Treasury Trails £1bn for Housing and New Borrowing for Mayors
Three days before the Budget the Treasury has trailed more than £1bn for social and affordable housing in England, taking its ten-year programme past £40bn, alongside £285m of transitional funding for local leaders and a £1.5bn borrowing facility from 2028. The chancellor says he is ending “fragmented bidding pots”.
This arrived overnight as one briefing and was filleted into two stories by different desks, which is worth knowing because the housing money and the devolution package are the same announcement rather than two. It is on the record, with quotations from both the chancellor and the prime minister, but it is not yet a published government document. Andy Burnham’s framing was characteristically blunt: “I’m calling time on local leaders going cap in hand to Westminster. That is no way to run a country.” Also in the package: £150m to build capacity in strategic authorities, councils able to borrow from government at preferential rates for housebuilding, and from 2028 a share of income tax revenue handed directly to local areas. The Mayor of London says the borrowing could unlock the West London Orbital and extensions to the Bakerloo line. One awkwardness sits inside the same story: the Treasury’s own entrepreneurship adviser is resigning the day after the Budget, having told a newspaper that start-ups are treated as a “sideshow” at the “margins of economic policy”.