Paging Lord Rooker

Rooker tells the tale of what happened next with relish, his broad Brummie accent turning increasingly high-pitched the more excited he becomes: "I hadn't even got back to Birmingham before my pager started saying 'ring the Labour Party press office'," he exclaims. Spin doctors were desperate to contact him because, although the government has confirmed it is carrying out a review of right-to-buy abuses, it has refused to signal an outright ban, clearly nervous about scrapping a voter-friendly policy.

Rooker likes talking – straight talking. He's known for being outspoken. While he was immigration minister he controversially said that most asylum seekers are "single men who have deserted their families for economic gain". Now housing and planning minister, he has a tendency to digress, interrupts himself when he remembers a good anecdote and leaves sentences half-finished as he thinks of something more pressing to say.

His words and behaviour are distinctly at odds with a political climate in which ministers are groomed into being permanently on-message. The Guardian newspaper has said Lord Rooker "owes nothing to the packagers' art". Even Downing Street described him as "a serious, no-nonsense operator". Indeed, he is so up-front that at one point during our conversation he admits he's forgotten the title of the government's policy for key workers – "what's the scheme called, now … ?"

The future of right to buy
So it is both surprising and disappointing that when I push the minister on whether the right to buy will be re-thought, he stays right on-message. He rubbishes newspaper headlines claiming the policy is to be scrapped but refuses to be drawn on how the government might amend it.

But perhaps we can get a clue about his views from his own admission that when he was in Labour's shadow cabinet, he did not agree with the way it opposed right to buy. "Old Labour – Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman – opposed the Thatcher legislation but prior to 1979 I had tried to persuade Jim Callaghan [then prime minister] to at least take the pressure off by allowing councils to sell empty properties. We opposed right to buy, we were still opposing it at the 1983 election. We lost millions of votes, and a lot of it you can tie down to our opposition to right to buy."

Now, the fear of a backlash from voters means "we're not going back to pre-1979". Rooker is adamant. "We're not intending [to], we haven't got a plan for that, I wouldn't agree with it. Nobody's asking us to reverse the policy back to pre-right to buy, but that doesn't mean to say there are some difficulties, we haven't got any plans, any secret agenda, but we are gathering information where right to buy is causing difficulties and that's all I've got to say on it."

Rooker won't even be drawn on whether the government's review of right to buy will consider the Scottish solution. In Scotland, special housing legislation suspended the policy until 2011 and extended the qualifying period so tenants who wanted to purchase their council homes had to live in them for at least five years. Rooker says: "What they do in Scotland is up to the Scots. They've got devolution and I'm not commenting."

However, Rooker does comment on the Brits' obsession with home ownership, which has led to millions of homes being lost from council control. To fight this, says Rooker, you simply have to offer tenants more choice. "You've got extremes, haven't you – 100% owner-occupation with a full stake and 100% paying rent to a private landlord. Between these two there should be opportunities for cooperative housing, half share, 50-50 share, tenants running management – there ought to be a range of flexibility." The government's current research on equity shares will, says Rooker, help this debate.

Choice, he goes on, is key in reversing the decline of affordable housing. "It doesn't matter if the homes are privately rented, council rented, housing co-ops or owner occupied – ignore the tenure completely. I want to be able to walk down any road and look at housing and not know by looking at it what the tenure is. But what I want to know is, first, there's enough to go around and, second, it's decent quality."

We’re not going back to pre-1979, but we are gathering information on where right to buy is causing difficulties

Landlords to blame for nuisance
Rooker's stance on nuisance neighbours is somewhat surprising. Instead of blaming tenants for antisocial behaviour, he says the responsibility lies with landlords.

In well-managed large-scale private-sector accommodation – "where they've got a concierge, caretaker, decent security, people know who's walking in and out of the receptions and vestibule areas" – antisocial tenants are not a problem, he says, "so basically it's down to poor management".

But isn't it more complicated than that? "Well, I don't blame the tenants, I blame poor management. You can't erect a block of flats, streets in the sky, and walk away." The answer, he says, is for local authorities to transfer their stock. "Local authorities' job is not to play being the landlord, in which they've failed, but to take the role that only they can do of looking over the totality of housing in their area and make sure they've got decent stock."

Housing associations, on the other hand, come in for praise in their handling of antisocial tenants. He can give, offhand, no examples of good practice, but says that in "most cases" associations deal with these issues better than councils. He is intrigued by the Housing Corporation's plans to turn larger associations into developers (HT 1 August, page 7) and praises the corporation's "excellent record on delivering".

He rejects the idea that the organisation's role might be eroded by the possible creation of a single inspectorate for the sector and a boosted role for regional development agencies and assemblies, and adds: "We want to use the best of what they can do, but what we're looking at is it doing what we want it to do, as its role changes. It's all very amiable, there's no turf wars going on." Rooker is also keen to reassure those who are sceptical about RDAs' ability to drive the housing agenda (HT 1 August, page 16). "They are into neighbourhood renewal, they are into the rebuilding of communities in rural and urban areas."

Continuing on the theme of John Prescott's statement following the comprehensive spending review, Rooker has a ready reply to the housing sector's complaints that Prescott was high on promise, but short on detail. "The guy had to restrict his statement to about 20 minutes, a quarter of an hour, you can't do more than that. He varied his statement from 4000 words down to 1800, and he also had to deal with the planning green paper, so we were restricted."

Rooker also pooh-poohs the suggestion that Prescott's statement failed to order the delivery of more affordable housing and merely mentioned that the South-east could potentially accommodate 200,000 more homes. Rooker's choice of words is casual, but his tone is measured. "We're having a think about the divvying-up of the money. I know people are saying – Labour MPs as well – that it's nice but when are we going to get detail?"

So when are we going to get the detail?