Having heard the Chancellor yesterday trying to make a quasi-plausible job of carefully ‘applying lipstick to a pig’, I wear a wry smile, since the ‘Devil is in the detail’.
£39 billion over the next 10 years, for affordable and social housing, at first sounds like a laudable objective and certainly is a humongous amount of money.
If my maths is correct, this is £3.9 billion per annum and Reeves, with a bit of luck, after four years will not be in charge of the Exchequer’s purse.
What is conspicuously absent, is how on earth will she build these socially affordable homes, by whom and with what materials?
ELUSIVE PROCESS
For theatrical purposes, in the Commons chamber, clicking one’s fingers and emitting gaseous substances in the form of soundbites, is all very pupil dilating and a good sop for the left-wing zealots of her party.
But making all this happen is quite another elusive process.
I can see that she has read the Paul Daniels’ Magic Circle instruction to dress up capital commitments as off-balance sheet expenditure, so that she doesn’t spook the Bond Market and create a Truss-like run on the Pound.
The political capital squandered on the pensioners winter fuel debacle is incalculable, and this self-inflicted wound, credibility wise, will be difficult for the Party to recover from. This was a foolhardy escapade, which for very little gain created a massive downside for them.
ABRACADABRA TRICKS
I am all in favour of social and affordable housing but as a natural born pragmatist, I want to see the blueprint of how you make this happen in reality.
It has been a long time since I believed in Abracadabra tricks and got a Crackerjack pencil!
Technically, there is a shortage of land, building materials are in finite supply and the existing nationwide builders simply do not have the capacity to help build 300,000 homes per annum to meet their ambitious targets.
In a recent survey, Savills estimated that the maximum that can be built is 180,000, which is not far adrift from the number that the Conservatives achieved.
This much trumpeted spending review, as William Shakespeare so aptly put it, was ‘much ado about nothing.’
The salient parts were already disclosed by a succession of Cabinet ‘nudnicks’ who were trotted out to meet the media in the last few days.
Trevor Abrahmsohn is Founder and Director of Glentree International
