Reeves gets boost from gullible hacks

The government’s approach to spinning the spending review appears to rely on the expectation that if you throw a big number at hacks, especially non-specialist hacks, they will report the big number and not check the small print.

This has led to some glaring schoolboy/schoolgirl errors on the pledge of £39bn for social housing over 10 years.

For starters, both the BBC and the Guardian call it a “boost”, even though the £39bn touted isn’t the extra cash, but the 10-year total for an existing funding stream.

The BBC says:

The chancellor will unveil a £39bn boost for social and affordable housing when she speaks at 12:30 BST…

despite the sum to be unveiled being all over the papers.

Similarly, the Guardian’s headline is Rachel Reeves to unveil £39bn housing boost in spending review shake-up.

In fact, the Guardian’s live blog comes closest to looking behind the numbers, quoting a somewhat garbled post from Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation thinktank.

News this morning dominated by money for affordable housing. The TOTAL funding of £39bn over ten years is being completed to the EXTRA capital investment by this government over five years. I'm reserving judgement on whether housing is a winner until we see more detail.

— Ruth Curtice (@ruthcurtice.bsky.social) 11 June 2025 at 10:08

I think she is saying that that the money is promised a long way ahead and we don’t know the funding profile. In fact, Rachel Reeves is promising funding not just for this Parliament, not just the next one, but the one after that.

Bizarrely, the iPaper considers the fact that the pledge of money the government doesn’t have covers 10 year instead of five to be a “win” for deputy prime minister Angela Rayner.

Housing Today calls the £3.9bn a year on average “a significant increase” on the £2.5bn allocated annually under the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme once ‘top-ups’ were taken into account, but that doesn’t take into account inflation over 10 years.

Of course a lot of the papers have self-serving scripted quotes from spin doctors masquerading as “sources”, including the Mirror:

A Government source said: “The Government is investing in Britain’s renewal, so working people are better off.

"We’re turning the tide against the unacceptable housing crisis in this country with the biggest boost to social and affordable housing investment in a generation, delivering on our Plan for Change commitment to get Britain building.”

 

New money for old

I’m not sure what has left me more gobsmacked – the smoke and mirrors in the government’s claim of an extra £15bn for local transport in the North and Midlands or the credulity of the hacks for falling for it.

Lets start with some basic facts. City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTS) have already been announced (by the Tories) for both 2022-27 and 2027-32. But the government has scrapped the second phase of CRSTS and rebranded it Transport for Cities (TCR)

This document, which was withdrawn today in a rewriting of history of which Stalin would be proud, set out £13.8bn of CRSTS from 2027-32, boosted by £5bn in October 2023 by the addition of cash that the Tories said they were saving by not taking HS2 beyond the midlands.

The BBC tamely points out that:

Sunak had also announced some of these same projects, including the development of a mass transit network in West Yorkshire, in his Network North plan, intended to compensate for the decision to scrap the HS2 line north of Birmingham.

Labour reviewed these projects when they came to power in July, arguing they had not been fully funded.

So the gist of the story is that the Tories had announced £14bn, Labour queried it, and came back and said was now £15bn. But it's the same money.

I was as sceptical as anyone about the “Network North” nonsense, where the Tories promised money nine years ahead based on savings from cutting something they didn’t have the money for in the first place – but is Labour any different?

Only two years (2027-28 and 2028-29) are likely to fall within next week’s spending review and the three subsequent years are in the next Parliament. Labour probably won’t set out its total spending envelope for those years for a good while yet.

According to the detailed spending profiles released by the Departmentfor Transport today, £10.2bn (two thirds) will fall in those last three years.

So, basically, Labour is doing exactly what it accused the Tories of doing – making what can only be described as “unfunded” announcements of billions of pounds for transport beyond its time in office or its spending plans.

And, interestingly, while the document claims that “Over £500 million of TCR funding has been brought forward into 2025-26 and 2026-27”, it also says that “Funding allocations for the final year of the CRSTS programme will be confirmed in due course”. 

This means not only that half a billion of the “extra” money depends on the CRSTS programme staying at existing levels last two years, but that it might actually be cut by more than the £500m that has allegedly been “brought forward”.

 

The Times tears up its credibility

The Times has the latest spin story about government capital spending plans with a story whose feeble headline, Rachel Reeves to spend big in redwall — what could it mean?, belies a preposterously overblown opening line.

Rachel Reeves is preparing to tear up Treasury spending rules and announce a multibillion-pound investment package in the north and Midlands to combat the threat of Reform.

Is she really preparing to "tear up" Treasury spending rules? Obviously not:

Across the country Reeves is likely to have up to £100 billion of capital investment to announce, having changed the fiscal rules in her budget last year.

