The big Housing Day interview: Kit Malthouse is grilled by Leslie Channon

So what emerged from the interview and just how open did Mr Malthouse prove to be?

We’ll start with the tenant voice, given that is the broad theme of housing day, and also a bit of a grey area when it comes to the government’s plans.

As a reminder, the green paper acknowledged that a number of tenant and resident organisations were keen on “an independent platform for tenants”. It then asked “is there a need for strong representation for residents at a national level” and “if so, how should this best be achieved?”. (Consultation on the green paper runs until 6 November for anyone who wants to guide the government’s thinking in this area).

Ms Channon asks directly what Mr Malthouse’s personal feelings are about the idea. He starts by outlining some of the key questions he feels any national voice would need to address, such as “how do you cover the whole country?” and “how does everybody feel that it is theirs without having some massive bureaucracy of elections and all the rest of it?”. He doesn’t sound keen on an elected body – which is certainly what some tenants have been calling for – stating “if it is elections, people run on tickets and it all gets a bit bureaucratic and difficult”.

What the government wants from a tenants’ voice is “something that is raw and real” he states. “Real time” feedback on issues is important, he adds. The government is open to ideas about whether there should be a national or regional structure, he says, pondering whether an annual conference – along the lines of the annual party conferences – might work, but repeats time and again that “I don’t know – I’m open to ideas”.

“What do you think?” he asks Ms Channon. Ms Channon responds that “what I think is kind of irrelevant” because she doesn’t represent the feelings of the body of tenants nationally.

“It became clear after the awful Grenfell tragedy that quite a lot of people in social housing didn’t feel that they were being listened to,” the minister states

But she says that what the Voice for Tenants group wants is backing from government that would enable a feasibility study to be carried out “to temperature check the eight million people in social housing and ask them ‘what do you want?’ and come back with some kind of idea of how that is going to be set up”.

The most important thing about any process must be to consult widely, she adds.

One of the first questions Ms Channon asks on the day is just why the voice of social housing tenants is important to the government.

“It became clear after the awful Grenfell tragedy that quite a lot of people in social housing didn’t feel that they were being listened to,” the minister states. “That either they were screaming into the void and not being responded to, or that politicians over the last couple of decades have stopped caring.”

Mr Malthouse is candid that this is an issue for government to look at itself about, too.

“It’s very important,” he states. “You know, most constituency MPs, the good ones, try and maintain a constant conversation with their constituents. You do that through letters and emails and surgeries and all the rest of it. It’s very important that you are responsive to and sensitive to your constituency.

“But collectively, maybe government had stopped doing that with particular constituencies, one of which – a huge one with four point something million homes – was social housing tenants. They felt that and certainly now we felt that and hopefully we are correcting it.”

If government is looking to change, Ms Channon wants to know what the plan is for those landlords who are “barely complying with the [English regulator’s] tenant involvement and empowerment standard”.

Mr Malthouse says that a theme that has emerged from some of his meetings with tenants so far is a feeling that “they were being excluded at the highest level”. “They felt as if particular boards were hiving them off into sub-committees”, or that tenant participation was an “afterthought, tick-the-box thing”, he adds, although he says he doesn’t think this is necessarily the case for most landlords.

It’s very important that you are responsive to and sensitive to your constituency.

But collectively, maybe government had stopped doing that with particular constituencies, one of which was social housing tenants.

There is however, a “democratic challenge” for social landlords to address about how tenants are selected to sit on boards or senior governance positions, he feels (a common complaint from some residents is that tenant positions on boards and committees are often unelected – meaning that even when there are resident board members, many other tenants can be left feeling disenfranchised and powerless).

More widely for social landlords, one of the key questions the government is asking is “how do we swing the pendulum a bit towards the consumer-facing regulations so that they sharpen up their act” when it comes to responding to tenant complaints, he adds.

This is a topic that Mr Malthouse returns to again a little later when Ms Channon raises the issue of welfare reform – one of the top three issues in those tenant meetings with government in the run up to the green paper, she states. “Will your department be encouraging others within government to look again at how tenants are treated?” she asks. They’re speaking just hours before former prime minister Gordon Brown wades into the debate too, calling on government to abandon the roll-out of the “cruel and vindictive” Universal Credit.