Introducing shadow housing minister Melanie Onn

“Absolutely love it, my favourite publication – read it every week, have done since I was a teenager,” she says.

“Oh, er – wow, well… really?”

“Joking.”

In fact, at this stage Ms Onn may be as unfamiliar to this magazine’s readers as she is with the title itself. After all, she has only been an MP for around two years, and shadow housing minister for a matter of months.

Ms Onn was brought into Labour’s housing team in July, having been first elected as MP for Grimsby in May 2015. Along with Rochdale MP Tony Lloyd, she is one of two shadow housing ministers serving under shadow secretary of state for housing John Healey.

"Roughly speaking,Ms Onn is the opposite number of housing minister Alok Sharma"

Together, they form Labour’s shadow Department for Housing which, confusingly enough, is a shadow of a department that does not exist: housing responsibility for the government rests in the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Roughly speaking though, Ms Onn is the opposite number of housing minister Alok Sharma.

The Parliamentary Labour Party remains a strange factional collection of politicians. Ms Onn appears not to be a firm member of the Corbynistas – indeed, she was one of the many frontbenchers who quit last summer in protest at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

Ms Onn was better prepared than most when she joined Mr Healey’s team

She has since accepted the offer to return to his team, but puts this down to her new boss – Mr Healey, who she has “a huge amount of admiration for” – and adds that her party has “come a long way” since the mass resignations.

Ms Onn was better prepared than most when she joined Mr Healey’s team – especially for such a new MP. For one thing, she had sat on the Communities and Local Government Committee of MPs – responsible for scrutinising housing policy – for eight months up until the snap election.

But what lies at the heart of her political drive to improve housing is more personal: as a teenager, Ms Onn herself was faced with homelessness. At 17 years old, after a falling out with an aunt she was living with at the time, she was forced to turn to local youth homelessness charity Doorstep for accommodation.

“It just makes things so much more challenging, not having anywhere to keep your stuff. You don’t feel at all secure, and that is not a nice position to be in,” she remembers. “In some ways it wasn’t as bad for me. I was young, so quite adaptable. I didn’t have any family to worry about. So it’s not like I was a family with children having to move around and deal with that.”

And she adds that she was relatively lucky not to have been affected by other issues at the time – mental illness or substance abuse, for example – not to mention the availability of housing benefit, which is now much more difficult for under-21s to claim through the Universal Credit system.

“It could have been a very, very different life,” she reflects.

Unsurprisingly, this experience drives her. She cites battling homelessness as her key priority in the shadow housing portfolio.

“The danger is, as with other fires in tower blocks, [Grenfell] will be forgotten quite quickly.”

“Government ministers must also see it, they must see it,” says Ms Onn. “They cannot possibly walk into work or drive round London in their ministerial cars and miss the number of people who are rough sleeping on our streets. And I think in 2017 that’s a pretty shameful position to be in.”

She thinks the government is still not doing enough on this, despite its rhetoric. She argues that recently announced funding allocations for local authorities to implement the Homelessness Reduction Act will not be “at all” sufficient – and wouldn’t be even if the £72.7m pot were doubled.

The conversation turns to discussion of Labour’s own policies. Our meeting follows a flurry of housing announcements at the party’s conference in September, including rent rise controls for the private rented sector and compulsory resident ballots on regeneration schemes. Ms Onn rejects the idea that this is a radical agenda – as Mr Corbyn’s policies are often portrayed.

“I wouldn’t say that any of this is radical, actually, at all. I’d say it’s really sensible and meeting the needs of the people that are in housing difficulties that we are seeing across the country,” Ms Onn says.

“And those different issues really need to be addressed and to be solved quickly, and that isn’t happening, and I think over the election we saw lots of people for [whom] housing was a big issue voting Labour because they liked what Labour was saying in its housing manifesto.”

On some of the specifics, she is a little hazier. For instance, when asked about the purpose of the Labour social housing review, unveiled during Mr Corbyn’s leader’s speech at the conference, she responds with nervous laughter: “I’ve got no idea.”

Recovering slightly, she adds that she hopes it results in a “very clear direction of policy steps that are workable and achievable”, but admits she’s “not sure” about how it might differ from the government’s Social Housing Green Paper, announced by communities secretary Sajid Javid just a few weeks earlier.

You can perhaps forgive Ms Onn somewhat for her lack of certainty over the review’s remit; her role in the housing team mainly focuses on – in addition to homelessness – private renting, sheltered housing and homeownership, as opposed to social housing.

“The danger is that as with other devastating fires that have happened in tower blocks, Grenfell will be forgotten quite quickly if action is not taken"

But one area of social housing policy is fire safety, in the aftermath of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire.

“The danger is that as with other devastating fires that have happened in tower blocks, it will be forgotten quite quickly if action is not taken,” she says. “And I think that it should not be allowed to be forgotten at all.”

But she claims the government is attempting to do just that – “dragging it into the long grass and hoping that people’s memories will fade of just how serious that incident was, particularly around how the tenants felt very marginalised”.

“I think it’s a real lack of clear direction and a real lack of understanding,” she adds.

“And so ministers may well have got a bit teary at the despatch box, but now when… local authorities apply to the government [for help funding fire safety measures] and the government says ‘no, sorry that is not something that we’re prepared to fund’, I can’t help but look back on that statement when the minister was seemingly very distressed by his experience meeting the families at Grenfell and think it was all for nothing.”

She adds that there needs to be “a shift in how we treat people” living in tower blocks – and that not doing so is “storing up problems for the future”.

The time ticks round to half past 10, and the interview is over, with Ms Onn needed elsewhere. Off to thumb through the latest issue of Inside Housing, no doubt.