Question: You've got a new Minister for Housing - what do you think his first priority should be?

Jim Coulter: His first priority is to take stock of the fairly comprehensive range of policies for which he's now responsible, which were developed by Nick Raynsford, and obviously approved by the government as a whole in the policy statement announced last December after a very extensive consultation on the Housing Green Paper published in April last year.

He should look at the priorities for implementation, and I think critically looking not just at the Green Paper but make sure that the connections between what it represents and the other government policy developments - for example on national strategy for neighbourhood renewal, on urban renaissance, and because of the changes in government, other connections through to rural housing, which have now transferred to the department where Margaret Beckett is, and obviously also the construction links, which used to be Nick Raynsford's responsibility have gone to DTI with Brian Wilson. So there are some stock taking jobs to do to make sure the joining up carries on, which were made a bit more complicated by the way in which government structure has changed in those two areas, and of course, how the regional policy elements are more dispersed than they were before.

Question: Has the Whitehall restructure caused any problems for you, do you think?

Jim Coulter: Not at this stage, but I think it's too early. But I think it potentially adds to the complexity of the government succeeding in joining up because it means, effectively, a larger number of people and departments have got to agree about issues that must be done in tandem.

Question: So it's not very joined up government really.

Jim Coulter: Well it's the risk that it might not be. To give you an example of what is very important - the government has an agenda of changing procurement practice following the Egan report, which was about modernising our construction sector in order to make it more effective efficient and to reduce its costs. That's very strongly led by the investment programmes of housing associations who have got targets established through the Housing Corporation about Eganising their procurement processes over the next 3 years. And the risk of detaching that from the old DETR to the reconstructed DTI is that the focus may change because clearly the DTI's focus on construction is much more likely to be broadly based than it is to focus on housing, renovation and regeneration. So some clear risks there, I think.

Question: You've called for 80,000 new affordable homes per year until 2016.That's 1.2 million new affordable homes. Where would they all go, bearing in mind the government is committed to building other new homes as well?

Jim Coulter: One has to get a sense of perspective about these large numbers. That is a rate of building, which would certainly be higher than we've got at the present time - in fact we're at a low point in the cycle of building social affordable housing. It's not, however, even in areas like the south-east or London, a dramatic impact on the green belt. Indeed, arguably, certainly in London, in the capacity studies that have been done in the GLA and the Mayor's office, it's perfectly possibly to fit literally all the affordable new housing and other new housing that's required on existing brownfield land, and in the south-east more generally there is no need, or any reason, why green belt would need to be reclassified. If we talk about densities, which are at the lowest in the south-east by comparison to any other region in the country, if we talk about town additions, if we talk about the growth points and regeneration needs of other weaker areas say in the former Kent coalfields or on the coast, then it's perfectly possible to accommodate the additional housing that would go regionally in each of these areas, without the dramatic impact that some of the nimbyism that one experiences, including from politicians in Parliament as well as at local level, would make you believe.

Question: And it would be £1 bn a year to do this - can you see the government realistically shelling out that kind of money?

Jim Coulter: The government can afford to do so, even by its own public sector borrowing requirement rules and its golden rule about the cycle of investment.

Question: And is Gordon Brown warm to your idea about social affordable housing?

Jim Coulter: It's interesting that if you look at the Labour Party manifesto on which the government was elected, the housing section is not under welfare, it's under economic prosperity. So if one takes that to a logical conclusion, the government in its manifesto, made the connection about having economic successes and sustainability, and a healthy housing market in which affordable housing must play a key part, with provision that will obviously vary in different parts of the country regionally, depending upon demand, affordability, economic growth and so on. And in the same focus of that chapter on prosperity was focus on urban regeneration and on rural provision. So the rhetoric is there in the manifesto. I think the important thing for us with a specific housing connection is to work on the priorities being established for the comprehensive spending review, which were announced only a day or so ago, to make sure that we make the best possible case for the link between economic health, personal opportunity, and the need for a decent home for all, which is the government's stated objective as in the Green Paper I referred to earlier.

Question: There's a great deal of talk about public sector workers in London and the south-east being priced out of the market. What would be your message to the government about offering them affordable housing - is that happening at the moment?

