When Nick Walkley announced last month that he was stepping down as chief executive of Homes England after just four years in post, there was an outpouring of praise on Twitter. Most would be flattered and maybe a bit embarrassed. Walkley, on the other hand, was a little bit annoyed.
“I’ve never really bought into the great leader, person-at-the-top centric view of the way an organisation works,” he says. “So to then step down and find loads of people telling you what a great leader you’ve been and how you’ve made a big change just feels a bit like maybe people have missed the point.
“What I’ve been trying to do is to create an organisation with really great people who are capable of delivering the sort of profound change that the housing sector and the residential sector needs more generally.”
This, of course, is exactly what makes Walkley such a great leader and why he got such an outpouring of love on Twitter.
Ask him what he hopes his legacy will be and he’ll look at you as if you’ve just told him your favourite band is Dire Straits. Ask him about purpose and you’ll get a whole other Walkley. Someone who can’t help but be proud of what Homes England has come to represent. Someone who even can’t help but be just a little bit proud of the role he has had to play in that.
Walkley joined Homes England (then the Homes & Communities Agency) in 2017 from Haringey Council, where he had been chief executive for four years. Prior to Haringey, he was chief executive of Barnet Council. Just a cursory look back at those roles reveals that transformation is something that Walkley leaves in his wake.
Not that he’d let you say that about him, of course. But Homes England has been transformed. And has been transformative. It has delivered houses, created public/private partnerships – successful ones – and has become something of a poster child for what good can look like.
And for Walkley, that success has come because the agency has been focused on doing the right thing, not just doing something because that is what legacy dictates. The number one right thing for Homes England to be doing is enabling delivery of homes. That, says Walkley, is its purpose.
Homes delivery
“We’ve built a lot of houses and that’s the important thing, getting more organisations to build more homes,” he says. “We’re totally obsessed about delivery. We’re in the year-end period at the moment, and there is probably not a person in the organisation – from a policy officer to an economist and analyst – who isn’t doing something that isn’t about cranking that handle.”
Walkley says there is not a single person in Homes England who doesn’t take “raw pleasure” from getting deals done.
“A senior civil servant said to me once, ‘One of your problems as an organisation is that you’re deals junkies’. I just don’t see that as a problem,” says Walkley. “I think it’s fantastic that we’re always trying to get another one over the line. I like that impatience. It is really important.”
Since Walkley took over as chief executive at Homes England, the agency has enabled the delivery of more than 111,000 homes – a figure likely to jump to 150,000 once 2020 figures are included. Not a bad achievement when during that time there have been six housing ministers potentially to meddle with that output.
But while the industry bemoans the constant merry-go-round of housing ministers, Walkley is a little more purposeful in his reflection.
“He won’t mind me saying this,” says Walkley, with a wry smile, “but the current housing minister asked me, ‘What have you learnt, Nick, in your time doing this job?’ To which my immediate response was, ‘There are a lot of housing ministers.’”
But, he adds: “The first thing I’ve learnt – and I would say this to the whole sector – is that the sector needs to be careful not to underestimate the extent to which housing ministers themselves are well aware that they’re the next one in a very long queue. And figuring out how you have an impact and do things and not look a bit daft in the face of this huge sector is really challenging and difficult for them. They’re well aware of that and they also want to make an impact. They don’t just want to be another one on the list.”
Walkley says he has time for all six of the ministers he has served since 2017, whether it was Dominic Raab and his interest in making more public land available, or Esther McVey’s commitment to modernising construction.
For him, those are the ideas that need supporting and that’s why an agency like Homes England has such a huge role to play.
Enduring support
“I remain absolutely convinced that the country needs a stable institution that sees beyond funding cycles or political cycles or even organisational cycles – because, let’s be honest, in my time as chief executive, huge numbers of the well-known figures have been and gone. Somebody and some organisation needs to keep the eyes fixed on those bigger strategic plays,” he says.
