planned by the government, allowing councils access to cash to develop.

Despite all these plans, Mr Rouse is cautious and refuses even to put a ballpark figure on how many homes the council could build. ‘We don’t know what our optimal output per year is - we’ll test that as we grow.’

Talk turns to whether he misses the wonderful world of social housing. It seems he might do if only he wasn’t having too much fun in his ideal job. He gives full marks to the TSA - not entirely surprising given that its chief executive Peter Marsh used to work for him at the Housing Corporation as director of resources, and they had dinner the other night. ‘I’m really proud of what Peter has done and achieved,’ is his avuncular comment.

He also compliments Sir Bob Kerslake, chief executive of the HCA: ‘I don’t envy Sir Bob but he’s the right man for the job at a difficult time.’ Time for another metaphor: ‘They [the HCA] thought they’d get a few aces, but find they are playing with three twos…’

There is one big caveat. Though, naturally, he doesn’t wish to blame Sir Bob, he worries there’s been insufficient preparation during the recession for the economic uptick when it comes. Mr Rouse sees no equivalent to the Thatcherite urban regeneration corporation of the 1980s or the government-backed city challenge and English partnerships of the following decade.

He frets that when things pick up and developers are looking for large development opportunities that are ready to go, there won’t be any. ‘What I’m worried about is that, given that there are virtually no EP-style partnerships going on now, in terms of acquisition and investment in infrastructure, where are the units going to come from two or three years down the line?’

Warming to his theme, Mr Rouse comes out with an unexpected metaphor. ‘It’s a sausage machine,’ he says. ‘But if you run out of meat, you can’t make any more sausages.’

Butchery aside, housing may not be Mr Rouse’s day job anymore but it clearly still matters to him - and he’s not ashamed to say so. ‘I think I’ve got unfinished business at national level that I’d like to return to,’ he says. ‘I would love to have the opportunity, at some point in the future, to have another go at that sort of thing - housing and regeneration policy at a national level.’ But first he has to solve Croydon’s development problems.

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