In my fourth interview with the MPs appearing in Tower Block of Commons, former Conservative Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith shares his experiences of life in a council tower block.

Why did you agree to take part?

I chair the Centre for Social Justice and there’s a programme called Inner City Challenge where we take MPs and we put them in these sorts of areas and they have to live and work with charity groups for a week. You will see on our website there are a number of MPs who have taken part and we make them write or video diary of their week, and from that you can see what they’re doing. The idea is to get MPs into difficult areas so they can learn from what’s going on there. The makers of the Tower Block of Commons had liked the idea of the Inner City Challenge and so they came to me and said they’d like to do a pilot for Channel 4.

So I did the pilot and that’s what you see as I only did a day back in March/April of last year, long before they decided to go ahead. Then they got the go ahead and they came back to me and said would I do it? I said yes but then my wife got ill and I pulled out before they started. They then came back to me in October-November and asked if I would mind if they used some of the stuff from the pilot in the programme which is what you saw.

Did it meet with your expectations having been involved with similar projects?

I was in favour of the idea. I have spent a lot of time visiting estates because that’s what we do at the Centre for Social Justice — we look at the problems of the poorest in society and try and figure out the best ways to change them. So as I engage a lot with these groups, there’s nothing new about some of the things on these more difficult estates and talking to people on them. There were no new surprises but I didn’t expect any. But I thought the idea of it was quite good.

What did you think of the residents made of you turning up there?

Well I wasn’t there that long but I got on pretty well with Sherice and her mum, and then her friends, I got on reasonably well with most of them. In fact I’m going to get a number of them up to the House of Commons so they can see how that works. I don’t know if they made anything particular of me because I wasn’t there long enough but we seemed to get on alright and had a bit of a laugh on occasion.

Do you think the residents learnt anything from you?

Well I don’t know how much they learnt from me because it was meant to be the other way around. But I had long chats with Sherice about what she should do in the future and try to get her to look at what she wanted to do.

Do you think the programme reinforced our image of 'broken Britain'?

What I hope is that these sorts of programmes show that life on a large number of these estates is often quite dysfunctional and that people on the estates probably aren’t working. They find themselves trapped and unable to get the sort of advice, help and support, which they need, that you might get in normal family circumstances. A high degree are in broken families so kids are growing up without any major role models who can help them and no networks of successful people. Some kids will have somewhere in their parents group of friends, somebody who has done something, which they might be able to help them with. There’s none of the peer support group that’s goes on. People will drift if their aspirations can’t be met because they don’t know how to meet them. People are often trapped on these estates because they have a house or a flat and they daren’t move because they will lose it but at the same time there’s often not work near the estate so they travel large distances which is often expensive. So they are often worse of going in to work than they were at the beginning and all that sort of stuff traps them in a way that makes it difficult for people outside the estate to understand. There’s a lack of links, of knowledge and of role modelling.

Read my other interviews with Nadine Dorries, Tim Loughton and Mark Oaten on their experiences of the Tower Block of Commons.

Tomorrow Austin Mitchell.