Section 57 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2010 (the Act) gives the Scottish Housing Regulator the power to appoint a manager to ensure that a social landlord provides housing services to an appropriate standard.
Section 58 of the Act gives the Scottish Housing Regulator the power to appoint a manager to ensure that the financial or other affairs of a Registered Social Landlord are managed to an appropriate standard.
We have updated our list of people whom we judge have the necessary expertise to be appointed under the Act.
We will only make statutory appointments where we judge that this is required to safeguard the interests of tenants and/or service users.
Our document 'How we use our statutory powers' gives further information about our powers to appoint statutory managers and how we will use the list.
We carried out an open selection process for the statutory manager list. We advertised for applicants and then assessed each application against a defined list of experience, skills and knowledge required for such appointments. You can see the experience, skills and knowledge we asked applicants to demonstrate in the application pack.
The list helps us to be open and transparent about the people we will select and helps control costs for landlords who pay for the statutory manager. The list also gives us a way to quickly access people with the right skills, experience and knowledge when we need to.
The following are on the statutory manager list:
Wendy McCracken
Wendy has held senior management roles in finance and corporate services, since the mid-1990s and has a passion for social housing.
In 2016, following a two-year interim CEO role, she set up her own company which specialises in the provision of governance and compliance services to RSLs.
Since then, Wendy has held several interim senior officer posts. She has assisted governing bodies to meet their statutory and regulatory requirements and to make decisions, sometimes difficult ones, with the best interests of tenants at heart. She held the post of interim manager at Homes for Life Housing Partnership while they went through a strategic options appraisal to the recruitment of a permanent CEO. Prior to that, Wendy was the interim manager at Kendoon Housing Association which, following a strategic options appraisal exercise, transferred to a local RSL.
Wendy has carried out a number of investigations providing action plans to assist governing bodies to recover from the challenges faced.
Wendy’s experience of being a voluntary board member, a statutory board appointee, a staff member, a senior officer and at one time a tenant means that she can see the full picture when carrying out any of her senior manager or governing body roles.
Paul Rydquist
Paul spent most of his working life as the Chief Officer of Threshold Housing Association based in South-West London, joining an initially fledgling association, and leading its growth and development into a substantial and diverse housing association group with 7,000 homes, and some 400 staff.
For the past 17 years he has been working as an independent housing consultant, almost exclusively in Scotland. He has applied the lessons he learned at Threshold to help stabilise and restore housing associations with significant governance and leadership concerns to a position of strength and full compliance with regulatory requirements, once again fit for their future purpose. Up until 2014 this was usually undertaken as the Interim Chief Officer of the association concerned, but since 2015 this has been primarily as Statutory Manager appointed by the Scottish Housing Regulator.
As well as the Chief Officer role, he has extensive experience as a governing body member, including housing associations, elected membership of the National Council of the National Housing Federation, Chair of the L8 housing association peer group, and Vice-Chair of People for Action, a national organisation promoting the “community investment” role for housing associations. He championed this role within Threshold, and particularly enjoys working with Scottish associations who embody the same values.
Susan Philpott
Susan has worked within the social housing sector for 40 years, of which, over 30 have been at an executive level. This has included permanent, interim and consultancy roles with housing associations, housing charities and local authorities, the Audit Commission, the Local Government Ombudsman, and the Housing Ombudsman. She was appointed as a Statutory Manager for the Scottish Housing Regulator between 2017 and 2019.
Susan has been a trustee of Coventry and Warwickshire Mind; a member of Coventry and Warwickshire Palliative Care Planning Team; a board member of both Rockingham Forest Housing Association and a national trade body, the Confederation of Co-operative Housing; and Chair of the London Federation of Housing Co-operatives.
Her passion is community-based housing. She has worked with mainstream and specialist landlords and resident bodies, including those within minority ethnic communities, to ensure that the residents’ needs are central to service development and delivery. This has included the development and delivery of training programmes for residents to enable them to actively participate in resident empowerment opportunities such as customer service design and delivery panels, mystery shopping and the taking up housing association board positions.
Mags Lightbody
Mags is a highly experienced executive in the social housing sector having enjoyed particular success in the areas of crisis and change management.
Until 2013, she was an executive director with Glasgow Housing Association (GHA), then the Wheatley Group, the largest housing organisation in Scotland. During her time there, she led the successful change management programmes which turned around the fortunes of GHA, the founding member of the Wheatley Group.
