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”.