Tower Block of Commons

Tim Loughton talks to Channel 4 about why he wanted to participate in the series, the surprises and shocks he encountered and whether the experience has made him a better politician.

Channel 4: How did you end up taking part in this series?  
Tim Loughton: There was quite a long gestation to it. Several years ago Love Productions came to see me and we had a chat, and I thought it was quite a good idea, and gave them some leads, and then it all went quiet and nothing happened. And then last year Love Productions came back and said 'At last we've got the go-ahead from Channel 4 to produce this, would you be interested in doing it?' So I was given first refusal on it.

Channel 4: And why did you decide to do it? 
Tim Loughton: There were two main reasons behind it. Given what had been going on with MPs expenses and everything last year, I saw it as part of the MPs rehabilitation process, to try and put a different side of MPs over to the public, showing that we are just ordinary people who happen to be MPs. And secondly, it was an exercise in showing communities which are clearly fairly disenfranchised and disengaged from politicians and the political process, to show them that actually, you can use MPs and other elected representatives to try and bring about change in your community. MPs are for everybody, and this is what the programme is partly about.

Channel 4: Where did you end up, and what were your initial impressions of the area? 
Tim Loughton: I was sent to Birmingham's Newtown area. I had no idea where I was going until I arrived at Euston station.. At Birmingham station I got into a taxi and was taken to Newtown, dumped in the middle of an estate, and given an address where I was due to go. My first impressions were that it could have been a lot worse, because it was actually quite a tidy estate. Lots of quite big tower blocks, though I was used to that, because I'd lived in London before next to rather bigger tower blocks than that. But then the more you got to know it, the more some of the obvious problems emerged: lots of boarded-up houses, boarded-up shops, no real facilities for the community, lots of people hanging around with not much to do.

Channel 4: Who did you stay with while you were there? 
Tim Loughton: I started off with Natina, who's brilliant. That was quite a soft-option, to start off with. It was Natina and her daughter and her mum, and they were really nice, so I landed on my feet. [...] But I wasn't told anything, so I didn't know if I'd be staying in a different place every night, if I'd be staying with Natina for the week, or what. Eventually, I moved four times. I stayed with three different families, and went back to Natina for my last night. Not knowing where you're going actually adds to the discomfort of it.

Channel 4: Who did you go to after Natina? 
Tim Loughton: I had two nights there, then I went to Dean and Sarah and their four and six-year-old kids and their two excitable pit bull terriers, a cat and two goldfish, on the ninth floor of a tower block, in a one-bedroom flat. That was quite a challenge. When you'd eventually made your way to the flat through the remnants of last night's drug activity, and you'd got into the flat through the various messages left by the dogs, that was quite a challenge. That was the worst level of accommodation I was in. Very friendly, very welcoming people who tried to make it comfortable, but there's a limit to what you can do in those circumstances. And I had two nights with them, and then I went to stay in the same block, slightly lower down, with Adrian, a 43-year-old single guy who's lived there for eight years and didn't want to live there. He worked on the other side of town, and he had a baseball bat in every room of his house, because of what went on outside the flat. What was really quite sad but quite telling was that at the end of my stay he said to me that I'd met more of his neighbours in the space of eight days there than he has in eight years. He really lived in isolation, which was sort of symptomatic of the lack of community spirit on a lot of the estate.

Channel 4: Were you surprised by some of the things you encountered? 
Tim Loughton: Actually I wasn't. I didn't come across anything I hadn't seen before. It was perhaps the extent and concentration of what I saw that was most alarming. When I first stood for parliament it was in Sheffield Brightside in 1992, with some really depressing big council estates, with people living in some pretty dire conditions. Where I lived in London was next to one of the largest tower block estates in London, in Battersea. Although I didn't actually live in the tower blocks, I lived across the road and stood for election to the council there, and knocked on every door. So I've seen some of the problems and some of the conditions there. But what was really shocking was the state of Sarah and Dean's flat. Somebody had set fire to their flat some months earlier, so they'd moved out. And the job refurbishing it had been botched. They had those windows which tilt, with safety catches so you can't fall out of the window. The week before, Sarah and Dean had found their four-year-old daughter, Ruby, dangling her legs over the side of the window, because the safety catch hadn't been mended. Miraculously, she didn't plunge nine floors below. The door into their lounge had no door handle, so basically you struggled to get out. If there had been a fire again, it literally was a death trap. And they certainly didn't want to be there. They weren't house-proud, because there was nothing to be proud about, so it became a sort of vicious circle.

