Spinning the axe

Posted by: Jules Birch

27/05/2010

Ministers in successive governments have spun cuts in housing investment as increases but David Laws did it with real style in parliament yesterday.

If he keeps this up he may even come close to matching John Prescott’s performance in 1997. The former deputy prime minister boasted about billions of pounds extra for housing when Labour took power when the truth was that the new homes programme in particular was actually set for deep cuts.

And the new chief secretary to the Treasury was up to the same thing yesterday in the parliamentary debate on spending cuts. 

‘We are allocating an additional £170 million to fund investment in social rented housing in 2010-11 to help to deliver 4,000 social housing starts - members on both sides should welcome that,’ he told shadow chancellor Alistair Darling.

‘In the savings that we make, we are seeking to ensure that we cut with care,’ he told Conservative MP and former chair of the public accounts committee Edward Leigh. ‘We have demonstrated this week that we can find efficiency savings and also put money into the areas that many of us in the House are passionate about-protecting education and putting more money than the previous Government did into social housing.’

He was referring to the £170m of savings that will be redistributed back into housing at the insistence of the Lib Dems. But there was no mention of the £150m cut to housing announced on Monday or of the £780m cut to the Communities and Local Government budget to make it the biggest departmental loser. 

No mention either of the briefing document published on Tuesday by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) that showed that housing will be cut by £230m - and that  hundreds of millions of pounds worth of kickstart, local authority new build, housing market renewal and growth fund investment has been frozen ahead of the emergency budget on June 22.

Shadow housing minister John Healey has already accused the government of using the extra money as a ‘fig leaf for cuts to come’.

He told Inside Housing this week: ‘Not axeing money that is already funding a programme does not constitute new money, and this is just old fashioned spin rather than the long promised “new politics”.’

But Laws didn’t stop there. Criticised by Labour’s Dennis Skinner for campaigning against cuts and then imposing them, he hit back: ‘The hon. Gentleman talked about the decisions that we have made. Perhaps he could acknowledge two things. First, we have protected the NHS and we have protected schools. We have put money into social housing, which he might have aspired to do if he had had influence on the previous Government.’

And his real triumph came when he was congratulated on his appointment by Lib Dem backbencher Mike Hancock and asked to explain ‘some of the benefits that will accrue, particularly with regard to the amount of money being put into social housing’. 

‘I am grateful to him for drawing attention to the additional investment that we are making in social housing,’ he said. ‘That is a real priority for many members across the House, including those in the Liberal Democrat party and the Conservative party, and, I suspect, for a lot of members on the Labour benches, who have been sad that the previous government were unable to invest more in social housing.’

But that was just preparing MPs for a serious charge against the old Labour administration: ‘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. We are determined to do everything we can to ensure that the vulnerable people who depend on social housing - those who are on the waiting lists that built up under the previous government - will have some hope under this administration.’

The ‘black hole’ is presumably a reference to the amount of money that was brought forward from 2010/11 to pay for extra spending in previous years. It does not bode well for the emergency budget or for the spending review.