Early evening summary
Angela Rayner has promised her planning changes will not lead to “a load of ugly houses”, as she set out plans for more GP surgeries, roads and schools around developments to win over the “nimbys”. Asked to explain why she has removed a requirement for buildings to be “beautiful” from the revised national planning policy framework (NPPF), Rayner said: “Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another.” (See 12.42pm.)
Ministers have rejected claims that Tory-voting areas are being disproportionately forced to accept higher housing targets. (See 10.17am and 12.16pm.)
Rayner has confirmed that she wants to restrict, but not get rid of, right to buy. (See 12.57pm.)
Rayner has suggested that people will drop their objections to new homes being built in their communities if there is proper infrastructure in place. (See 11.45am.)
Republic, the group campaigning against having a constitutional monarchy, has released polling suggesting people overwhelming want MPs to swear allegiance to their constituents, not to the king. (See 4.16pm.)
Universities face sanctions if they fail to stop 'abuse of power' in staff/student relationships, watchdog says
Universities in England could face sanctions if they fail to take steps to prevent an “abuse of power” in intimate personal relationships between university staff and students, the higher education watchdog has said. PA Media reports:
The Office for Students (OfS) will introduce a new condition of registration which will require higher education institutions in England to set out how they are protecting students from harassment and sexual misconduct.
It comes after a fifth of students who responded to an OfS survey said they had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour in the 2022/23 academic year.
Universities and colleges will not be able to use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), which forbid students from talking about incidents of harassment or sexual misconduct, under the OfS’s condition of registration.
Higher education institutions will be required to take “one or more steps to make a significant and credible difference in protecting students” from any conflict of interest or “abuse of power” in intimate staff-student relationships.
But universities will have the flexibility to develop and publish their own policies on relationships between staff and students – including the restrictions or prohibitions they consider appropriate, the watchdog has said.
The Welsh government has published figures today suggesting its controversial decision to make 20mph the default speed limit in residential areas has been followed by a reduction in collisions and injuries.
The 20mph policy was introduced in September last year. According to a report with provisional figures for the first quarter of 2024, “the total number of collisions is 18% lower than in the previous quarter (737) and 17% lower than in the same quarter in 2023 (733)”.
And, on casualties, the report says “the total number of casualties is 17% lower than in the previous quarter (982) and 16% lower than in the same quarter in 2023 (968)".
In a post on his Substack account, Will Hayward from WalesOnline says that other data presents a similar picture. “For example, insurance company Esure said they had seen a 20% drop in vehicle damage claims in Wales since the nationwide 20mph default speed limit was introduced,” he says. He says he is surprised Welsh Labour politicians are not talking about the success of the policy, instead of “acting apologetic” about it.
But the Welsh government report is much more non-committal about what the figures show. It says that the number of collisions and casualties on Welsh roads has been declining gradually over the past decade, that the figues vary from quarter to quarter and that, with regard to collision numbers, “care should be taken when interpreting this data over a short time period”.
A Holyrood probe has found “no evidence” the SNP misused stamps bought with public money to aid its general election campaign, PA Media reports. PA says:
Officials launched an inquiry last month after WhatsApp messages among senior staff working for SNP MSPs appeared to suggest stamps paid for by expenses were being used in the party’s push ahead of the July 4 poll.
The investigation by the Scottish parliamentary corporate body (SPCB) – the cross-party group of MSPs tasked with running the parliament – spoke to the staff involved and their MSP bosses, and said all of whom “complied fully with the investigation”.
Today officials said there was no evidence to suggest stamps had been misused and they had received assurances from the MSPs to that effect.
A spokesman for the Scottish parliament said: “Following a thorough investigation, officials have found no evidence that stamps were used inappropriately. Therefore, no further action is required. Ahead of the next session the SPCB will carry out a review of stamp purchasing, as part of its sessional review of the members’ expenses scheme, to ensure the current approach is the most suitable.”
Lisa Nandy says she wants culture department help make Britain 'self-confident country, at ease with itself'
Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has said she would like her department to help make Britain “a self-confident country, at ease with itself”.
She set out the ambition in a speech at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, attended by representatives from more than 150 leading cultural organisations.