Channel 4: Did you encounter any political extremism there? 
Tim Loughton: Fortunately, no. Which is not to say it wasn't there, but I didn't see it. It was Clare Short's seat, although nobody actually knew who their MP was. If that was my constituency, I would have been very, very worried about that. She's been the MP there for 26 years. The bit I stayed in had a white working class population, and quite a big West Indian population. And actually they got on quite well. But they were maybe quite anti the Muslim population. That manifested itself because there was a pub on the corner that had been closed down, and was being refurbished and turned into a community centre. And it turned out it was going to be a Somali community centre, and there was quite a bit of resentment about that. People thought 'Hold on, we've lost that pub, and now it's going to be a quasi-Mosque, and that's not for us.'

Channel 4: Did you ever feel threatened? 
Tim Loughton: I didn't feel threatened. They had very sensible precautions, and I was never put in a very dangerous position. Although, having said that, when we were filming in a playground next to the tower block, a young kid did produce a gun. I went out with a really impressive guy who works for a youth charity, and met a lot of gang members who were openly rolling spliffs and playing with their knives on camera, without a care in the world. I was with good people. If I was on my own and had gone up to some of these people, I think I'd have been told where to go and found myself a bit threatened. But because I was accompanied by people who knew the turf, I felt fine.

Channel 4: What was the lowest moment of the experience for you? 
Tim Loughton: I think probably turning up at Dean and Sarah's flat, and realising what I would be staying in for a couple of days. By no means was it comfortable. It was the most challenging bit of it all. But the hardest part of the whole week – staying in strange accommodation, being hosted by strangers, you don't know where you'll be sleeping from one night to the next, all that you can cope with – but when you've got a camera in your face, and a microphone on your belt from 7:30am until 1am, which was the earliest we finished filming, for eight days in a row, that's the biggest challenge. Constantly being a performing seal and having a camera on you. If I'd been there, staying with nice people as I was, and being taken round, it would've been fine, but the fact that you were constantly in the spotlight made it that much harder.

Channel 4: What were the high points? 
Tim Loughton: I felt there were a few real achievements. For one thing, we got Dean and Sarah's windows fixed, and repairs to their flat, and they'd been banging on to the housing department for quite a while to get that done. One had to pull rank a bit, and we got the repair team round. Another high point was I organised a couple of football matches. I organised a football match at the end of my week there, and then when I went back in October for another couple of days. There were a lot of teenage kids playing football in the kiddies' playground next to the tower block, which is not the best place to be doing it. And just across the way, there was what turned out to be a community centre, which nobody seemed to know about, with a bit of green space outside. And I went to see the people running the community centre, which turned out to be a fantastic community centre, and said 'Can we use your field for a football match?' And the people there were really obliging, so at the end of my first week I organised a football match, and the kids turned up, and we had a barbecue for the community. And then when I went back, because it wasn't possible to do it the first time, I organised a second football match, with the kids playing the local police. And the police turned up in force, with a pretty crack football team, and we had over 20 kids who came and wanted to play, so we had to rotate them a lot against this police team. And they had a fantastic time, and the police beat them solid, they didn't take any prisoners. And everyone really enjoyed it. There was something deeply symbolic that happened. We did some filming of the kids looking over this iron fence to where this community centre football field was, and it was a big symbolic dividing line. And when they came for the first football match, they all climbed over the fence to get into the field. For the second match, they all came through the front door. It seems a silly little thing, but it was real progress. Because we'd introduced them to that community centre, and because the people there had been really welcoming, they felt that they belonged a bit more.

