Mary Reid

Lembit Öpik was 20 minutes late for our interview, delayed by the public interest in the Segway that he was riding and promoting.

So we tried not to make him look too ridiculous by posing him with two blogging cuddly toys, Millennium Elephant and Pink Dog. And in more pensive mode....

I asked him whether the media coverage of his more wacky exploits might be overshadowing the perceptions of him as a serious politician. He looked rather askance at this cheeky question and wondered what I meant. So I mentioned his appearances in Hello magazine, and his latest espousal of the vertical scooter with big wheels.

He thought his populist antics play well with the general public. He stuck to this view even when challenged by the result of a LibDem Voice poll which placed him at the bottom of a list of Lib Dem Shadow Cabinet members, based on their perceived effectiveness.

Which brings me to the remaining questions I posed to him relating to his Housing portfolio. After all, in Kingston we suffer under two specific policies of this Labour Government and I wanted to know what he would recommend in their place.

First up was the pressure by the Government on Councils to transfer their housing stock to a housing association. Housing associations are able to raise capital for improvements; Councils can't. That means there is a strong practical incentive for stock transfer, even though most Councils and tenants would much prefer social housing to remain with them, open to democratic accountability.

Lembit said that a level playing field was needed, with Councils and housing associations offered identical opportunities for capital funding. He was not at all clear why the Government persisted in privatising social housing, and he had not been able to get an answer from the Minister, Caroline Flint, on this.

Perhaps, he remarked, they just didn't want the funding to show up in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. Our financial hero, Vince Cable, has suggested that this should be seen as a long term investment by Councils, and could be categorised separately from the PSBR.

My second issue was around the negative housing subsidy that takes a serious chunk out of the rents paid by Council house tenants in Kingston. In fact 31% of all the rent paid in Kingston is creamed off by central Government. At one time all this was redistributed to other Councils; now it seems some £190million each year is simply retained by the Treasury. Normally rent is supposed to be used to cover the costs of keeping housing in good repair and to modern standards. Kingston tenants pay out £6million each year to other boroughs and into the general taxation pot.

Lembit described this as a tax on the poor.

In summing up his vision for housing he outlined the three fundamental principles that should underpin housing policy - economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. Amen to that.