So she already has more scope for capital spending, having changed the fiscal rules in her budget last year to allow more borrowing.

So what is new? You have to go a long way down the piece to find the substance to the story:

Reeves ordered a review of the Treasury’s Green Book, which sets out the rules that determine which capital projects qualify for approval, in January.

The review is expected to conclude that the government should give greater priority to public sector investment in areas of lower economic productivity.

The Times has been told that it will be published on the same day as the comprehensive spending review. A ten-year infrastructure plan will be published a week later by Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury.

So, more rules being tweaked, rather than torn up.

And how new is all this? In January Civil Service World reported that:

Reeves outlined the aims of the government's Green Book review, which is set to report back at the conclusion of this year's Spending Review. The SR is due to conclude on June 11.

She said: “As the metro mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotherham, has called for, we will review the Green Book and how it is being used to provide objective, transparent advice on public investment across the country, including outside London, and the South East. This means that investment in all regions is given a fair hearing by the Treasury that I lead.” 

But here’s a “source” in the Times to provide the spin, not by giving new information but by reminding us of what Reeves said previously:

A government source said that Reeves had been clear that she wanted to review the Green Book to provide “objective, transparent advice on public investment across the country, including outside London and the southeast”. This would mean that “investment in all regions” was given a “fair hearing by the Treasury”.

Cut the crap

This Guardian article Reeves in standoff with ministers over proposed cuts to public services by Jessica Elgot is spoilt, not so much by spin (of which there is plenty) as a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of words.

Let’s start with the opening line:

The Treasury is in a standoff with some ministers over proposed cuts to public services including policing and social housing.

So there are proposed cuts to social housing? Well, no. Leaving aside the fact that capital funding for social housing isn’t really a service, it becomes clear that what is in question isn’t a cut at all but a proposal for extra cash that falls short of what Angela Rayner, whose brief it is, would like.

There are also clashes between the Reeves and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, over funding for social housing.

[…]

However, Rayner is understood to be dissatisfied with the level of funding for the next phase of the programme.

The reference to the “next phase”, as Elgot explains, is a potential increase on £2bn for 2026-27 announced in March, which “was described as a “down payment” on further funding to be announced at the spending review, which Reeves said would mark a generational shift in the building of council homes”.

Some of the “further funding” to be announced at the spending review will top up this £2bn in 2026-27, which is currently less on an annual basis than the £11.5bn on the 2021-26 programme. And chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to put in quite a bit more to deliver what she promised would be “the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation”.

Elgot points out – probably after someone who thought it was a get-out pointed it out to her  – that when Reeves “said housing will be one of the key beneficiaries of the £113bn in capital spending”, she “did not specify social homes”.

This is, if you will forgive the pun, beside the point. The affordable homes programme has always been about “social and affordable housing”, as the Reeves quote above illustrates. 

The distinction does not detract from the suggestion in Elgot’s previous piece of spin that the £113bn that Reeves conjured out of thin air will include “significant cash for housebuilding as Labour strives to meet its 1.5m homes target” and the anonymous assertion from an spin doctor masquerading as a “source” that “These will be Labour homes built by a Labour government.”

Governments often pretend that continuing spending on something at the existing rate is new money (Labour has made this worse by branding things that the Tories were already doing as part of a "Plan for Change") and it is arguable that not continuing a funding stream at the existing real-terms level would be a “cut”.

But here, while the extra money for housing may not be quite as much as Elgot previously led us to believe, or as much as Rayner would like, nothing in this story justifies calling it a cut.

 

 

"There is £113bn that was not there"

 

This piece Reeves to champion £113bn of new capital investment in spending review by Jessica Elgot in the Guardian does exactly what it says on the tin - talks about the things the chancellor wants to talk about.

Rachel Reeves will put £113bn of new capital investment at the forefront of the spending review and argue that the billions of investment in homes, transport and energy would only have happened under Labour.

The billions unlocked by the change to the fiscal rules, which will be spent over the next parliament, will be at the centre of the government’s narrative in a fortnight’s time in an acknowledgment that Labour MPs need a better economic story to address rising discontent among the public.

So, just to be clear, that’s £113bn of free money that has been magically “unlocked by the change to the fiscal rules”? No, it will (probably) be additional borrowing.

And the claim that the money will be spent “over the next parliament” is as dodgy as it is lazy, not just because the next parliament will probably begin in 2029, but because Reeves doesn’t actually specify a time period, despite implying one with a dodgy "and":

“At the spending review coming up in June, we will invest more in capital, and we’re going to invest £113bn more in capital spending than the plans we inherited from the previous government.”

