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"I felt both discomfort and fascination," she says. "Here were these kids stoning the coach 鈥� which is what I'd have done if a coachload of academics had turned up to my home 鈥� and I realised how housing affected life choices. It made me change from a potential career in academia to housing, something more practical."

A brush with antisocial behaviour is an unusual way to be bitten by the housing bug 鈥� most of her peers, she remarks with a hint of embarrassment, would cite Hulme in Manchester, the Gorbals in Glasgow or the inner city in which they grew up as their inspiration 鈥� but Webb, ex-head of the community housing taskforce and policy director of the Chartered Institute of Housing since last year, is an unusual woman.

She is known for ignoring the rulebook that says policymakers are long on rhetoric and short on real life. Her preference, she says, is for external outcomes over internal politics and direct statements in layman's terms over abstract concepts and technical jargon. "Officers should ask themselves 'did you do anything today for Mrs X paying her rent for her damp multistorey flat' rather than concentrate on the internal bureaucracy of an organisation," she says. The CIH job appealed in part because it would give her "the freedom to say the things that I believe 鈥� not to say that I didn't mean everything I said at the community housing taskforce, but obviously there were constraints".

Her oft-stated commitment to action over words has meant that her appointment has been greeted with high hopes from the sector. Ask Webb's peers to tell you about her, and they invariably cite this ability to concentrate on action rather than ideas alone. Graham Farrant, chief executive of Barking and Dagenham council and Birmingham's director of housing when Webb was head of strategy for three years before she joined the taskforce, says, "she puts theory into practice".

But how is she finding her new job? "Enjoyable and scary in equal measures, but I wouldn't have made the right decision if I wasn't anxious about the task." And it isn't just the arrangement of the institute's rhetorical furniture she's unhappy with; upon arrival at the CIH's Coventry headquarters, she was irritated by the fact that the office she has taken over from her predecessor John Perry doesn't have a round table, just a desk that forces her to sit, interrogation style, opposite her visitors 鈥� not nearly informal enough. However, the seating arrangements have yet to be changed.

Birmingham taught me to remember that if something really, really doesn鈥檛 feel right, then maybe it鈥檚 because it isn鈥檛 right

Doesn't her previous role at an Office of the Deputy Prime Minister taskforce mean that she's something of a poacher turned gamekeeper? Webb is evidently keen to distance herself from her alma mater: her first move as policy director was to lobby the ODPM for more cash for regional housing forums (HT 25 April, page 12). Keeping on the regional note, the CIH policy team is being restructured to ensure it can lobby the regional housing boards.

For someone who favours substance over style, she still has plenty to say on the subject of the institute's image. "I hope we can make the institute seem relevant to more people," she says. "Why would you join? Because you know they have a seat at the table of influencing policy and getting things changed, and that would not be true for everybody now, but that's the challenge."

Regeneration is another area where she feels tempted to stray from the CIH's traditional remit. "Generally the housing profession is less bricks and mortar X X focused. We are still the Chartered Institute of Housing, not the Chartered Institute of Housing and Sustainable Communities, yet without abandoning the practical policy, stuff about housing management, there must be equal good practice stuff that's about the regeneration arm."

Webb's achievement are all the more impressive as, at the same time, she has avoided being "defined by" the debilitating medical condition from which she suffers. At the age of 37, while working on the future of Birmingham's council housing, Webb was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradicalneuropathy, a rare and incurable condition where the nerves in the arms and legs become inflamed and stop working, leading to weakness and sometimes paralysis in the limbs. "The messages from my brain to my arms and legs get scrambled halfway down," explains Webb with typical pragmatism. She was hit, she recalls, "totally out of the blue" and within a fortnight could no longer walk. She was admitted to hospital for tests and emerged a few months later in a wheelchair; even now, she walks with crutches.

Just getting on with it
Farrant recalls that Webb kept working even in hospital, often holding meetings from her bed or while hooked up to an intravenous drip. "Where other people would have grapes and fruit, Sarah had an in-tray and laptop," he says. But this was simply necessity, says Webb. "People say 'weren't you scared?' but I just got on with it. You have to, don't you? You don't know you've got two to three years of being ill ahead of you, you think it's a temporary thing."

Illness, she says, has made her more aware of disability access issues. "I was invited to speak at a conference recently, but I wasn't able to get onto the platform. Before this, I didn't think about these things. I'd park my car next to lowered kerbs, for example; but if you're in a wheelchair that's the only way you've got to get across the road."

But Webb, a self-confessed "glass half full" person, says that although the illness has curbed her spontaneity ("It's a bit hard to go abroad for the weekend at the last minute, or suddenly decide to go out to lunch 鈥� how do I get there? How can I cope with the stairs?") it has also forced her to be more organised 鈥� an essential quality for a key member of the team putting together Birmingham's problematic transfer policy. Although the no-vote came after Webb had left the project in 2001 to join the community housing taskforce, in hindsight, she admits that she suspected full transfer wouldn't work. "Central government had this policy, and said to local government 'we want you to deliver on this policy', to which local government said 'we're not sure it fits local circumstances'. We knew in our heart of hearts in Birmingham that a single-solution approach probably wasn't ideal, we wanted different for different parts of stock. I will try and remember that lesson: if it really, really doesn't feel right, then maybe it's because it isn't right."

Webb used this lesson in her job at the taskforce advising councils up and down the country on options for their housing stock (in just her first six months, she travelled 22,000 miles). Mike Gahagan, former head of housing at the ODPM and now chair of the South Yorkshire market renewal pathfinder, says: "She fought hard to ensure the taskforce had a voice within the department. They're even mentioned in the Communities Plan, which is down to Sarah." While some would baulk at the constraints of the civil service, Webb says that at the ODPM she enjoyed "the discipline of trying to use your influencing role in a narrow, defined field, having to engage people while following the corporate line".