星空传媒

Of her time as mayor, she says: "It was good for me to challenge issues to do with age and gender in local government."

Matt Jones, 27, is principal antisocial behaviour officer at arm's-length company New Prospect Housing and has led a crackdown on nuisance in Salford, Greater Manchester.

Jones trained under Manchester council's Bill Pitt as a nuisance response officer before setting up Salford's antisocial behaviour team in 2001. "I'm very proud that I've managed to set up and recruit a successful emerging team from scratch," he says, "having had fairly limited housing experience and no management experience.

"The positive energy from listening to the experiences of people who've had their lives turned around through their bravery and our intervention can't be underestimated."

Chris Benjamin, 31-year-old housing manager at Gloucestershire Housing Association, made his name tackling antisocial behaviour.

He began as a housing officer and was an estates manager for Cheltenham council before starting at Gloucestershire three years ago.

Although only 32, Catriona Simons is finance director of registered social landlord the Peabody Trust. She trained as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young before joining Peabody in 1997 as special projects accountant.

One of her major achievements was raising 拢60m in new loan financing from Nationwide building society last year.

Jon Rouse, 35, is chief executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and champion of high-quality design in public buildings.

A member of the urban taskforce and the man behind its report on construction practices, he has helped make design a top priority in social housing. His influence is reflected in the fact that the government this year launched CABE Space to boost the creation of parks and green areas in towns and cities.

Steve Philpott, 35, is manager of the Birmingham rough sleepers contact and assessment team at Focus Housing. Since arriving at Focus, part of the Prime Focus Regeneration Group, in 1999, Philpott's team has successfully achieved more than a two-thirds reduction in rough sleeping in the city. Philpott started his career managing two homelessness hostels in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Later, he developed guidelines on best practice for resettlement projects for Birmingham City Council.

A senior research officer at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 34-year-old Shane Brownie, managed the huge research study into low-cost homeownership launched at the NHF annual conference last year. He has impressed the housing sector with his work on rent restructuring and was responsible for producing the nine regional daughter documents in the Communities Plan. After that task, the deputy prime minister invited him to dinner to express his thanks, which Brownie says is his proudest achievement to date.

Neil Fergus joined Pinnacle Psg as a graduate trainee six years ago and rose rapidly to contract manager for a Westminster council estate. Next month he takes over as contract director, responsible for all of the borough's estates 鈥� at the age of only 28.

Architects Stuart Piercy, 32 (below right), and Richard Connor, 30 (below left), are the brains behind the "microflat", designed to increase densities in urban areas. It is yet to be built but their other projects such as housing above supermarkets prompted the British Council to describe Piercy Connor as "one of the most conceptually advanced architectural practices of its generation".

Dawn Smart, 32, is an academic turned development high-flyer. Now development head at Southern Housing Group, she began by lecturing in sociology at Glasgow Caledonian University before moving to Scottish Homes.

Development roles at London & Quadrant Housing Trust followed before she moved to Southern in 2001 as development manager for London.

He's the man behind housebuilder Lovell's benchmarking project across eight regions, and has been promoting Lovell Choice, an innovative form of low-cost homeownership. Yet Marcus Keys is just 32.

Presently Lovell's business improvement manager, he is a former housing association maintenance officer and ex-project manager at best-practice body the Housing Forum.

When your father is veteran housing lecturer Albert Toal, you're almost destined to go far. While service development manager in Sunderland council's housing department, Phil Toal, 34, drew up one of the UK's first housing-based domestic violence strategies and, with Northumbria Police, developed antisocial behaviour order procedures that were later used in Home Office guidance. After the council transferred its stock to Sunderland Housing Group, he became policy and research manager at the biggest large-scale voluntary transfer landlord in England. He is an associate consultant for the Northern Housing Consortium and Housing Quality Network. Another man following in his father's footsteps is Elliot Lipton, 34, managing director of new affordable housing firm First Base. The son of CABE chairman Sir Stuart Lipton, Lipton Junior formed First Base in February this year: "We are looking to sell central London one-bed flats at around 拢100,000," he says.

Meg Hillier, 34 is a Labour member of the Greater London Assembly and former chair of its affordable housing scrutiny committee. At 30, she was the youngest mayor of Islington, north London. She now chairs the GLA culture, sport and tourism committee.

Clive Tritton, 34, director of regeneration company Renaisi, put urban renaissance on the agenda in east London. A former adviser to Hackney's City Challenge improvement scheme, in 1994 he was one of the founders of the Thames Gateway Partnership, Europe's largest renewal initiative. At Renaisi he oversees a plethora of schemes in Hackney.  

High performance in housing management from housing services manager Lee Daley, 33, and her team helped ensure RSL Innisfree was chosen as BME partner on flagship London schemes such as those at Arsenal and White City.

Daley worked as a housing officer at various inner-London councils before joining Innisfree four years ago.

Dr Rebecca Tunstall, 34, is tipped to be a future leading light of housing policy research. A lecturer in housing at the London School of Economics, Tunstall is currently on sabbatical at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. After a social science degree and an MA in urban design at Oxford Brookes, she runs the university's MSc/Dip housing course.

Want to know about antisocial behaviour policy? Ask 33-year-old Ruth Lucas, senior project officer for the Local Government Association's housing team and a fast-rising expert on the subject.

After an MSc in politics and administration, Lucas worked as a research assistant in the House of Commons and spent seven years at Redbridge council, where she developed her interest in the social side of housing.

Shared ownership specialist Tower Homes has a clutch of Charter Mark awards, largely because of 35-year-old assistant director (operations) and low-cost homeownership guru Steve Nunn.

After setting up Tower's customer services team in 1993, Nunn rose to become head of homeownership in 2000. He also chairs the South-east Homeownership Group and is secretary of the London Homeownership Group.

Naseem Malik, 35, head of legal services at Knowsley borough council, has made her mark fighting and researching nuisance cases.

After qualifying as a solicitor in 1994, Naseem worked in private practice, specialising in civil and criminal litigation, before going into local government at Blackburn and then Oldham councils. In 1999 she was asked to join the Cabinet Office's social inclusion unit, looking at cases of antisocial behaviour, and took up her role at Knowsley.

James Brown, 35, masterminded the setting-up of a dedicated affordable housing department at property agent FPD Savills earlier this year.

Director of the agent's affordable and student accommodation projects department, Brown is a chartered surveyor and the former head of social housing business at Chesterton.

Berwyn Kinsey, 28, has been regulation manager at the Housing Corporation for the last two years 鈥� not bad for someone who started as a temp at RSL Circle 33 in London in 1997. He rose to head of policy in just four years and is now known for his work on equality and diversity issues.