In fact:

“Reeves will hope details of how the government will spend the £113bn package will be enough to stave off further disquiet over harsh cuts to day-to-day spending expected in the spending review. Departments had been asked to model reductions in their budgets of as much as 7% over the next four years.”

So, not only is this the point of the story – “to stave off further disquiet” – the cuts to day-to day spending might be the source of some of the extra capital spending. In fact, some resource (revenue) spending might just be reclassified as capital.

There is a lot of self-serving guff from people who Elgot chooses to call “sources” but who are in fact spin doctors speaking on behalf of the government. Here, a “source” gives advance justification for the recycling of announcements:

Treasury sources said Reeves understood that the government needed to set out anew how the billions would be spent.

See what they did there?

The rest of the story is full of the usual scripted quotes:

One source said: “That is real money. It’s not empty promises, or the unsigned cheques the Tories used to do. It’ll be proper money, and this investment in Britain’s future will be a part of the theme of the spending review.

“There are trade-offs in spending reviews. But she’s made a clear political choice to invest in the long-term projects that will make a real difference to people’s communities. These will be Labour homes built by a Labour government. All this investment is Labour – no one else would have done it. We changed those rules and now there is £113bn that was not there.”

Pass the sickbag.

U-turn if you want to

Hacks so love a cliche that they have universally declared what Keir Starmer said yesterday to be a "U-turn", despite having no idea how much, or how little, the policy to restrict winter fuel payments will be tweaked.

This is what the prime minister actually said at PMQs: 

we want to ensure that as we go forward, more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments. As you would expect, Mr Speaker, we will only make decisions we can afford. That is why we will look at that as part of a fiscal event.

If you look at any sensible definition of  U-turn, it would involve reversing a policy or changing it so substantially that it can be seen no longer to be operative. But Starmer didn't actually say that anything would change, only that he wants to ensure that more people get the payments - a garbled mix of aspiration and certainty. And a decision will be sometime in the future "as part of a fiscal event". 

You are eligible for the winter fuel payments if you get certain means-tested benefits as ministers pointed out after restricting the payments. They launched a campaign to encourage people to apply for pension credit, which could be described (not by me) as seeking to ensure that more people will get the payments.

But I suspect that hacks were briefed in advance to interpret Starmer's statement as saying a lot more than he actually said, much like when Tony Blair didn't actually announce a review of Clause IV.

In an excellent piece in the Guardian, Labour MP Jon Trickett only says Starmer "indicated he may U-turn", which is about right.

The important point about all of this is that, if hacks use words that overstate what has happened they don't just con their readers in the short term, but devalue those words for when they might actually apply. 

The next time a government completely reverses a policy, hacks will have no way of stressing that it really is a U-turn. 

A language deficit

This piece by Will Dunn in the New Statesman Why George Osborne still runs Britain is fascinating in its analysis but ultimately flawed in its adoption of Osborne's language.

The premise is that Osborne's narrative about "the deficit" still pervades the political orthodoxy, boxing in current chancellor Rachel Reeves and the government as a whole.

But it begins with a crass error: 

Fifteen years ago, on 11 May 2010, George Osborne arrived in the Treasury with a mandate to change the British economy. The deficit had reached more than £100bn, a hole in Britain’s finances twice the size of the armed forces.

And 

Part of the reason Osborne’s cuts to the state were so deep was that he planned to eliminate the deficit in four years.

There's no such thing as "the deficit". In recent years, governments have spent more than they receive in tax or other income but, as Dunn acknowledges without realising in the second quote, a deficit is not a permanent fixture so as to require the definite article. 

Despite setting out clearly how Osborne managed to make his story about public spending the dominant narrative since 2010, Dunn has failed to realise that Osborne's presentation of "the deficit" as an inevitability was his ultimate lie.

As the Tories continued to spend more than was coming in, increasing the country's debt, they convinced the media and therefore the public that because they had reduced "the deficit" their management of the public finances was a success. 

It is of course possible to run a surplus and for the national debt to go down, but Osborne presented a slowing down of the rate at which the debt went up as if that was what he had achieved.

The lie continued for the whole of the decade as the Tories continued to run a deficit and the national debt ballooned. 

In 2020, Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, said the Tories would "always balance the books".

There's another strange lack of sensitivity to language elsewhere in the piece:

The first and most important means by which the British economy would be healed, he said, was “active monetary policy”. Or, as a normal person would put it, cheap debt.

Economists use "debt" as synonym for borrowing in a way that normal people don't. Economists, and business journalists like Dunn, talk about corporate acquisitions for example as being financed by debt, by which they mean borrowing. 

But for normal people debt not borrowing itself but the outcome of it. 

In attempting to translate the euphemism, Dunn has merely given the reader another euphemism.