In line with the government’s determination to prioritise economic growth, Nandy stressed the economic value of the culture, media and sport sectors, which are worth £170bn and support 4m jobs.
But Nandy also stressed her determination not to follow her Tory predecessors, who often used the post to harry cultural institutions they saw as “woke”. Nandy said she wanted to help arts organisations write communities back into the national story.
She went on:
It is our ambition that we will face a self-confident country, at ease with itself, where all our people see themselves in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as a nation – and our contribution is seen and valued.
And my message to each and every one of you is that if you share that belief in our country, if you have that zest, if you want to challenge us and are willing to be challenged in turn, then I promise you that we will walk alongside you. We will have your back. And we will give voice to the country many of us have believed in all our lifetime but never quite yet seen.
Nandy’s comment echoed what John Major said when he became PM in 1990, and declared in his first speech in Downing Street that he wanted to create “a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident and a country that is able and willing to build a better quality of life for all its citizens”.
Voters overwhelmingly want MPs to swear allegiance to their constituents, not to king, poll suggests
Earlier this month the Labour MP Clive Lewis had return to parliament to be sworn in properly after his first attempt was declared invalid because he left out the line about swearing allegiance to King Charles’ “heirs and successors”. As he took the oath a second time, he said he hoped in future MPs would be able to swear their loyalty to their constituents, not the king.
It seems the public agree. Republic, the group campaigning against having a hereditary monarch as head of state, has released polling showing that “56% of the public believe MPs should swear allegiance to their constituents and the country, compared to just 11% who want MPs to pledge allegiance to the king”.
Graham Smith, Republic’s CEO, said:
At a time when faith in politics is at a low ebb, it’s understandable the people want MPs to pledge allegiance to them, not to Charles and his family.
This poll underlines a significant shift in attitudes toward the monarchy. The public put much more faith in democracy, but want our democracy to work for them, not elites and billionaires.
Clearly it’s time that our representatives swear an oath to their constituents instead of our unelected head of state.
Today Republic is calling on the government to immediately bring forward legislation to change the parliamentary oath, so that MPs can pledge to do the job they were elected to do, serve the people.
Rayner says building more homes a 'moral obligation'
Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, has written a letter to metro mayors summarising the planning changes she has announced this week and urging them to work with the government on delivering more homes. She says this is a “moral obligation”.
Here is an excerpt.
As regional leaders, you know how dire the situation has become and the depth of the housing crisis in which we find ourselves as a nation. You see it as record numbers of homeless children are placed in temporary accommodation; as the councils that you work with grapple with waiting lists for social housing getting longer and longer; and as your younger residents are priced out of home ownership.
It is because of this I know that, like every member of the government, you will feel not just a professional responsibility but a moral obligation to see more homes built. To take the tough choices necessary to fix the foundations of our housing system. And we will only succeed in this shared mission if we work together. That is why it was so important to me and the prime minister that we gathered in our first week in office. And it is why we have been so clear that housing need in England cannot be met without planning for growth on a larger than local scale. This means enhancing your powers over strategic planning, to ensure that you can work together with your constituent authorities to deliver the housing and high-quality jobs that underpin local growth.
She has also delivered a similar message to council leaders and chief executives.
Updated
As a new prime minister, Keir Starmer has to spend quite a lot of time on introductory telephone calls with fellow heads of government. This afternoon he has been speaking to Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, to Bola Tinubu, the Nigerian president, and to Nikos Christodoulides, the president of Cyprus.
On the talk with da Silva, No 10 said:
The prime minister welcomed Brazil’s presidency of the G20 and its upcoming presidency of COP next year, and underscored the UK’s support for Brazil in its priorities to combat the global challenges of hunger, poverty and climate change.
On the call with Tinubu, No 10 said:
The president congratulated the Prime Minister on his recent election victory, and the prime minister commended the President as Nigeria marks twenty-five years of unbroken democracy.
And after the conversation with Christodoulides, No 10 said:
The president warmly welcomed the prime minister’s reset with European and global partners. They agreed this also marked an important opportunity to deepen the invaluable relationship that the UK and Cyprus share, particularly on issues including regional security and migration.
