Politics Home has reported this morning that:
Sajid Javid has pledged to spend more than £250 million to invest in 20,000 new homes in “areas of high demand” across the country.
The Chancellor said the money will come from the Housing Infrastructure Fund, which is aimed at improving road, schools and transport links across the Midlands, and the east and south east of England. In other words, it seems unlikely that this is new money. Despite which he said:
This £250m will increase the number of houses available to buy and help support people to achieve their dream of home ownership.
Note two things. The first is that the spending is going on the areas of highest need in the country:
Oxfordshire County Council will receive the largest slice of the cash, with £102m to build 5,050 homes.
A total £52.3m will also also go to Surrey County Council to pay for a water treatment facility and 1,500 homes.
So Tory then.
But more importantly, the implication of the headline is that £250 million pays for 20,000 homes. At which point I think Sajid Javid needs to get out his calculator. The total is £12,500 per house. That does not pay for a new house anywhere. This is just a thinly disguised bung to swing voters in marginal seats in the home counties. So Tory then.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I hope that the Chancellor is properly quizzed on this by the MSM (more in hope than expectation TBH)
So Dominic Cummings. Send different messages (overt or subliminal) to carefully selected different constituencies: even using the same words! If they are contradictory, ‘who says’, who notices, who cares? Keep it simple, stupid. This is just the start. We haven’t seen the social media onslaught that will follow. Cummings is now in his chosen, proven element – a campaign winner; he understands the British public very well, and knows how to play their prejudices. Why do you think he is there? How, otherwise, could he possibly have survived in post? You can like it or dislike it, but this is how it is. The bigger problem is how to beat it. Well?
In the very first spoken words of the first movie ever Hollywood “talkie”, ‘The Jazz Singer’ (1926): “you ain’t heard nuthin’ yet”.
That method is exactly how the Tories won their majority in 2015. It’s not just Cummins who employs it.
Oxfordshire and Surrey? Please.
I could build a house for 12K – just. Designed to spec, either self built or 3D printed in clay on donated land, full spectrum green credentials, minus solar panels and power storage. Will there be provision for this type of operation under Mr Javid’s offer in Oxfordshire or Surrey? Would it qualify under any special terms under the planning process?
I suspect not, but would be genuinely interested to present a theoretical case. To do so I’d like to see the breakdown of how that sum is to be allocated, the terms of the procurement contract, whether there is a list of approved contractors/developers and if so what are the conditionalities , and what land is to be made available again under what terms. If this is public money, this information should be available.
Green New Deal, anyone…?
Ooooooh Joanna – are you sure? £12500? A new house? Contain yourself! Maybe we need to chat (I develop new social housing – there’s no such thing as a £12500 house unless you are going to to do a container conversion and I think you are looking at least £25K to get it anywhere near decent).
A chap who I worked with recently told me that the new affordable starter homes in his part of Surrey were £520K – and they were small. Half a million pounds – and his ‘kids’ (both in their 30’s) were still living at home. Awful.
Our properties in the East Midlands are trad build with extra insulation, solar PV and built to the latest building regs with some elements of passiv haus. In 2015 we could do them for £80K, now we are looking at anything from £100K for a flat, to £170K for large adapted bungalow. Whether it is BREXIT or austerity or the shortage of skilled labour as London undergoes its continuous speculative building boom, bringing in anything at cost is a challenge.
OK Pilgrim, I exaggerate a little ;). My point being that most obstacles to cheap building are regulatory/landbanking/supply chain driven rather than the cost of simply constructing a dwelling. And parametric design, especially 3D printing, especially using circular economic principles and industrial byproducts, is set to push costs down very fast.
Seriously I’d be interested to explore this further off-blog with a planner… (disclosure: I’m not a construction company!)
Joanna
Good point. £12,500 wouldn’t even buy a plot of land let alone any building materials, labour etc.
