Nick Raynsford's getting tough on housing and tough on the providers of housing. The local government minister tells Saba Salman why it's time for councils to shape up – or suffer the consequences
As the keys to City Hall – the new home for the Greater London Authority – were handed over to mayor Ken Livingstone at the end of last month, across town in a corner of Westminster a contented smile was unfolding on the face of the minister for local government and the regions.

Amid all the attention focused on the central London building and its occupants, which make up the youngest local authority in the country, it is easy to forget that without Nick Raynsford, the GLA might never have been born at all.

In 1999, when he was minister for London, he spent night after painstaking night in the Commons, driving through the cumbersome legislation needed to create a government body. He also commissioned City Hall, into which the GLA will move on 15 July. It will be formally opened by the Queen a week later.

Sitting on the sofa in his office at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on a hot June morning, Raynsford exudes a quiet competence. Since he started his ministerial career in 1997, the housing campaigner turned local councillor turned MP has been a reassuring element of continuity in a department subject to seemingly incessant change. He has been there from its days as the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, through its brief spell as the Department for Transport, Local Government and the regions to its most recent reincarnation as the ODPM.

While his more exuberant colleagues have been in and out of the headlines, often for the wrong reasons, Raynsford has remained shy of the limelight, a man who makes getting the job done his priority.

Freedoms and performance
He took up the post of local government minister little more than a year ago and is on a drive to raise standards.

He says: "The biggest issue is how we carry through a programme that gives greater freedom and flexibility to local government to raise service delivery.

"The regional white paper [which proposed the establishment of regional assemblies as another tier of local government] and the draft Local Government Bill [which includes proposals to allow high-performing councils to borrow more money for major projects such as new buildings] are all about giving greater freedom of opportunity to do well, while ensuring that performance is monitored."

His use of the word "performance" is telling. Like the draft local government bill, it puts paid to hopes that the government might extend borrowing powers to underperforming councils, as previously hinted by ex-secretary of state Stephen Byers.

"Our general approach," says Raynsford, "is that, yes, there should be some additional freedoms for all authorities, but this must relate to performance. There will be many more freedoms for high performers."

There are many in the housing sector who expect this approach to make it difficult for some authorities to reach the 2010 decent homes target. Raynsford disagrees. It is still achievable through the use of "more flexible" approaches to transfer, such as arm's-length management companies, he says.

There will be many more freedoms for high performers

The corporation's future
The housing lobby also fears the creation of regional assemblies will diminish the role of the Housing Corporation. Not so, says Raynsford: "One important thing we suggest in the regional government white paper is that in regions that choose to elect an assembly, there should be a unified framework for capital allocations for housing, which would be determined by the regional assembly.

"This would pull together the Housing Corporation, the corporation's approved development programme and the government office programmes for local authorities."

The proposed assemblies would oversee the country's eight regional development agencies, which exist to regenerate areas and improve economic performance. This will help bridge the North-South economic divide, Raynsford believes. "If we can improve the economic performance of regions that are falling behind, that will help stem problems of dereliction and help to ensure that economic development is evenly developed around the UK.

"We must ensure that policies do respond to the different needs of different regions. We will need more housing in the South-east, whereas in the North it is much more about tackling problems of low demand and market failure. You have to have policies that are appropriate to each."

Planning gain and tariffs
On the related issue of stiff new affordable housing targets on new developments, Raynsford gives short shrift to developers' complaints that planning gain is too high. "I think it is right, realistic and important, not just as a route to get affordable housing but to gain balanced and mixed communities."

But it is crucial that local authorities learn to be more sophisticated in their dealings with developers when setting targets, he says. "In my time as housing minister I made it clear that developers would have an obligation to produce affordable housing, but this has to be realistic. Local government can't just operate on a flat-rate figure for planning gain because some sites will generate greater profit and therefore provide more scope for affordable homes than others.

"Local authorities have got to be better negotiators and, above all, local planning and housing officers must work together. In some cases, planners have no idea of what housing officers want."