Voters strongly support large increase in new homes being built, but not on green belt, poll suggests
Voters back the government’s plans for a big increase in housebuilding by a margin of two to one, new polling from YouGov suggests. And even when people are asked if they favour a large number of new homes being build in their local area, they back this by a smaller majority, 52% to 41%.
But the poll also suggests there voters oppose some of the methods ministers want to use to deliver a big increase in the number of homes built. The survey suggests they are more likely to oppose than to support ministers being allowed to overrule councils when they refuse planning applications, and it suggests two thirds of people oppose new homes being built on the green belt.
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Taylor Wimpey says Labour’s planning changes ‘important early step’ for more homes
Taylor Wimpey has welcomed Labour’s planning proposals as an “important early step” to delivering more homes across England, as its half-year profits fell by nearly 60%, Jack Simpson reports.
If you have got a long holiday coming up, and you have not chosen anything to read yet, then try No Way Out by Tim Shipman, which is the best of the political books that has landed on my desk this year, and one that I’ve not had the chance to plug here yet. Shipman, the Sunday Times’s chief political commentator, published two superb books about the politics of Brexit before the 2019 election (All Out War, and Fall Out), and this one, if anything, is even better. It mostly covers the final year and a half of Theresa May’s premiership, and her doomed attempts to negotiate a Brexit deal. It was a disastrous period in our national politics, and Shipman recounts it, and explains why, better than anyone.
Some of this may feel like ancient history now but, with Keir Starmer repeatedly saying that his mantra in government will be “country first, party second”, one revelation is particularly topical. Shipman says in early 2019 there was a cabinet meeting where ministers explicitly argued, when discussing Brexit policy, that Tory party unity was more important than avoiding the economic damage of a no-deal Brexit. He says:
Senior civil servants in cabinet were shocked not only that no-deal was suddenly an option, but also at the reasons given. One said, ‘All around the table, they said, “If the choice is the Conservative party staying together and no-deal or the Conservative party fracture and an extension, the national interest is in the Conservative party staying together.” It was one of those moments when you realise that you’ve been complacent about ideology in politics. They really believe it was the Conservative party that made Britain great. They had internalised this mythology.’ When the cabinet minutes were written, the civil servant responsible made a point of including the observation that ministers had equated the national interest with that of the Tory party. When JoJo Penn [an aide to Theresa May] spotted this, May was furious and demanded it be changed. The mandarins refused.
A Treasury minister is being investigated by parliament’s standards watchdog, the first such inquiry since the election, PA Media reports. PA says:
Tulip Siddiq, economic secretary to the Treasury and MP for Hampstead and Highgate, is under investigation for the late registration of interests, according to the parliamentary standards commissioner’s website.
The inquiry is thought to relate to Siddiq’s failure to register rental income from a property in London, which a Labour spokesman said was “an administrative oversight” for which she had apologised.
The spokesman said: “Tulip will co-operate fully with the parliamentary commissioner on standards on this matter.”
Siddiq is the first MP of the new parliament to be placed under investigation by the standards commissioner.
But investigations into three former MPs which began during the last Parliament remain open.
Former Conservative MP Bob Stewart is being investigated for failing to declare an interest and an alleged lack of co-operation with the watchdog’s inquiry.
Ex-Tory and Reclaim MP Andrew Bridgen is being investigated over registration of his interests, while former Tory Sir Conor Burns is being investigated for use of information received in confidence.
During the last parliament, the standards commissioner opened more than 100 investigations into MPs, the majority of which were resolved by “rectification” – a procedure that allows MPs to correct minor or inadvertent breaches of Commons rules.
A reader asks:
I was wondering if you ever got a response from the DHSC yesterday as to why the previous government claimed settling the junior doctors’ dispute would cost £1.7billion?
That is a reference to a post on the blog yesterday about Victoria Atkins, the shadow health secretary, asking why Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, said the 22% pay rise for junior doctors would cost just £350m when the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said in May a pay rise like that would cost more than £1.7bn.
