Incoming housing minister Kit Malthouse urged developers to speed up house building on the first site tour of his new role.

Mr Malthouse visited the Rochester Riverside project today a little less than two weeks after being appointed to the new front-bench role.

He said he'd been "raring at the bit" to get out to building sites.

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Standing on scaffolding overlooking the site, he addressed a gathering of developers, government officials and Medway council representatives - and gave home builders Countryside a clear message to speed up the £400 million development project.

He said: "I'm here in Rochester Riverside in lovely Medway to look at what is a really fantastic example of a development that's really cracking on."

He said the plans to build about 1,700 homes, of which 25% are going to affordable were "to great design standards, using lots of brick, making it look like the local area, so it will age well and blend in".

He added: "It's a critical part of our delivery of this 300,000 housing target.

"There's lots of people that have all played a huge part in making this development happen and I'm here to see the great work that they're doing, slap them on the back and ask them if they can go a little bit faster."

If Mr Malthouse's message to build faster wasn't exactly a surprise, his estimate of 1,700 planned homes was - and Countryside later confirmed the number of planned homes remained at 1,400.

And the figure he referred to in his quote was 300,000 homes nationally per year.

Countryside Partnerships South chief executive Graham Cherry said they were up for the challenge, but sounded a note of reality.

He pointed out that the speed of the project would be determined by demand from buyers.

"He's obviously keen to understand the development progress," he said.

"Are we on programme, how fast we can build the homes, whether we can speed up or not?

"The government's agenda is all about the provision of housing, a lot of it and quickly.

"Our current estimate is 12 years and he said 'what about 10?'.

"At the end of the day next year we're building something like just under 150 homes, which is a tremendous output and if we can do that for each of the following years we'll be going some.

"It's obviously dependent on the marketplace. If the market's strong we'll see if we can speed it up, but I think reducing it from 12 to 10, it will be a challenge, but we're up for one."

Medway Council leader Cllr Alan Jarrett said the visit had been a good opportunity to build the national profile of the area.

He said: "The minister was really engaged with the process, really supportive of what we're doing here, not least because we'll be helping him to hit some of his housing targets, so it was good visit."

He told the minster that "Medway was the place to be" adding: "I gave him some examples of that, not just here - but Amazon are moving to Medway and a whole load of things, so it was a good story to tell him actually.

"He did buy it I think - I told him about things he didn't know - about our universities, the size of our population, our growth ambitions - all of that was new to him and I hope it stuck."

But he said there no opportunity to talk about easing the pressure to build more homes.

"I didn't think it was appropriate to get into that but I do know there are revised population estimates coming out soon, which I'm told will take our projections down from 330,000 to 317,500, which is quite significant. We'll see how that plays out because that's quite new.

"This is my first visit since the ground-breaking and I was quite surprised at how much progress they've made so quickly.

"The panoramic view we had from the top if what will be the marketing suite was quite an eye-opener - they're really motoring, they're a good outfit."