IN A grey suburb peppered with dilapidated fast-food joints and bargain basement stores, the stucco cottage seems an unlikely residence for a cabinet minister.

But while the bric-a-brac, 1970s soft furnishings and kitsch little lamps that adorn Margaret Beckett’s home may not be to everyone’s taste, the place is spotlessly clean and cosy - and the owner clearly house proud.

The housing minister has been there 25 years and never fallen out of love with it, despite many nights spent in grander surroundings thanks to her job. So she should have some sense of what a nightmare it must be for the estimated 75,000 households in Britain facing repossession this year.

The spectre of thousands of families being evicted as the recession bites has left Beckett with little time to enjoy being at home. Aides claim she has spent almost every waking hour locked in meetings with mortgage lenders, construction companies and cabinet colleagues, trying to stave off the deepening crisis.

It might seem an impossible task, but Beckett believes another property boom may not be very far off - and warns there is no time to waste.

“If demand starts to turn up before supply turns up, you’re immediately back in inflationary pressures, and it’s just not economically healthy. If you haven’t got the construction training programmes, or the skills, or the people coming through, all you’ll get is an inflationary bottleneck when the upturn comes, and that’s the last thing we need.”

She warns would-be first-time buyers not to delay in the hope of further price falls, because “when the upturn comes, there will probably be a mad rush”.

Beckett is haunted by memories of previous recessions, when the construction industry was left to founder. The government cannot risk that happening again, she says.

“We’re going through a recession when we know there’s a substantial built-in growth of householder demand in the pipeline. The demand is not going to go away so we have to ask, how can we maintain supply through the recession?”

It entails ploughing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into public construction projects to tide the industry over until the downturn ends. Beckett has asked local development quangos to look for regeneration work that could be subsidised by the government.

Her department is also mopping up unsold housing stock - something she is “peeved” it is not getting more credit for.

“The message of how much we are trying to do across a range of fronts seems to me to be getting lost. We’ve just bought up 4,800 properties and another tranche of stock for a scheme for first-time buyers.”

She has just launched a shared-equity scheme to help first-time buyers purchase Barratt homes. Critics might ask why the government does not try to improve the image of renting, instead of encouraging more people to buy property they may not be able to afford. Should we be more like the Germans, and accept that sometimes renting is better?

“You could turn the question on its head. Why is it that people in places like France or Germany or the Netherlands, or wherever, don’t want to, don’t care, about owning their own homes? Maybe it’s they who are the people whose attitudes are a bit surprising.”

She does want to make renting more attractive, particularly in London. “I do think we need to look at what we can do to raise the standards.”

But encouragingly for first-time buyers, the government is determined to ensure as many people as possible can buy their own homes. Beckett cannot see the British perception of renting as “second best” changing.

“People do feel that if you are just paying rent for years, it’s money down the drain. It isn’t, in the sense that it’s providing a roof over your head, but a lot of British people do feel like that and I don’t really see much sign that will change.”

On eco-towns, Beckett sends out mixed messages. She criticises nimbys who “do not want the disruption” and describes Gordon Brown’s concept as “brilliant”. “ I think it’s quite fascinating and strange that the eco-towns idea is so controversial . . . I can’t help slightly wondering, to be honest, whether people are just resisting the idea of new homes being built.”

When she adds that she is “still hopeful that we can make quite a lot of progress”, however, it hardly sounds like full steam ahead. She says one proposed eco-town - Rackheath, near Norwich - is close to meeting the government’s tight environmental criteria.

“The others are, well, yes, there’s a prospect, a possibility, but they have a lot more work to do . . .” She trails off: it seems clear it is not going to happen, at least not any time soon.

But nimbys cannot sit back, as Beckett prepares to back plans for pockets of new housing in England’s prettiest - and most expensive - villages. She believes it is time for an “acceptance” of the need for affordable homes in such areas.

It is a “total myth” that Labour does not understand the countryside, she claims, saying the party had “something like 150 MPs” in rural or semi-rural seats in 1997. The test will be how many remain after the next election.

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