Brace yourself

A few hours after the chancellor George Osborne delivered his Budget, a Local Government Association debate posed the question: ‘The first cut is the deepest?’. With the Lib-Con government’s actions to date suggesting much worse is to come, the answer, as I told the LGA audience, is very much ‘no, it isn’t’.

Let’s get one thing straight: however ministers in the coalition dress up the decisions they have trailed or half-announced, the cuts they talk about are not being made out of necessity. They are being made by choice. Driven at the outset by an ideology whose goal is a smaller state.

In government, Labour knew it had to tackle the problems caused by the credit crunch and the subsequent global recession. That’s why it put in measures in place to deal with the economic deficit and borrowing, and get Britain back on track. That our actions were the right ones has now been confirmed by the new Office for Budget Responsibility and other, independent economic forecasters. Borrowing is less than was predicted, unemployment lower and tax receipts higher. The quick and deep cuts proposed by the coalition government risk all of that, and more.

Housing, as we know, was first in line for cuts, with £230 million instantly slashed from the Homes and Communities Agency budget. We were also quickly told that the entire £780 million for housing investment was being put on hold until the Budget. I say put on hold but at the time of writing it’s been several days since George Osborne delivered his Budget and we’ve yet to see the promised detail on housing. It’s not even tucked away, as we’ve now come to expect, in the darker corners of the HCA website.

For those who care about housing, I fear the evident disdain being shown by the coalition indicates further cuts to come. While this is partly to do with the downgrading of the role of housing minister from cabinet, it is mostly about Communities and Local Government ministers being either too weak or without the will to make the case for public investment in new housing. At the very least, they could query what happened to the government only cutting ‘waste’, rather than the frontline services on their watch.

Setting the tone for the Budget, the prime minister said to expect a change that would alter the British way of life and at the same time called for a fundamental rethink of what the state should and shouldn’t do. Taken alongside the trailed cuts, the abolition of regional planning targets and the reneging of private landlords’ regulation, the sector could be forgiven for feeling housing is gradually being removed from the business of government.

If that is the ultimate aim of the Lib-Con coalition, it amounts to a dereliction of duty.

John Healey MP is shadow cabinet minister for housing and planning