Jim Coulter: There's the Starter Homes initiative, which was announced initially in the Green Paper last year, and on which there was a competitive bidding process, which will produce about 8000 homes in the next year. We have yet to see what the specific bids will produce because the government has yet to announce the details. That's a start, but it's by no means enough because clearly, London in particular, (but it's true of the south and south-east and some parts of the east region), are suffering from the biggest gap between what people on modest incomes, average incomes, not only people on low pay, as it would be classically defined, can actually achieve in the market place, and the need to have public service workers available to meet the other targets that the government has about the quality of education and the quality of health performance. So good start, more to do, I think is the clear message.

Question: How much more?

Jim Coulter: At least twice that sort of level in London and the broader south-east.

Question: How many more houses in London and the south-east then?

Jim Coulter: It would be putting the starter home initiative up to about a 20,000 a year programme over the next 3-5 years - in London and the south-east, I'd say the commuter hinterlands of London.

Question: 20,000 a year for the next 3 years?

Jim Coulter: For the next 3 years, for the next public spending period. Now the resources aren't there to do that, and that's one of the things that we will raising, along with many other suggestions that we have for making sure that existing stock in other parts of the country is put to better use.

Question: How concerned are you about the public perception of many housing estates as ghettos? Does this perception hold true?

Jim Coulter: The working title of my memoirs is "Perception equals reality" so whether it's actually true doesn't matter because the perception is the reality for individuals. I'm personally very concerned, as is the National Housing Federation, about what you may say clicheistically, the reputation of social housing. There are a number of things that we need to get much clearer public understanding about. First, we've had economic and labour market, and I think societal changes, over the last generation of the last 25 to 30 years, which have made tenure and poverty much more closely linked. Social housing has much stronger links with poverty than it did up to, say, the early 1970s. Second, we need to get some more public and political understanding of some of the consequences of that, and in particular, that residualisation or ghetto effect that people describe.

Question: How concerned are you of the concentration of ethnic minorities of some of these housing estates?

Jim Coulter: I think that's a slightly different issue. Let me just come back to the general point - the position about social housing in those terms is that we need to recognise that for the people in those homes, what is most important to them, and the evidence of surveys and research (government research included) shows that they are, generally speaking, happy with the condition and the management of their homes. What they are very unhappy about is the state of the neighbourhood and the broader problems of regeneration in areas linked to unemployment, the impact of low economic success on areas, and potentially additional issues of crime and violence.

Now to come to the specifics of the point about black and minority ethnic communities, which is not an issue directly and necessarily separately about social housing - it's an issue of all tenures - the 70 per cent of black and ethnic minority households live in the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods across the country in whatever the tenure. So I think the issue of concern is not the housing issue directly, but the concentration in areas which are poor. These are communities which are economic and otherwise poor and have a very significant proportion of black and ethnic minority households. Clearly that means our regeneration agendas, economic renewal agendas have got to be brought to bear more actively over the next few years on those areas to create, in the full sense of the phrase, equality of opportunity for all communities.

Question: What's at stake if that doesn't happen - could we see a return to the inner city race riots of the early 80s?

Jim Coulter: Well we've seen a number of outbreaks of violence and rioting, which although clearly the press reporting and police observations show have some connection with activities of the far right in places like Oldham and potentially Burnley, there's also clear evidence that the levels of frustration in black and minority ethnic communities in those areas or in other areas like Leeds and Bradford, are about poverty, desperation and clearly there's a racist dimension to how some provocative actions by some far right groups have produced effects. But nevertheless, impoverished communities ultimately become angry communities and we can't afford to see significant parts of British populations - and they are British populations- detached from mainstream opportunities.

Question: So how do you develop social affordable housing with affluent housing areas and mixed housing communities without overcoming the obstruction of nimbyism?

Jim Coulter: It depends on areas really. The street I live on in North London is a pretty mixed street, there is council housing, some Housing Association housing, family housing that's privately owned, and there are flats with leaseholders, and there's some private rented housing. That's a product of a long-term pattern of settlement. And I think the historic problem for a community to provide a volume of affordable housing that's needed is that we've got estate building that has got too large a scale. So I think what we need to do is to get back to much smaller scale incremental development and redevelopment, so that there's a better fit with different tenures of housing in similar neighbourhoods. And I think the second thing we need to do, for which there's a lot of encouragement for Housing Associations to do, is to make sure that their housing development is of mixed tenure and not single tenure, so that we, as it were, mix up different income groups.