Channel 4: Have you stayed in touch with anyone you met there? 
Tim Loughton: I have. I've stayed in touch with Natina and with Adrian. Dean and Sarah have gone off the radar, but I'm planning to go up again soon, without a camera crew this time, so I can do some more stuff there.

Channel 4: What are the lessons you'll take away from the experience? 
Tim Loughton: Well, what really alarmed me was how that community, who need politicians or people who can bring about change more than most communities, were the most disengaged and detached from them. There's the irony. How Clare Short accounts for how she's spent her time up there is up to her, and I'm sure, had we gone to another part of her constituency, they would have said 'Oh, she's fantastic, she's always here.' If that had been my constituency and people who had lived there for a long time didn't know who I was, I would be deeply worried. There has been a complete disengagement from politics, either because politicians haven't been there enough, or because people there have become frustrated and believed what they've read in the papers, that it's all a waste of time. I don't know, but it's a two-way street. I've got areas of deprivation in my own constituency, where I spend a disproportionate amount of time, and it reaps dividends. Politicians need to spend more time on the streets in those areas, and people need to give them the time of day and engage them and get their help. The other really alarming thing that I hadn't realised – I spent a lot of time meeting gang members – was the completely inane postcode war that goes on between the gangs. In was in B19, and if you happened to be someone from B6 who strays into B19 territory, then you're dead meat. They are fighting the most inane war based on something as arbitrary and meaningless as a postcode. Talking to some of these kids, when you stripped away the bravado, you had some pretty ordinary kids, with the same hopes and fears and ambitions as anybody else, but this extraordinary fatalism, whereby they're fighting this gang war, the origins and purposes of which they don't understand, but they know they've got to do it. If it means they end up getting knifed or shot or ending up in a coffin by the age of 25, then que sera sera. I found that extraordinarily inane and depressing. It's as futile as that, and that was quite a big eye-opener for me.

Channel 4: Has it changed any of your political opinions? 
Tim Loughton: No. It reinforced my view that when you're dealing with desperate circumstances, government and local authorities can often play second fiddle to voluntary organisations – certainly on the gang warfare front. If you're really to engage with these kids in gangs, then you need to do it through people who speak their language. We need to give tools to the people at the grass roots who speak the language and know what's what, rather than come up with another top down government initiative that tends to crash and burn.

Channel 4: Do you think that making this series has made you a better politician? 
Tim Loughton: Sure, yes. It reinforced to me that we've got to get out there and engage with the most disengaged communities, and politicians have got to find ways, in their own areas, of doing that. And certainly when I'm speaking up in parliament around issues to do with poverty and homelessness and drugs and gangs, then I've spoken to people who are living it, and not just for the eight days that I was parachuted in for, but living it every day of their lives. I've got people I can go and speak to who can give it to me chapter and verse first-hand. That's tremendously valuable.

Channel 4: Do you think we should send all MPs away on a residential course in a tower block? 
Tim Loughton: Frankly, the good MPs, of which there are many, are doing versions of this all the time anyway. In some of the worst parts of my constituency, I've rolled my sleeves up. Even though I'm not sleeping in the tower blocks or anything, I'm forming relationships with these kids. I think it's stuff that some MPs do all the time anyway. We do that in our party – a scheme was set up a few years ago through the Centre for Social Justice, whereby any MPs can go and be deposited on an estate somewhere.

Channel 4: Have you talked to the other MPs from the series about their experiences? 
Tim Loughton: Yeah, we finished filming last week, and the final bit of filming was where the four of us came together for a discussion about our experiences. And, in fact, the housing minister, John Healey, came in, and we were able to bounce a few ideas off him. So it was quite interesting to swap experiences. I think some of us had taken initiative on certain things more than others, but I think that's all going to become clear through the four parts of the series – how we each tackled it in our own different ways.

Read also Tim Loughton's testimonial on taking part in the series.