Latest news with #MichaelHeseltine
Telegraph
04-08-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Revealed: Thatcher's Right to Buy cost taxpayers £194bn
Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme was the 'largest giveaway in UK history' and cost taxpayers almost £200bn, a new report suggests. Changes brought in by the Conservative prime minister in 1980 triggered a surge in council tenants buying their homes at a steep discounted rate. Analysis by Common Wealth, a think tank, estimates these ex-council houses would be worth £430bn today, taking inflation and the rise in property prices into account. As a result, it claims as much as £194bn of taxpayer cash was effectively given away in free equity through the discount. Researchers said the findings affirm claims by Lord Michael Heseltine that 'no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people'. Some 1.9 million council homes in England were sold at an average discount of 44pc of market value. This has contributed to the country's spiralling housing crisis – as the stock of affordable homes was depleted and not replaced, Common Wealth said. The report added: 'Right to Buy represents two big blows to council balance sheets: the discount giveaway itself, and the forgone appreciation of the assets had they not been sold.' 'Strategic policy failure' Social housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for councils, with some town halls turning to private landlords to provide council accommodation. If the properties were sold at their market value, and this money was 'reinvested in housing equity', it could pay off all council debt nearly three times over. The sum of debt securities and loans across local governments stood at £92bn at the end of last year. The Right to Buy scheme has long divided the housing industry. Some campaigners have claimed the report shows that 'Right to Buy has been a strategic policy failure'. Rachael Williamson, of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said: 'For decades, vital social housing has been sold off without effective replacement, costing the public billions and compounding the housing crisis However the Centre for Policy Studies said the data was 'highly misleading'. A spokesman said: 'Social housing normally generates no profits at all, so its economic value to its owner – the taxpayer – is approximately zero. The so-called 'discount' was not a discount from its actual value as social housing, but a discount from the hypothetical value it would have had if it were market housing. 'Taxpayers only 'lost' something they had already given away.' It comes as Angela Rayner is planning to overhaul the Right to Buy scheme and make it harder for tenants to buy their home, despite benefitting from it herself. The Deputy Prime Minister will extend the minimum time a tenant must live in the home from three to 10 years before they can buy it at a discounted rate. In 2007, Ms Rayner used the scheme to buy her former council house in Stockport, Greater Manchester, for £79,000 after claiming a 25pc discount. Rachel Reeves also announced a cut to the maximum saving from £136,400 to £38,000 in the Budget, leading to a surge in demand from tenants racing to buy. In July, The Telegraph revealed that almost 130,000 households in taxpayer-subsidised homes earned at least £71,344 last year. It means 3.2pc of those renting from local authorities are among the country's top earners. Kevin Hollinrake, chairman of the Conservative Party, said at the time: 'With over a million households on the social housing waiting list, it's impossible to justify high earners remaining in taxpayer-subsidised homes. 'Government subsidies should be focused on those in greatest need. Social housing exists as a safety net, and resources should be targeted at the poorest to ensure the system remains fair and effective.'
Telegraph
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
No one has noticed the most important part of Kemi's reshuffle
Michael Heseltine was talking recently to a Conservative successor – that's to say, to a man who now is, as Heseltine himself was once was, a Tory shadow Cabinet minister. 'During every single day of opposition,' he said, 'I went to bed with one thought only. Namely – how will I attack the Labour Party when I get up tomorrow morning?' Ponder the applicability of those words, the best part of 50 years on. Then, the Conservatives had 279 Commons seats, not too far off the winning line of 318, and about 38 per cent of the vote. Now, they have 120 seats, their lowest total in modern times, off the back of a mere 24 per cent of the vote – the lowest share in their party's history. Then, the energies of Margaret Thatcher, in whose shadow Cabinet Heseltine served, were concentrated, like his, on defeating Labour. The Liberals, as they were, had 13 MPs. Reform didn't exist at all. The SNP was unrepresented in the Commons. Today, Kemi Badenoch, must contend not only with Sir Keir Starmer but with Sir Ed Davey, whose Liberal Democrats hold 72 seats, most of which were previously Conservative, and with Nigel Farage, whose party leads the polls, snatched ten councils off the Tories in this year's local elections, and are poised to make further gains next year. Furthermore, Heseltine's main means of communication to voters was three TV channels and a handful of newspapers. Today, his successor must cover a mass of channels, online papers, YouTube, X, TikTok and much more – when he isn't being run ragged responding to a pile of frantic messages in a mass of WhatsApp groups. In short, he must embrace his front bench