Subsequently, Mags was Acting Chief Executive of the 90,000 home Northern Ireland Housing Executive for two years, leading the successful turnaround of the organisation.
Since 2015, Mags has led her own consultancy business, providing interim lead officer/ statutory manager services, executive coaching, and other strategic support with transformational change to a wide range of social housing and health sector clients.
She is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Housing and holds a Masters in Business Administration (MBA).
Lawrie West
For 44 years, Lawrie has worked in social housing development, maintenance, management, governance, compliance and change management – in Dundee, London, Stirling, Perth, West Dunbartonshire, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dumfries. He has worked in housing associations since 1997 and has spent seven years as Lead Officer in constitutional partnerships, group structures and merger activity from 2009. Since retiring from Caledonia Housing Association in 2016, Lawrie has been self-employed in chief officer or senior fixed-term interim positions.
Lawrie was an office bearer for a homelessness charity in Fife for seven years from May 2010. He has been a statutory appointee of the Scottish Housing Regulator and co-optee on boards of housing associations in Kirkintilloch, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Lawrie is currently a Board member of Kingdom Initiatives, a non-charitable subsidiary of Kingdom Housing Association in Glenrothes; and of Calvay Housing Association in Glasgow.
Lawrie lives in Dunfermline and is married with two adult children. His interests include studying for a second degree, walking, football, travelling, earth sciences, current affairs and politics, cinema, roots and world music, symphonies and choral music.
John Mulholland
John Mulholland is a well-known and experienced housing professional. He has worked in social housing for more than 40 years with over 30 years of these years as Director and senior officer. In most of these posts John has worked closely with voluntary board members in community based RSLs.
Initially starting his career with Glasgow City Council Housing Department, he then moved to the RSL sector at Clydebank HA ultimately becoming Director of Garrion and Forgewood Housing Cooperatives. While employed with the Cooperatives he developed successful community-based organisations which attracted significant external investment to secure their roles as community anchors. Over the years he also has provided interim Director services to many RSLS including West Lothian Housing Partnership, Bellsmyre Housing Association, Copperworks Housing Association, Cadder Housing Association and Charing Cross Housing Association.
John has skills and experience across all areas of housing but in particular in relation to asset management, development and investment and commercial awareness. John has had three successful appointments as Statutory Manager at Kincardine Housing Cooperative, Antonine Housing Association and Thistle Housing Association. John is currently working with a number of RSLs on asset, development, and assurance and governance projects.
Jitinder Takhar
Jitinder has enjoyed a career spanning more than 30 years in the social housing sector. As the CEO at Local Space, she led the governance review successfully taking the organisation through the inspection regime to receive the highest regulatory ratings. As Homes for Lambeth’s CEO, Jitinder ensured that the newly created organisation was supported with a robust structure to meet its challenging targets as a newly created organisation.
Throughout her career Jitinder has been recruited to many non-executive positions and provides the required balance of support and challenge to executive teams. In 2004 she was selected to be a statutory appointee bringing her skills and experience to help lead an organisation out of regulatory supervision. She is currently a Trustee of the charity, Leadership 2025, serves on the board of a for-profit registered provider and has been recruited to the Housing Improvement Board at Croydon Council in its mission to meet new regulatory, legal and compliance standards for the borough’s housing stock. With a passion for housing and a commitment to supporting the sector to be as inclusive as possible, Jitinder has shaped teams and worked with boards to achieve the highest standards of customer service.
Jill Cronin
Jill is an experienced housing professional with a wide knowledge of the housing sector across RSLs, Local Government and the Private Rented Sector.
She worked in Local Government for over 28 years, 23 years in a senior management position covering operational management of frontline services; strategy / business planning; and partnership development. Her experience, whilst largely housing related, also spans Planning, Economic Development, Sport and Culture and Community Development. She served for a number of years on the Board of the Chartered Institute of Housing in Scotland and is an experienced RSL Board Member.
Since leaving Local Government in 2018, Jill has been providing interim services to Scottish housing associations as well as conducting occasional housing research projects in partnership with Newhaven Research Ltd. Jill is passionate about supporting associations to always do the best for their tenants through good governance, value for money and improving customer service.
Please note that the biographies have been provided by those on the Statutory Manager List.
The list of potential statutory managers will be in place for three years, and we will keep the list under review.