Victoria Derbyshire: Victoria's reality check

Victoria Derbyshire sits at the corner bar in her games room, with its pool table and wall-mounted Brazil football shirt autographed by Pele, and ponders the relationship between the BBC and the Great British public.

"Quite a lot of people according to research do feel disconnected from the BBC," she says. "Hopefully with Five Live they know that there is an opening for them."

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One of the best-known female voices on British radio, Derbyshire returns to Five Live next week after nearly nine months away from the studio on maternity leave, and is in little doubt about which section of the population feels ostracised by the corporation. She is not talking about young people or ethnic minorities that the corporation has acknowledged it is struggling to reach. "White working-class people. It's perhaps because they think the BBC doesn't talk about issues which concern them. Perhaps because they have a perception that some parts of the BBC are, as they put it, liberal, chattering class types, based in London, who don't know about the real world."

Derbyshire, 38, who is proud of her Lancastrian roots, also has a clear idea of the issues that these disenfranchised licence fee payers feel are being overlooked. "Particularly I would say immigration," she says, distancing Five Live itself from any criticism on that score. "We've done many programmes on immigration and we get white working-class callers and we get immigrants and so over the course of half an hour or an hour you do feel slightly enlightened by it because you've had that broad range of people calling us or texting or emailing."

Asked to define the Five Live listener in terms of the media they consume she says "they probably watch Doctor Who and they probably read the Daily Mail". The "perfect" topics for debate among the Five Live audience are "immigration, tax, CSA". It is right, argues Derbyshire, that one of the BBC's national networks should appeal to a different demographic than its sister stations. "Out of the five radio stations the BBC runs, we've all got to be offering different things to justify the licence fee."

Derbyshire, who is speaking in the midst of a growing crisis of public trust in the BBC, but the day before the announcement of shocking breaches of editorial standards in flagship phone-in and children's shows, says Five Live's unique interactive relationship with its audience allows the station to carry the public's criticisms of the corporation. "We said 'Do you trust the BBC?' obviously after the Queen debacle," she notes, allowing herself a chuckle at that error. "We can do that without sounding defensive, we are absolutely open and we say 'Yeah, tell us what you think.' And yes, some people don't trust the BBC and they don't trust politicians and they don't trust journalists." Giving vent to such distrust and criticism is what she and her Five Live colleagues "are here for", she says.

Before long, Five Live will become an even stronger counter-weight to any metropolitan, liberal, middle-class bias at the BBC, as the network moves to its new home in Salford. Some of her colleagues have winced at the thought but Derbyshire has little sympathy. "There were two years of 'Will we, won't we', when it consumed a lot of people's time by the water cooler, with people asking 'Are you going to go?' Now it's happening and, as Greg Dyke once said, 'If you don't like the BBC then I'm sorry it's time to go.' It's happening, we're going so let's get on with it."

Ahead of confirmation of the move, Derbyshire caused outrage in her native North-west by being overheard exclaiming "No, no, no!" on the air as a Five Live newsreader announced an attempt by MPs to force the BBC to go ahead with the move to take the network and other departments to Salford. BBC publicists claimed afterwards that Derbyshire was being ironic.

Certainly she is unequivocal now, proposing that other BBC radio networks should abandon the capital as well. "The BBC is supposed to represent all of Britain – so why are we all in London? I will drive the removal van myself. Some of us wish it was happening sooner and then we could all get on with it. It will be a real boost to Five Live and I think it will be an injection of adrenalin. I don't know why we can't go further – why can't Radio 1 be in Brighton, Radio 3 in Edinburgh, Radio 2 in Birmingham?"

By moving to the North-west, Five Live will subtly change its output, she says. "It might feel like starting a new radio station again. The brand is still there but some people won't go and some people will, so there will be new members of teams and perhaps new editors. We will probably look for different types of guests, different stories and we will inevitably on air talk about the North-west of England. In a way that we might now casually refer to the Tube we will talk about the trams getting into work. I think it will just sound different. We will live in different places – we won't all be in London."