duties less like work than like a religious vocation. Everything else must play second fiddle. Nothing else can get in their way. He must have, as Yeats once wrote of himself, a fanatic heart. Chris Philp, Laura Trott, Andrew Griffith and above all Robert Jenrick are among those who cut the mustard. Other such MPs tend to be fairly new, with a stake in the future. Promoting them rapidly means upsetting older hands – a risky course to take if your position, like Badenoch's, is not completely secure. But not doing so means firing on less than all cylinders. There is no easy option – and, remember, most voters don't know who any of these people are and care even less. So that James Cleverly, Badenoch's defeated rival for the Conservative leadership, has returned to the Tory front bench may turn out to be less important than the reported entry to the shadow Cabinet of Neil O'Brien – who will apparently take charge of the policy process. O'Brien, who entered the Commons eight years ago, is part of a clutch of younger Conservative MPs who have the energy, brains and skills necessary if the Tories are to be reinvigorated. Others include Katie Lam, Danny Kruger and Nick Timothy. (500) Obviously, some experience is needed in the mix – which explains, for example, why John Glen, a former minister, has been appointed as Badenoch's parliamentary private secretary. And with the top three shadow Cabinet posts unchanged, plus Robert Jenrick kept where he is, Badenoch is walking on the cautious side of the street. All in all, the Conservative leader has opted to shake up CCHQ and shuffle her middle-ranking shadow Cabinet ministers. Do her changes cohere? Probably. Can their significance be over-egged? Certainly. Do they pass the Heseltine test? The jury is out.
Irish Times
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Ireland is learning what Britain has already discovered: the status quo does not endure
Last weekend, I did my best impression of a Shire Tory. I was at Henley Regatta, the world's most prestigious rowing competition (spectating, not participating). The town – Henley-on-Thames – is a bit like Dalkey in south Dublin: close to the capital, with a kind of ambient sense of wealth hanging in the air. It was once the seat of Michael Heseltine and, more recently, Boris Johnson . This is Conservative heartland. These people hoped that David Cameron would be prime minister forever. If you want in on establishment Britain, I suggest that the 35-minute train journey out of Paddington Station, London , is a very good place to start. What an upset, then, when last summer this seat – held by the Tories since 1910 – was lost to the centrist upstart Liberal Democrats . Suddenly this leafy, riverine, bourgeois utopia was no longer Conservative heartland. And the truths that the Tories believed were incontrovertible (such as that no matter how bad things got, England's rich southeast would stay loyal) were revealed to be much flimsier propositions than anyone in the party headquarters had ever bargained for. The stickiness of their appeal turned out to be not so sticky after all; the 'matter of fact' was, instead, contingent. So what's the moral here? We are biased towards trusting the status quo will endure. We are not very good at understanding that what is happening might not continue to happen. This basic psychological disposition is hard to override. And it's why the Conservatives were caught off guard in Henley-on-Thames in June 2024 by the Liberal Democrats. It's also why Cameron put erroneous faith in the idea that his country would not vote to leave the European Union – 'things just don't change that much', you could hear his internal monologue whirr when he pulled the referendum trigger. It is also why sensible experts in January 2022 just could not believe that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine with that level of force. Until he did. It's a human instinct. But as a tool of political analysis, it's about as sophisticated as a dog that believes it has been abandoned every time its owner leaves home: 'the immediate state of affairs are the only plausible state of affairs'. I suspect my labradoodle, Dougal, would have failed to recognise that Henley was vulnerable to falling to the Liberal Democrats, too. READ MORE And so to Ireland, which is staring into Donald Trump 's abyss, and wondering why on earth we ever left the economy so vulnerable to the whims of one irrational actor. As an economic model, Ireland's in the 21st century worked. Rescuing the country from the economic doldrums and transforming it into one of Europe's most cosmopolitan nations handed us a kind of centrist political stability that was the envy of much of the Continent (and latterly Westminster). But designing an economy on multinational corporate wealth works only so long as there isn't a lunatic in the White House hellbent on blocking multinational corporate investment. When there is someone like that in the Oval Office, it doesn't look like it makes much sense at all. No matter how glib that may be to point out. A few caveats: some predicted Ireland's fiscal miracle could all end in tears, and several commentators warned last year that the country's next economic crisis would come not from within our own borders but from Washington. Trump, economist Stephen Kinsella said last year, would be 'the most obvious source' of upset; the shock could even make Ireland's earlier period of austerity 'look like an episode of the Care Bears', he told the podcast The Entrepreneur Experiment. And it is not just Trump, but Europe that threatens Ireland's cushy