Replacement of the planning gain system with tariffs paid by developers for councils to spend as they wish is not under his remit. But he is happy to give his opinion in the wake of the suggestion by Genie Turton, director general of housing, homelessness, urban policy and planning, that the tariff idea would be scrapped if it failed to win enough support. He says: "Planning tariffs are one of the options, a system that gives greater certainty. The difficulty is that you cannot easily accommodate the capacity of different sites to yield more affordable housing. A degree of negotiation is almost inevitable."

  According to Raynsford, there's a model mixed development in his own constituency – the Greenwich Millennium Village. "It's the transformation of a derelict industrial wasteland into a marvellous new mixed development with houses for sale or rent, all planned in a very attractive way with a central ecology park. This is what we should be doing everywhere. But it will not happen unless developers are required to make a contribution to social housing."

It is, he adds, far too early to comment on claims that development on the Greenwich site might be under threat from the affordable housing targets of 50% in Ken Livingstone's London plan. "I have said that the trick has to be to maximise affordable housing but in a way that does not set an impossible target," says Raynsford. "I do not want to see entire sites left undeveloped just because developers are reluctant to act."

Planners have no idea of what housing officers want

Making rents rational
Raynsford's measures on rent restructuring have been called chaotic and confusing. But he is unrepentant.

"It is absolutely right, because the rent structure was chaotic. It sent out all sorts of perverse messages: imagine the sheer anger of a family in three-bed accommodation offered a move into smaller property but told it would cost them more. It is fundamental to a properly functioning social housing sector where there is a rational relationship between rent and property."

Behaviour and benefits
Although his brief is local government, Raynsford's history in housing means he also keeps a close eye on issues that do not specifically fall into his portfolio. These include his colleague Frank Field's bill suggesting that housing benefit be withdrawn from antisocial tenants. It's a controversial law. Is he for or against?

"Antisocial behaviour causes absolute misery to whole communities," he says. "We've got to be clear about dealing with people who intimidate neighbours, who allow their children to trash the neighbourhood, who make everybody else's life an utter misery.

"While we have done certain things such as introducing antisocial behaviour orders, I still think it causes huge irritation to neighbours to discover that the source of all this trouble is a family receiving housing benefit.

"The connection between behaviour and entitlement to benefit does seem to me to be a perfectly fair one to draw – and that's what Frank Field's bill seeks to do."

So he is backing Field's proposal. He is aware of the fears among campaigners such as Shelter that the move may lead to more homelessness, but argues: "Where someone is evicted by antisocial behaviour, we cannot put them back at the front of the queue for social housing. That undermines all the messages about antisocial behaviour being unacceptable."

However, Raynsford stresses that the way the law is implemented, if it is passed, will hold the key to its success. "One does not want [the docking of benefit] to be based on hearsay or allegation. It must be only cases where it is proved that someone was behaving in a wholly antisocial way."

Causes for celebration
In his own career, there are several moments of which he is proud. Along with the creation of the GLA and the handover of its new headquarters, he mentions his housing green paper, published in 2000. He also sees the moves to give more freedom and flexibility to local government as an important major policy statement on housing. "These are my highlights," he says with a smile, "so far."

So, what does he see in the future? Looking forward to this month's comprehensive spending review, Raynsford is quietly optimistic that local government will have something to celebrate, although he is too shrewd to go on record with much more than "it's too soon to say". But he adds: "The department has made a very strong case.

Nick Raynsford

Age
57
Family
Married with three daughters. Wyvill Richard Nicholls Raynsford – his full name – can trace his family of Northamptonshire squires back to the 15th century.
Education
Repton School; Chelsea College of Art; Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.
Career
Joined the London’s Sheltered Housing Aid Centre as an emergency officer in 1973 and rose to become director 1976-86; partner, then director of Raynsford & Morris Housing Consultants 1987-1992; HACAS consultant 1993-1997. Wrote A Guide to Housing Benefit, published 1982. Elected Labour MP for Fulham 1986-1987. MP for Greenwich & Woolwich, south-east London, since 1997 (Greenwich 1992-1997). Opposition spokesperson on London 1993-1997 and on housing 1994-1997; junior minister, DETR 1997-1999; minister of state, DETR 1999 -2001; local government minister 2001-2002; minister for local government and the regions since June 2001.