The £102m for Oxfordshire (Oxford West – currently Lib dem by about 800 votes) is for an ‘upgrade’ to the A40 – without it seems a guarantee for cycle facilities to support active commuting from e.g Witney. The well supported B4044 cycle path from Eynsham to Oxford was dropped from the bid by the Conservative county. https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18007287.102m-dual-carriageway-plan-a40-approved-government/
Maths is good. “£250 million to invest in 20,000 new homes”. So that is £12,500 per “home”. I’d like to buy one of those.
More seriously, I could imagine that amount being spent on “road, schools and transport links” (sorry – are roads something different from “transport links”?) but you might expect some of that to be picked up by developers under s.106 agreements. So perhaps this is a bung to developers, not a subsidy to aspiring home owners.
So Oxfordshire is getting “£102m to build 5,050 homes”. OK, so that is £20,198 per home.
And Surrey is getting “£52.3m … to pay for a water treatment facility and 1,500 homes” So something less than £35,866 per home in Surrey. (How much does a water treatment plant cost? £10m?)
Is it even feasible to build a home for £20k in Oxfordshire or £40k in Surrey?
That leaves £95.7m for the remaining 13,350 homes in the rest of the country, outside Oxfordshire and Surrey. That is under £7,200 per home. Great. Where are they building those?
Good questions
Hmm, where is our ( Scotland’s ) 8% share ??
Devolved is, I am sure, the answer
The details are on the UK Government website …
“The Chancellor today announced more than £250 million funding for vital infrastructure that will unlock over 20,000 homes nationwide.
This investment, from the Housing Infrastructure Fund, will pay for roads, schools, public transport and utilities in six places across the Midlands, the East of England and South East. This money will ensure new homes can be built in areas of high demand where people want to live, connecting businesses with their workforce — boosting jobs, growth and living standards.”
It seems he never suggested he was going to be paying for the houses themselves.
But I guarantee that the spin is deliberate
No it isn’t, your spin is wrong..you completely misinterpreted the announcement..
I reported it as reported
Which was as it was no doubt hoped it would be reported because people did not do the numbers
Maybe they’re planning favelas for the burgeoning underclass? £12.5k should cover the cost of the corrugated iron sheeting and the ground under the shack, with erection the responsibility of the inhabitants. Utilities? A standpipe for the favela should suffice. Get the Trussell Trust to build a food bank in each favela — sorted! If schools are deemed to be necessary for the inhabitants, a PPI deal can sort that and shift the costs onto the local council. Simples! Apartheid reinvented!
Government subsidy to housing developers in the form of infrastructure spending for which the property developers get the profit and there is no return to the public purse.
Absolutely standard from the neoliberal (neo-con) playbook.
LVT could address this….. if it was set-up and charged/applied correctly.
It has the feel of a subsidy, but perhaps it is pump priming. It would be interesting to know how much tax will be paid as a result of the building “unlocked” by this infrastructure spending: employment taxes on the wages of the builders, corporation taxes on the profits of the developers, stamp duty land tax on the sale of the properties, etc.
Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t (as was misleadingly reported) £250m for 20,000 new homes.
He actually said
‘The investment, from the Housing Infrastructure Fund, will pay for roads, schools, public transport and utilities in seven places across the Midlands, the East of England and South East.’
The money is an investment in provisioning for those houses to be built following infrastructure changes. It’s not to pay for the houses.
They’ll be paid for by councils and private builders. Sadly, that’ll mean barely any affordable housing for those struggling to get on the property ladder.
Slyfield Area Regeneration Project bid to support the reallocation of a water treatment facility Surrey County Council £52.3m Providing for 1,500 homes to be built.
East of Ipswich Strategic Highway Works bid to deliver transport infrastructure Suffolk County Council £19.8m Providing for 2,000 homes to be built.
St George’s Barracks bid to deliver a new school and infrastructure Rutland County Council £29.4m Providing for 2,245 homes to be built.
A40 Smart Corridor bid Oxfordshire County Council £102m providi g for 5,050 homes to be built.
