My stepdaughter Louisa Clarke, who has died of cancer aged 42, progressed in a decade from being a temporary receptionist for one of the UK’s smallest social landlords to director of finance for one of the largest, in pursuit of her personal mission to improve accommodation for the poor and vulnerable.
Louisa was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, daughter of Barbara (nee Glover) and Roger Newell, who separated and both remarried when she was small. Lou went to Comberton village college, Cambridgeshire, then Cambridge regional college. She studied philosophy at Essex University, graduating in 1996. The following year Lou obtained temporary work with a small social landlord, Colchester Quaker Housing Association, where she met Simon Clarke, whom she married in 1999. She studied for the Chartered Public Finance Accountant qualification and in 2001 became the association’s finance manager.
In 2004 she moved to Bradford Community Housing Trust. She was promoted to group finance manager in the same year and in 2007 became the director of finance. There she devised a value for money framework that was described by the Audit Commission inspectors as “the best they had ever seen” and which delivered multimillion-pound efficiency savings each year for the benefit of tenants in West Yorkshire.
In 2008 Louisa was named one of 10 “future leaders” in national public finance awards. The following year she was a finalist in the Women of the Future awards, and in 2010 she became finance director of Aldwyck Housing Group, serving Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire.
Lou was appointed finance director of the Lincolnshire housing provider Boston Mayflower in 2012. In a first for the UK social housing sector, she led the refinancing of Boston Mayflower through the bond market to raise low-cost capital for the building and maintaining of homes. In 2015 she became deputy chief executive, and in 2016 started working on the merger of Shoreline Housing and Boston Mayflower to create a more efficient social housing provider for Lincolnshire.
Louisa also served in several pro bono roles, notably with the CIPFA Housing Advisory Network, as a board member of Horton Housing Association, and as chair of the charity Dosh. She made a quiet but important contribution to the affordability of social housing in the UK and to making decent rental homes more accessible for the poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
Lou was a vegan and advocate of animal welfare, and loved word games, World of Warcraft, music and the colour purple. She enjoyed European travel and boating on the Norfolk Broads, and was a licensed radio ham.
She is survived by her husband and parents, and by her step-parents, Gilly and me.
