David Laws may have fallen into a black hole of his own but the row he ignited about the housing one does not look like it’s going away.
As I blogged last week, the former chief secretary to the Treasury made the serious charge in a Commons debateon the coalition government’s spending cuts.
Among the many black holes that we are discovering in the public finances left to us by that government, we have already found a very big black hole in the funding of the social housing programme,’ he told MPs.
Before Laws was forced to resign over his expenses claims, former housing minister John Healey wrote to him demanding an apology.
‘If this money is not now available to build new affordable housing it is because you and the chancellor have pulled the plug on the arrangements and agreements in place,’ he said.
But Healey’s successor Grant Shapps tweeted this on Sunday: ‘Weekend reviewing spending decisions by CLG Ministers from Jan to election - Some just shockingly wasteful.
Others look like election bribes.’It was Shapps who first raised the issue back in March. He claimed to have identified a £25m black hole in the housing programme and dismissed Healey’s claims that efficiencies would be found to plug the gap at a later stage.Black holes are not exactly new in housing.
In the last two years alone they’ve been identified in the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly budget and in Glasgow, Southwark, Lambeth and the entire council housing finance system.
And what about the coalition government’s own plans? Laws had boasted of an extra £170m for housing before it became clear that last week’s cuts package had axed or frozen £610m of Homes and Communities Agency funding - prompting Healey to describe it as ‘either a serious mistake or serious deception’.
Black holes swallow any kind of matter. And the next event horizon - the emergency budget - is just three weeks away.
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