In my second interview with the MPs appearing in Tower Block of Commons, due to be broadcast on Channel 4 on Monday at 9.00pm, this is what Tim Loughton MP for East Worthing and Shoreham had to say on his experiences of living in a council tower block for eight days with his host residents.

Why did you decide to take part?
There were two aims really to this exercise as far as I am concerned, it was part of the rehabilitation of MPs to show them that we aren’t all the subject of the expenses scandal and are detached from reality – to show them that we are just ordinary people doing a rather strange but ordinary job. The second part of it was to show local people as we do in our own constituencies, if we are doing our job properly all the time, that MPs and other local politicians are there to help and there to be used and by engaging with MPs and councillors you can actually get some things done.

Did it meet with your expectations of what you were going to find there?
What was difficult about it was that we were completely left in the dark and I didn’t know where I was going until I arrived at Euston station and given a train ticket for Birmingham. You weren’t able to prepare yourself for anything as I didn’t know where I was staying from one night to the next.

What was the biggest shock for you?
One thing that was a new experience for me was the gang culture. There is this postcode gang system whereby I was staying in B19 in Birmingham and if you happen to come from another part of Birmingham and you were encroaching on B19 territory then you were likely to get set upon. They waged this extremely arbitrary war between gangs on something as inane as postcodes. I went out with some really good youth workers from a project that works with gang members, so I was able to have a decent conversation with them while they were playing with their knives and rolling spliffs. They don’t understand why there’s this history of gang warfare and how it started and they don’t know how it’s going to finish, all they know is they have to be part of it. There’s this extraordinary pre-determination and feeling which is just bizarre and completely hopeless.

What do you think those residents made of you turning up?
I don’t think that the residents knew anything about me. They just knew they had an MP coming to stay with them. They went with all the sort of pre-perceived ideas of he’ll be in a chauffeur-driven car and he will have a great big house, lots of staff running about him, and swimming pools. By the end of it, I’m glad that all the people I was staying with were saying: “Well actually he’s a perfectly normal bloke.” We managed to turn their preconceived ideas that they had and they were starting to engage with some of the things I was trying to promote. Several of them were saying: “Well I’m going to bother to vote next time.” So it certainly got some people thinking which it was all about.

I like the way you got stuck in...
We could of so easily just have been portrayed as: “Oh here’s some MP who has just been parachuted in for eight days, they are going to be telling us how we should be living our lives and then to wave goodbye and that’s the end of that.” I want to be judged in the impact I made on the people I came across during those eight days and whether the seeds of projects and thoughts that I put in place can actually continue to flourish. There was always a problem of us appearing just terribly patronising and just doing everything in front of the cameras and then just buggering off back to Westminster.

Did you enjoy the experience – or perhaps that’s the wrong word to use?
I got to enjoy it – I have to say my second visit where I was staying with Dean and Sarah, the six and four year old hyperactive kids, ex-fighting pitbull terriers, a cat and two goldfish in a one-bedroom flat on the 9th floor of a tower block was quite challenging. I thought: “What the hell am I doing here?” But as the week went on and I started achieving things – I got some repairs done to a flat, we held a football match and BBQ for the local community and I got a newsletter going. You actually started to see things being achieved. Being dumped in completely new territory in very challenging conditions is tricky enough, but when you have a camera in your face from 7.30am till 1.00 at night, eight days solid, with a crew of thousands and a microphone on your belt the whole time – that’s real high pressure.

From your experience would you say Britain is ‘broken’?
Very much so, but that doesn’t mean that that has happened all over the place and it doesn’t mean that in those really deprived communities that the whole lot is in meltdown. I was in one of the most deprived parts of Birmingham, one of the more deprived inner cities in the country, living in tower blocks where people didn’t want to be there. Their ambition was to get out. There’s a limit to the pride one can take in one’s accommodation because you don’t want to be there – you don’t respect it. Yet I met some really interesting and inspiring people, some of the voluntary workers doing voluntary work with some of the gangs for example.

What’s at the heart of ‘broken Britain’ is a lack of trust and lack of community feeling amongst people and in the place I was, there was very little communication among people. A really telling comment from one of the people I stayed with who had a baseball bat in every room in the flat because he was scared stiff of the drug dealers hanging around the tower block, told me that I had probably met more of his neighbours in eight days than he had in eight years.

I went round saying: “Well where is the heart of this community?” The pub recently closed down, half the shops were closed. But I eventually found a really impressive community centre run by a Christian charity which was a real hub of various things going. But yet a lot of people didn’t know anything about it and never used it. And yet there it was a stone’s throw away from where many people were living. So even when you have something on your doorstep such is the lack of communication and community cohesion that people aren’t even using the facilities that are there and that’s where ‘broken Britain’ comes in very appropriately. The first one is very funny actually, I laughed a lot, particularly at Austin Mitchell. Whether he will come well out of it is another matter but he certainly plays to the camera.