deal right now: it is clear the glittering highs of this model will not endure forever. Ireland is exposed on two fronts. Here is the strange thing. Ireland is a country very used to vertiginous social change – the 2010s saw that rapid and radical liberalisation with the gay marriage and abortion referendums that we are all too used to vaunting. And there's recent experience of severe economic crisis followed by recovery. With this experience we might expect Ireland to be unusually alive to the fact that upheaval and disruption lurk around corners (even if we cannot predict exactly what shape it might take) and to organise our political structures accordingly. This is not a call for pessimistic thinking. I have lost track of the number of times that I have to remind myself that pessimism, like optimism, is deterministic. Believing everything is destined to go wrong is one simple way to ensure it will. But it is a self-reminder (as much as anything else) that the status quo is not permanent, no matter how much we will it to be. The Tories were not fated to rule over Henley forever just as Ireland was not always guaranteed a best friend in the White House.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lord Heseltine brands Brexit a ‘pack of lies' and calls for Britain to rejoin EU
Michael Heseltine says Brexiteers sold Britain a 'pack of lies' and called for the UK to rejoin the European Union. The former deputy prime minister said the UK should be 'at the heart of Europe' and that returning to the bloc would be 'in the best interests of a generation of young British people'. Speaking ahead of Friday's fifth anniversary of Britain's official departure from the EU, Lord Heseltine told the BBC: 'The creation of the single market was Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement. It was a culmination of the determination that war should be eliminated from the landmass of Europe.' He added: 'I was rather keen on these ideas. And I am appalled by Brexit, I don't believe for an instant that we should accept the verdict of a pack of lies that was paraded by various people in order to persuade people we had to sever our relationship with Europe.' His intervention came as Downing Street confirmed Sir Keir Starmer will snub the fifth anniversary of Brexit, with the prime minister instead focusing on his ongoing reset of relations with the EU. The prime minister has no plans to celebrate or mark the key milestone, his official spokesman confirmed, adding that he was focused on 'making Brexit work for the British people'. 'We are looking forward, not backwards… that is why we are resetting our relationship with Europe, to strengthen ties and deliver growth and security for the UK,' the spokesman added. Downing Street said the reset includes taking advantage of the UK's position on AI and financial services, as well as highlighting a new security pact with the EU. Sir Keir has been pursuing a closer relationship with the EU, including considering joining a tariff-free trading scheme with Europe after the EU, since entering Downing Street in July. On Monday, Lord Heseltine was pressed on how far he would advocate the prime minister going in rebuilding Britain's ties with the bloc. He said: 'Straight down the line, I would go back into Europe, to the heart of Europe. 'And do you know why? Because I believe it is in the best interests of a generation of young British people.' Lord Heseltine also dismissed critics of a second referendum on the EU, asking 'What is democracy about?'. 'This question of, 'we voted in 2016, the deal is done', what is democracy about?' he said. He added: 'I have lived through generation after generation where Conservatives have opposed Labour nationalisation programmes, we undid them. We said we would undo them, despite the fact they had a mandate. 'Why can't you have another referendum, put it to the British people?' On Sunday, Rachel Reeves said the UK was 'absolutely happy' to look at joining a tariff-free trading scheme with Europe after the EU opened the door to British membership. The chancellor indicated ministers will consider signing up to the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (PEM), as it would with any 'constructive ideas' consistent with its 'red lines' about not returning to the EU. Labour has ruled out rejoining the customs union and single market, or returning to freedom of movement, but committed to seeking closer ties with Brussels as part of a 'reset' in UK-EU relations. EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic last week suggested Britain could join the PEM, which allows for tariff-free trade of goods across Europe, as well as some North African and Levantine nations. Speaking to broadcasters over the weekend, Ms Reeves said she was 'happy to look' at the prospect of the UK joining the scheme with Europe. The Chancellor told Sky News' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: 'It was really interesting to see Maros Sefcovic this week suggest the UK might be welcome in that pan-European and Mediterranean customs framework. 'We are absolutely happy to look at these different proposals because we know that the deal that the previous government secured is not working well enough. 'It's not working well enough for small businesses trying to export, it's not working well enough for larger businesses either. 'We're grown-ups who admit that, whereas the previous government said there were no problems at all. 'And where there are constructive ideas we are happy to look at those, as long as they're consistent with the red lines we set out in our manifesto.'