Derbyshire has herself recently moved out of London, uprooting from the BBC heartland of Shepherd's Bush to a new home on the fringes of the shires. When the presenter contrasts her new environs with her previous abode she turns to the subject that she says is uppermost in the thoughts of many Five Live listeners – immigration. "Where I was before was 10 minutes from Television Centre on a street where probably 20 different languages were spoken, off a road where there were probably shops run by people from 50 different countries selling all sorts of exotic wares. Now I'm in a place that's predominantly white. I don't want to generalise about the place but they might think that Polish workers doing cheap painting and decorating is not a good thing because it does them out of a job and immigration has got to a point where it should stop, if I can put it like that. Does that sound terrible? It's a perspective. When we lived at Shepherd's Bush my toddler was in the minority in nursery – he's white. Here he's not."

This type of blunt speaking, some would say realism, is Derbyshire's trademark and she describes her own presenting style as "straight, direct", though adds that such an approach would not be appropriate when talking to a victim of crime. "If it's a Home Office minister talking about the latest immigration figures it might be different," she says, referencing the I-word again. As the host of the 9am-12pm Morning Show, Victoria Derbyshire is one of the most influential broadcasters in Britain, though she is at pains to emphasise her role in providing a platform to the audience and allowing it to shape the debate. She attended Bury Grammar School and Liverpool University before taking a diploma in broadcast journalism at Preston Polytechnic. After learning her craft in the West Midlands at commercial station BRMB in Birmingham and the BBC station CWR, she returned to the North-west in 1995 to work on the breakfast show at Manchester's GMR.

Derbyshire joined Five Live eight years ago as a joint presenter of the breakfast show with Julian Worricker and the pair won the Sony Gold Award for breakfast shows in 2002. She was later paired with Nicky Campbell. She became the subject of unwelcome tabloid headlines when she began a relationship with BBC radio editor Mark Sandell, who had been the partner of Derbyshire's presenting colleague Fi Glover. Sandell and Derbyshire have two young children, and autographed shirts of his beloved West Ham United hang in the games room next to those of Derbyshire's team, Bolton Wanderers.

Derbyshire is a good example of the Five Live presenter who can combine an appetite for new journalism with a strong working knowledge of the network's other staple, sport. She has broadcast live from the last two World Cups, in Japan and Germany, and from the Singapore announcement of the venue for the 2012 Olympics at which she emitted an "unprofessional" whoop at the news of London's success. Soon after she comes back on air, she is hoping to introduce a new intimacy to the show by presenting some of the morning debates from the homes of listeners. "They will feel absolutely comfortable and relaxed and you can get them to open up more and really get to the heart of them and what they're concerned about," she predicts.

"We have ideas of going to a household where they all vote Tory to find out what they really think about David Cameron – or going to a household where the grandma, the mum and the daughter were all pregnant at 16. You could have David Cameron on and they could say it's all very well having a £20 boost for married couples but we are not married though we are happily nurturing our children and got pregnant at 16. You would get a different atmosphere from having me sat in a studio with David Cameron and women ringing up from Derby or Wallsend or wherever."

Listeners can be even more direct in asking questions of politicians than Derbyshire herself. "One said to Charles Kennedy 'Charles, where do all these rumours come from about your drinking' He said 'I have no idea, it's Westminster gossip.' Then less than a year later the whole truth comes out."

Five Live is sometimes criticised for having moved away from the newsier roots it started with and becoming overly dependent on sport and banter. Derbyshire rejects this and cites the coverage of the Glasgow airport terror attack to support her argument. "It was in the middle of Wimbledon and immediately Claire Balding and Russell Fuller, who are what you might describe as sports presenters, switch into doing interviews about what's happened with eye witnesses and police and emergency services and passengers at the terminal."

During her maternity leave she has had plenty of opportunity to listen to the radio and has been checking out the output of opposition networks. Asked to explain the difference between a TalkSPORT listener and a Five Live one, she takes a long pause. "I suppose you might say a TalkSPORT listener is like a bloke you might meet in the pub whereas the Five Live listener could be male or female and perhaps wants more than just people's opinions. They want to find out about what is happening in Sudan or Gaza or a party's latest immigration policy."

She moves out into her garden to have her photograph taken, standing beneath the flowers that hang from the pergola and keeping one ear open for the cry of her baby. But undoubtedly Derbyshire sees herself as quite a tough cookie and certainly not the sort of presenter to ever try to set herself apart from her audience. At times like these, with the BBC accused of having treated licence-fee payers with disdain, the return to the fold of Derbyshire might provide the corporation with a much needed reality check.