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.