I did get a reply (from the Treasury), and I included it as an update, but it came late and most readers will have missed it. So I’ll repeat it here. The Treasury said the £350m figure that Reeves was quoting was the extra cost of the pay deal for junior doctors, on top of what it would cost to implement the pay review body recommendations for them.
Today says the Times reports that the full cost of the pay deal for junior doctors is £1.1bn.
Updated
Rayner confirms she wants to restrict, but not get rid of, right to buy
In her Radio 2 interview Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, also confirmed that she wanted to restrict, but not get rid of, right to buy.
When it was put to her that as a Labour politician she probably disapproved of the policy, launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government, allowing council house tenants to buy their homes at a discount, Rayner said she was reviewing what to do about it. She went on:
The real challenge we’ve got at the moment is the 2012 changes to right to buy [the discount was increased] meant that we can’t replace the stock, because the taxpayers are funding us creating social homes and then we’re not able to replace them once they are sold off at a highly discounted rate.
We think right to buy is something people should have, if you’ve raised your family in your home, you’ve been in it a long time, then this should be a way for you to buy it. But we don’t think the current situation is tenable when we want to build more social housing.
'Beautiful means nothing really' - Rayner defends removing beauty requirement from new planning rules for homes
Vine says Labour has removed the “beauty” requirement from planning.
Rayner replies:
This is ridiculous. Beautiful is so subjective. Actually, within the planning framework, there is a lot of specifications about in keeping with the local [environment].
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder anyway.
It’s actually about [being] in keeping with the area, it’s about protecting nature and having access to nature, it’s about making sure that buildings are safe, they’re warm, they’re sustainable. So there’s a number of guidelines and rules that a developer has to follow.
Beautiful? Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another.
Vine questions this. “There are ugly houses,” he says.
And Rayner replies:
And they’ve got through the system, under beauty.
All that wording was doing was preventing and blocking development. That’s why we think it’s too subjective.
And, actually, the guidelines and the rules that are in place mean there has to be consultation, they have to follow the rules on what the buildings look like, the safety of the buildings, are they in keeping with are – Yorkshire brick in parts of our mill towns …. [There are] rules and protections in place.
So I don’t buy this idea that I’m just going to build a load of ugly houses. That’s just not true.
The draft version of the new national planning policy framework published yesterday contained tracker marker showing where words and phrases from the old version had been taken out. The changes included the removal of various passages saying homes or places needed to be beautiful. Here is an example.
But many references to the importance of beauty in the countryside remain in the document.
Rayner interviewed by Jeremy Vine
Jeremy Vine is interviewing now Angela Rayner on Radio 2.
Rayner starts by saying every family is affected by the housing crisis.
Q: How will building more homes make them more affordable?
Rayner says the changes to the national planning policy framework include requirements for affordable housing.
Vine plays a clip from someone worried that the green belt could be “gone for ever” under Labour’s plans.
Rayner says the government will protect areas from urban spread. Only 30 local authorities have an up-to-date urban plan. She will require them all to have one.
Vine asks about claims that Tory areas are disproportionately affected. He quotes the Fareham example. (See 10.17am.)
Rayner says some authorities are seeing their targets going up because they are not meeting local needs. The Conservatives promised to build 300,000 homes a year. But they repeatedly failed to meet it, she says.
Q: Why is the target going down for London?
Rayner says the target for London was a “nonsense” one. (See 11.04am.)
Rayner says many pensioners could keep getting winter fuel payments by claiming benefits to which they're eligible
In her interview on ITV’s This Morning Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, urged pensioners at risk of losing winter fuel payment to check whether they are eligble for pension credit.
On Monday Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced that the government will stop giving the winter fuel payment, which is worth up to £300, to all pensioners. Instead it will be means-tested.
Rayner told ITV that the government was doing this reluctantly, because of the “horrendous” state of the public finances left by the Tories, and that pensioners should check to see if they are eligible for the benefits that would allow them to continue getting the winter fuel payments. She said:
There’s thousands of people that are eligible for pension credit that are not currently receiving it.
So my plea to people who are listening to this is check out whether you’re available for pension credit because there’s so many people that won’t, and those people will continue to get the winter fuel payment.
