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His favourites are shoot-'em-ups and strategy games, supplied by his student son – a fellow gaming "addict". But, frustratingly, he declines to say who's in his mind's eye when the joystick is in his hands. And although the conversation throws up plenty of possible targets – the new housing inspection system, the stock transfer impasse or amateur-hour board members – Ashby never scores any direct hits.

The computer games, it is obvious, are doing a good job at channelling his latent aggression. Face-to-face, Ashby comes across as a consummate consultant, preferring mediation to confrontation and expressing his opinion in tones measured not to give offence. But it's those qualities that have marked him out as the sector's most able interim manager, one who has represented the Housing Corporation in the supervision of more than 50 housing associations.

Using a "company doctor" analogy, Ashby describes taking a case history of housing associations weakened by infighting or financial stress, making a diagnosis, and coming up with a treatment plan. "In most cases, what really matters is what you do in the first few days. You have to take a grip of the situation." His successes include the social housing sector's most spectacular near-miss, when West Hampstead Housing Association teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in a 48-hour crisis in the run-up to Christmas in 2000.

But Ashby's talents are in finance as well as first aid. He has taken the business he co-founded to a Stock Exchange listing, and devised innovative ways of injecting funds into RSLs. Recently, he has championed and set up five borrowing "clubs", where housing associations pool their assets to achieve better terms from the banks. In the past three years, the firm's specialist treasury team has been involved in raising over £2bn of loans for clients. "We should be on a percentage, but we're not brokers!" he jokes.

Ashby was part of an intake of idealists who joined the sector around the time that the 1974 Housing Act introduced the social housing grant and housing associations entered a period of dramatic expansion. "I did all the things one does in the 1970s, I lived in a squat and I came to housing after 'dropping out' of the City," he says. After a two-week conversion course run by the Federation of Housing Associations, he was talent-spotted by Circle 33, which took him on as development manager.

There, he met Derek Joseph, who was destined later to be co-director of Hacas. The Housing Corporation asked the pair to take on their first troubleshooting role in the late 1970s. Four years later, the pair set up Hacas under the umbrella of the Housing Corporation and National Housing Federation, and launched it as a stand-alone private company in the 1980s.

Ashby spends 75% of his time on fee-earning consulting work rather than glad-handing clients or tinkering with internal issues. "Everyone has a fee target and directors aren't exempt. It's part of the culture of the organisation. We could grow faster with a marketing director, but it wouldn't be appropriate to the sector." Having Circle 33 down the corridor from the consultant's brown-carpeted and yucca plant-bedecked offices also means it's unlikely to forget its roots.

But even if marketing directors are thought a bit too brash, Ashby is still ambitious for growth. By listing the company on the Alternative Investment Market in 1998, Hacas turned notional value into shares, and shares into the means to buy Chapman Hendy a year later. Any more acquisitions in the pipeline? Ashby says the firm has "had discussions with a number of organisations, but we can't yet make an announcement".

The listing also allowed the firm to give staff their own financial stakes in the business, while the merger positioned it to bid for larger government research contracts. These include looking at the impact of rent restructuring, and forecasting the long-term asset management costs of the country's entire social housing stock.

At the moment, the project on Ashby's desk is drafting Housing Corporation guidance on the question of pay for RSL board members. It's clear he's wrestling with a moral conundrum: how to stay true to the public-service ideals of the housing movement while giving it some stiffer governance backbone. "Part of me is uncomfortable with the idea, but how else do you persuade [board members] to accept training and appraisal, and not stay indefinitely? A more rigorous system is beneficial as a package with payment."

Discussing stock transfers, Ashby is in a similar cleft stick, and acknowledges that the financial logic of structuring deals in large packages is often at odds with tenants' need to have input into the process. After acting for both local authorities and as a special tenant adviser on stock transfers of fewer than 2000 properties, he says: "I worked on transfers where I knew all the estates, and many of the residents. In Birmingham, it was impossible to have that rapport with people whose lives are being affected."

Despite his gaming skills, Ashby clearly prefers looking at policies from the middle ground rather than zapping them down in flames. The nearest he comes to squarely hitting the target is in reservations about the government's haste in appointing the Audit Commission as housing inspector. "The need for primary legislation will make the timetable uncertain," he says. "My anxiety would be that the corporation inspectorate may lose some good people if they are put through a period of uncertainty, coupled with the implication that they weren't the preferred inspection route."

Surprisingly, one computer game Ashby doesn't play is Sim City, where the object is to create a successfully functioning society. Perhaps it's because the subject matter is too close to his 1970s idealist's heart. Talking of the Islington primary school where his wife is a special needs teacher, he says regretfully that "20% will probably leave primary school unable to read or write – what life chances do they have? Tackling inequality is a minimum of three generations. At the moment, we're just scratching the surface."