Swale Transport Infrastructure bid to deliver road improvements to two junctions of the A249 Kent County Council £38.1m Providing for 7,899 homes to be built.
Melton Mowbray Southern Distributor Road bid Leicestershire County Council £14.7m Providing for 2,340 homes to be built.
Once again, a misleading Tory headline.
Gary Leslie Phillips says:
“They’ll be paid for by councils and private builders. Sadly, that’ll mean barely any affordable housing for those struggling to get on the property ladder.”
Younger people struggling to get on the housing ladder are not the current Tory target voters.
This is ‘homes for votes’ for those already on the ladder struggling to get up a rung or two.
I surmise that the discussion in this thread demonstrates the effective point of the methodology of modern populist politics as carried out by practitioners like Dominic Cummings. The analysis of the announcement, what it means; what it really means is deconstructed by the (forensic) few here, but the critical effort is largely pointless. The simple message: ‘big Tory funding of housing provided at the local level’ has been spun, absorbed, repeated, become conventional wisdom and the political caravan has already moved on. All before anybody here put finger to keyboard. The same message will target different groups with different, even contradictory implications, and scarcely anyone will notice. The correction or clarification lags so far behind the original spin the effect is lost and simply looks redundant.
Allow me to provide an example how this works even at the simplest, crudest level. Boris Johnson on his last day at the despatch box was still spinning the proposition that Scottish Conservative MPs were responsible for winning £200m of funding for Scottish farmers: Boris Johnson replied to Ian Blackford “There are some wonderful things happening in Scotland, and it is very often thanks to Scottish Conservatives, who are delivering £200 million for Scottish farmers–that is all thanks to the intercessions of Scottish Conservatives ​–as part of the biggest ever block grant from London to Scotland” (PMQs 30th October).
The reality was the Government, under pressure essentially gave the farmers their own money back, but over a year late. Here is what the ‘Scottish Farmer’ wrote (30th June, 2018):
“Scottish farmers have lost the battle over their unpaid ‘convergence’ cash, with Defra secretary, Michael Gove, finally admitting that they would not see any of the disputed £160m EU top-up that was awarded to Scotland but allocated elsewhere in the UK by David Cameron’s administration. During an evidence session where Mr Gove was questioned by the Scottish Parliament’s rural economy and connectivity committee, he admitted that ‘mistakes had been made’: ‘That money has been allocated and is in the budgets of the various governments of the devolved administrations and we must respect the decisions of the coalition government. I cannot call back money which has been spent or has been in budgets that have already been allocated,’ insisted Mr Gove.”
Simple.
Thanks
‘Classic Dom’ one might say.
I often wonder where the fabled rebate that Thatcher got from the EU ended up? I bet our fisheries didn’t get it or any other economic sector which felt put out by Europe.
John S has touched upon something I too have felt and many others too – that it is the way domestic policy has been delivered that has turned people against Europe. BREXIT I have long argued is a reaction to the way people are governed by THEIR government – not the EU.
Boris Johnson made his whole political reputation on the Daily Telegraph as EU correspondent, peddling utter tosh about the supposed tyranny of European regulations, which were successfully designed to protect consumers from exploitation or harm. The Brexiteers loved Johnson’s bludgeoning of a Continent, not because it was true, but because they hate the EU.
Britain joined the EU under the deliberate misrepresentation that it was only a Common Market, when “ever closer union” is built in to the fundamental principles of the Treaty of Rome (1957). Britain has misrepresented Europe to itself, ever since. The truth is Britain could have drafted most of the Treaty of Rome, and guided its development if it had embraced the Coal and Steel Community in 1948, when it had the natural leadership of Europe in its grasp after 1945; but it was simply not up to the task; then, now or ever.
I believe it was Jonathan Swift who wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” But people who lie or mislead repeatedly (like our prime minister and his friends) garner a reputation and won’t be believed even if there is a wolf.
Shoot first. Ask questions later.
Apologies cost nothing if you eventually get caught out.