According to government figures, only 63% of people eligible for pension credit actually claim it.
Updated
Rayner suggests 'nimby' objections to new housing will fade if proper infrastructure in place
Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, has suggested that people will drop their objections to new homes being built in their communities if there is proper infrastructure in place.
In an interview with ITV’s This Morning, Rayner argued that people do not oppose new housing just “for nimby reasons”, but because they fear the local infrastructure cannot cope.
Rayner has announced plans intended to trigger a big increase in housebuilding. But previous governments have found it hard to make this happen, partly because while voters tend to favour more homes being build in principle, developments often provoke intense local opposition from so-called “nimby” (not in my back yard) campaigners.
Rayner said these objections might fade if people were not worried about local roads, schools and surgeries being overcrowded. She said the government was requiring councils to produce up-to-date development plans, and that these would have to cover infrastructure.
She went on:
There isn’t a family that hasn’t got a housing need that isn’t met in the UK at the moment, so people are not like nimby for nimby reasons.
They’re saying ‘well hang on a minute our roads are already congested, we can’t get a GP appointment and now you want to build more houses here?’ So infrastructure is critical.
And that’s why our rules will make sure that we get that infrastructure as well, because I’ve heard what people have said on that – ‘we need these homes, but Ang we need the infrastructure in place.’
Pennycook defends decision to cut housing targets for London
In his LBC interview Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, also defended the government’s decision to cut the housing target for London from 100,000 new homes a year to 80,000. He explained:
What happened in London under the previous system is that this arbitrary 35% urban uplift was imposed on every borough in London, different from any other metro area in the country, and got you to a figure of around 100,000.
What we’re saying to the mayor – and let’s be very clear on this, the current London plan is around 52,000 homes, current delivery in London is just over 30,000 – we’re saying the London target is 80,000. That’s incredibly stretching. The conversation I’m having with the mayor and officials in City Hall is we need you to do more.
In a thread on X last night, Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a Tory thinktank, criticised these plans for London. The CPS welcomed the main thrust of what Angela Rayner announced yesterday. But Colvile said the government should be demanding more homes in London.
His thread starts here.
I like a lot of things about Labour's housing reforms. But the decision to let London off the hook has me properly fuming. Quick thread. (1/?)
— Robert Colvile (@rcolvile) July 30, 2024
I like a lot of things about Labour’s housing reforms. But the decision to let London off the hook has me properly fuming. Quick thread.
And here are some of the points he makes.
When you’re in power, you get to fuck over the people who didn’t vote for you. That’s life. The Tories did that with the ‘urban uplift’, which hacked housing targets in order to force more homes into the big cities. And now Labour have done the opposite.
The result is the pattern in this chart (via @JenWilliams_FT) - housing targets hiked in the North and the shires, lowered in the big cities. (Uplift was 35%, which helps explain some of these figures.)
But London isn’t like other places! It’s where everyone is moving to, and everyone is migrating to (approx 30% of migrants). As this 2022 chart from @NeilDotObrien shows, once you account for population change, it is absolutely not building anything like enough houses.
Pennycook rejects claim Tory-voting areas being disproportionately singled out for larger housing targets
In an interview with LBC Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, rejected claims that the new housing targets set for local authorities are politically motivated.
Yesterday Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, said that the system used to calculate local housing targets is changing. She published tables showing what the new figures would be, authority by authority, and this has led to claims that Tory-voting communities are being forced to accept many more homes.
On LBC Nick Ferrari, the presenter, said that in Fareham, where Suella Braverman is the MP, the target for new homes would rise from 115 a year to 794. In North Yorkshire (Rishi Sunak) it would go up from 1,360 to 4,230, he said, and in Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden) it would rise from 277 to 959.
Asked to explain why the figures were changing so dramatically, Pennycook said:
What we’re proposing in the consultation that was released yesterday is to change the methodology about how housing targets are calculated.
At the moment, they’re calculated on an outdated population-based projection, figures from 2014. And what that means is the areas of the country that have not grown a lot, but need to, including some of those you’ve mentioned, have very low housing targets.