“You’re always going to need somebody who’s prepared to put the flag into that stuff and keep moving it forward. In some cases, that’s going to be a combined authority. In other cases, it’s going to be the council. But for the things of real scale, you probably need national-scale backing as well. And that’s where we can add some real, real heft.”
And that is where deals like those Homes England has secured with Japanese modular housing specialist Sekisui and Sweden’s BoKlok come in. Transformational deals that Walkley hopes will lead to others following suit and deliver an increase in the use of modern methods of construction, better design principles and more sustainable homes being delivered.
“I think we’ve got to show that we’re prepared not just to talk, but to put real resource and risk-based judgments behind getting to scale. Sometimes that’s no more than the government badge, or it can be bringing partners together,” he says, adding that the agency was conscious that doing its deal with Sekisui in 2019 was a very public way of showing how serious it was about the future of modular in housing delivery.
The big deals are great at getting people’s attention, says Walkley, but he’s still just as passionate about the quiet deals. The “quiet brokerage” that keeps the existing MMC factories growing, the work the agency does with housing associations and the planners it sends along to developers to help them rework a proposal to deliver more affordable housing. The little purposeful things that enable the delivery.
Walkley is acutely aware it is the small stuff, the local stuff, where the magic often happens. He’s refreshingly humble and wants Homes England to be too.
“Let’s not think that because we care about place, we know place and therefore we can tell people what’s good for them,” he says. “That’s a really dangerous space to get into and something I worry about virtually every day of the week running a big central agency.
“We are just big,” he adds. “That shouldn’t mean overbearing; it should mean supportive. You’ve got to put local people, local politicians and local developers in control.”
People and purpose
And it is that focus on making sure that you are listening to the people who do know that has enabled Homes England to deliver on the other great issue facing the industry today – diversity and inclusion.
The agency is not only working on equality, diversity and inclusion within its ranks (Walkley would love to see a woman take over from him when he leaves at the end of this month), but is calling on its private sector partners to do the same. Potential partners that cannot show commitment to D&I will be excluded from future procurement panels.
“If you don’t grow in a way that reflects who you’re building for and where you’re building, you will get it wrong and you will get it more wrong,” says Walkley, “so I thought it was really, really important that we take our own measured steps but also be really clear that there was a plan behind it.”
For Walkley, this is and should be hard work. “It’s just hard managerial grind,” he says. “The stuff that everybody does for the balance sheet, doing it for this as well, watching the numbers, understanding your decisions, knowing where your talent is. It isn’t a different skill set. This is about really robust leadership and management and using it to your advantage.”
He is confident the hard grind will pay off and is expecting its gender pay gap – currently in the high 20%s – to fall to single digits.
But the biggest pay-off for this purpose-driven deals junkie won’t be those figures. It is in the voices that have been amplified as part of the process. It is in the new leaders who, he says, have been uncovered within the business because of its approach to D&I, because of its focus on purpose.
Walkley is so proud of the people in Homes England that he wants them all to leave.
“I want people to leave Homes England because I want them to go and work elsewhere and spread a little bit of what we think elsewhere in the sector,” he says.
So is that why Walkley is leaving after such a short stint in the role?
Aside from the offer of helping his local record shop with its online deliveries (have a scroll through those outpourings on Walkley’s Twitter feed), Walkley says he is leaving because he wants to do something more. He just doesn’t know what or where yet.
“The great privilege has been to lead an organisation with purpose,” he says. “When you’re inside one, it’s really energising and exciting and fulfilling. And what I’m really interested in next is finding that purpose. I care passionately, as I think people know, about social aspiration, social mobility. I worry profoundly about access to housing, about the status and structure of the property market, and I’m really interested in what that means and how I might be able to have more impact in that space.”
It’s a sign-off that makes it hard not to understand why Walkley’s goodbye Homes England tweet last month got so many shocked and saddened and “big shoes to fill” responses. Whether he likes to admit it or not, it is passion and purpose coupled with an obsession to deliver that make a leader great – and him a great leader.
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