We’re changing the method. We’re saying that every part of the country needs to grow by at least 0.8% of its existing housing stock. We’ve got an adjustment for affordability.
When it was put to him that the seven-fold increase for Fareham seemed unreasonable, Pennycook replied:
We simply don’t have enough homes. That is why we got a housing crisis. That’s why we got 150,000 people housed in temporary accommodation. More than a million on the housing register etc. We’ve got to tackle the crisis.
We were elected on a very clear mandate to build those homes and more parts of the country are going to have to do more.
Ferrari asked if party politics was a factor. Pennycook replied:
Not at all, because we have a very simple, clear and straightforward methodology that produces those numbers.
Building work on homes in new towns should start before next election, says housing minister Matthew Pennycook
Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme he had to respond to a series of sceptical questions from Amol Rajan, the presenter, who pointed out that both the last Labour government, and the coalition government, promised new towns that never materialised. Here are the main points from the interview.
Pennycook said that building work on some of the new homes in the new towns identified by the taskforce announced today could start before the election. Rajan said that Angela Rayner claimed before the election she would like to see housing completion in new towns within five years. Asked if that was realistic, Pennycook said:
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to have spades in the ground on several of these large-scale new communities by the final year of the parliament, and that will be our objective.
He accepted that new towns on their own were “not a solution in and of themselves” to the housing crisis. He was responding to a question from Rajan who quoted from a post on the Planoraks planning blog, by Zack Simons, about Labour’s new towns policy. Writing last month, Simons said:
We have a shortfall of well over 4 million homes. Take all the new towns we’ve built since 1950, add ‘em all up… under 3 million people live there. Which is to say: new towns can be hugely powerful, but they’re not close, not anywhere close, to being a full solution to our needs for housing and other kinds of development.
Pennycook said that today’s announcement had to be taken alongside yesterday’s announcement about the target for new homes being raised from 300,000 per year to 370,000 per year. “And there is more to come,” he added.
He claimed that Labour had a better chance of succeeding with new towns than previous governments because it had “a comprehensive plan”. He accepted that there were lessons to be learned from the failure of past governments to build new towns. He went on:
But we will succeed where others have failed partly because we’ve got a comprehensive plan to drive this forward in a way [we didn’t have] on previous occasions.
He dimissed suggestions that having a large number of MPs representing marginal seats would make it hard for Labour to approve lots of new housing. Those MPs recognise there is “an urgent need” to address the housing crisis, he said.
Angela Rayner appoints taskforce to identify sites for ‘new generation of towns’ within 12 months
Good morning. Parliament starts the summer recess today, most of the Westminster political class will be making plans for a post-election holiday, but the business of government goes on and this morning ministers are announcing plans for what they say will be “a new generation of new towns”.
Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, is setting up a new towns taskforce which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months. It will be chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC who has unrivalled experience as an adviser to governments, particularly on local government matters. The deputy chair is Dame Kate Barker, an economist and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has also led previous housing policy inquiries for previous governments.
The taskforce will recommend where new towns should be built. But, reading the announcement from the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, it is clear that many of these new towns won’t actually be new towns, but extensions to existing towns.
Rayner also wants these developments to aim for a 40% affordable housing rate.
Explaining what the taskforce will do, the department says:
The programme of new towns will create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger. These places could deliver hundreds of thousands of much-needed affordable and high-quality homes in the decades to come, tackling the barriers to growth and helping more working people across the country own their own home.
The new towns will help unlock the economic potential of existing towns and cities across the country, and the government will continue to drive growth and regenerate areas that have been held back by constraints on their expansion for far too long. While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area.
These new communities will be governed by a ‘new towns code’ – a set of rules that developers will have to meet to make sure new towns are well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live. They will have all the infrastructure and public services necessary to support thriving communities. The towns will also help meet housing need by targeting rates of 40% affordable housing with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.
Rayner will be talking about this later. She is on ITV’s This Morning at 10.30am, and then on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show at noon.
Otherwise, the diary looks quite empty. But doubtless of God of News will provide something.
We are also covering the Southport riots, but on a different blog. Yohannes Lowe is writing that. It’s here.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on X (Twitter). I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use X; I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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