£780m Labour housing pledges was not "fully and securely funded"

Labour ministers promised thousands of new homes would be built despite hundreds of millions of pounds in funding not being secured.

The Department for Communities and Local Government took the highly unusual step of releasing details of the scale of Labour’s largesse in the months before the general election.

A trawl of records showed “the previous Government made commitments that were not fully and securely funded”.

It included an eye-watering £780 million towards housing priorities as part of Gordon Brown’s flagship Housing Pledge.

It is understood that the money – half of a £1.5 billion fund - depended on the Home Office and the health, education and transport departments “underspending” on their annual budgets. This money will now be used to tackle the deficit.

A spokesman for Communities and Local Government said the state of the public finances is “severe”.

David Laws, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said the government was instead allocating an £170 million to “fund investment in social rented housing in 2010-11, to help deliver 4,000 social housing starts”.

The Homes and Communities Agency is also cutting £50 million from housing market renewal schemes and £30 million from the gypsy and traveller programme.

No new or further commitments will be entered into.

However Labour’s John Healey, the housing minister until the election, claimed the government’s failure to defend the housing budget would lead to cuts in jobs and homes.

"This is bad for the economy, bad for families' and bad for a housebuilding sector that has been kept going through recession by public investment.

"In failing to defend housing, the new ministers at CLG have shown little fight. On the back of David Cameron's downgrading of Housing Minister to a non-Cabinet post, they've made the Treasury's task of public investment cuts much easier.”

Live from Whitehall, The Coalition. Forget Prog-Rock, this is prog(ressive) politics.

Lead singer David Cameron sat the first 20 minutes out, leaving his incongruous backing band to thrash out their solos on the platform.

First up, deputy lead singer Nick Clegg rattled through some familiar riffs – freedom, fairness, responsibility. He must get used to playing these big stages.

Next, Home Secretary Theresa May brought a bit of glamour, promising bobbies on the beat, cutting paperwork and more freedom.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, was having technical trouble. When he was due to take centre stage, a roadie was adjusting his microphone. Ms May offered to fill time by dancing, though it is Mr Cable who is more usually found twirling ladies around ballrooms.

In the awkward delay, Mr Cable joked: “We're making it up as we go along.”

Unfortunately this had the ring of truth to it. Flicking through the coalition agreement, where policy clashes have occurred the wording of the final statements are a fine blend of compromise, vagaries and fudge.

The vote on hunting has become a vote on whether there should be a vote on hunting. Lib Dem Chris Huhne’s energy department will draft the government’s pro-nuclear policy and he will then campaign against it.

And a pledge to freeze council tax for two years has become a one year commitment, while they will “seek to freeze it for a further year, in partnership with local authorities”.

Cutting the deficit takes precedence over everything, we were told again and again. Except, it seems, when there is a publicity budget to spend.

Towering over yesterday’s coalition press conference, at least ten feet tall, were two floor-to-ceiling billboards almost entirely blank but bearing the logo of this new politics.

Inevitably, it also had the mark of a design guru – a colon. It read: “The Coalition: our programme for government.”

The Coalition was written in green. Blue (Tory) and yellow (Lib Dem) of course make green. Keep up at the back!

Mr Cameron insisted it would be “churlish” to look for the holes in the agreement, when hacks should be focussing on all the things they could agree on.

The mood music may be positive now, but as the axe falls on pet projects and divisions emerge on key policies, Tory and Lib Dem backbenchers may be less willing to dance to The Coalition’s tune.

Ashdown asked for Miliband to rescue Lib-Lab pact

I spoke to Paddy Ashdown yesterday for our first Saturday Interview after the election.
As always he was on great form, quoting the politician's prayer - Lord make my words sweet and reasonable for I may have to eat them - he knows he has said one or two things about the Tories.
But he revealed a lot about his personal role in trying to rescue a deal with Labour, including making an indirect plea to one D Miliband.
Here is an extract:

It is clear Lord Ashdown would have preferred to have seen the Lib Dems enter government with the Labour party – something he came tantalisingly close to doing with Tony Blair in 1997, a deal scuppered by senior Labour ministers.

For three decades the Lib Dems have aimed to be a party of government in their own right by trying to “create a realignment of the left around broadly moderate and liberal values”.

That was the vision of former leaders including former one-time North Devon MP Jeremy Thorpe, David Steel and Jo Grimond.

He insists it was “very important” that the Lib Dem negotiators pursued talks with Labour, even in “pretty fragile circumstances”.

“My job in this process was to keep the Labour option alive because if we hadn’t we would have had no bargaining power with the Tories. So of course many of us, the whole party, would have preferred to do that.”

He insists Mr Clegg simply “kept his promise” that whichever party had the most votes and seats had the right to try to form the government first.

“Did I think it would end up precisely as it ended? No. Did I think there would be a serious attempt to do this? Yes I did.”

Two factors caused the Labour talks to fail. “The first was the old Neanderthals, the old knuckle draggers, stopping it happening for tribal reasons.”

In particular he blames former Deputy PM John Prescott, outgoing justice secretary Jack Straw, and former home secretaries David Blunkett and John Reid. “These were the old tribalists who stopped things happening in ‘97.”

He admits that Mr Brown was also a key roadblock to doing a deal in 1997. The outgoing Labour leader has “many, many personal gifts – one of them is not the personal gift required to run the country”.

But he is also critical of the would-be future Labour leaders who failed to see the potential of doing a deal with the Lib Dems this week.

“I think there was a failure of action by those who could have staked out very clearly this is where they wanted to go.

“By this I mean David Miliband. There was a point, and I will say to you that, not directly but indirectly, I know that this point was made to him: that he ought to come out clearly and say if he was leader of the Labour party he would back this.

“But I fear greatly that he decided that for reasons of a leadership election, he wouldn’t. I think that’s true of others too.”

UPDATE: The Independent on Sunday has picked up the story today. However Jane Merrick reports that:

The accusation that Mr Miliband, the frontrunner in the race to succeed Gordon Brown, could have denied the Conservatives power was rejected by sources close to the former foreign secretary last night.

Lib Dem MP reveals 80% of new government policies are from Lib Dem manifesto

The remarkable thing overnight and this morning is the extent to which the Tories have given way to the Lib Dems on key policies.

Both sides have been able to drop their more bonkers ideas (Inheritance Tax/illegal immigrant amnesty) while moving on to the “liberal conservative” ground that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg favour.

Full details of the deal will come out this morning, with Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Clegg (better get used to that) giving a press conference at 2.15pm

In the meantime, Andrew George - the staunchly independent Lib Dem MP for St Ives has put out a statement – admitting he favoured a deal with Labour but was satisfied the Tory deal is right for the country.

He also reveals 80 per cent of the new government’s policies are from the Lib Dem manifesto not the Tories’.

We’ll find out in the next few hours.

Andrew George's statement:

“The electorate had given MPs a clear mandate. One which required them to work together. There was no overall winner of the General Election.

“Liberal Democrats have always argued for consensus politics. In any case, it is the inevitable consequence of electoral reform. So this is consensus politics in practice.

“The last thing the country needs right now is unstable Government followed by another General Election in the autumn. I believe that the agreement reached is not only a good one for the Liberal Democrats – as the statement to be released later this morning will show – 80% of the policy commitments of the new Government are items from the Liberal Democrat rather than Conservative manifesto.

“Personally, I had hoped for an alignment of the centre left. However, the Labour Party were very clearly not prepared to do any kind of deal. They were not prepared to compromise. They wanted to go into opposition.

“I am aware that whichever way these negotiations went many local electors would be unhappy. I am keen to speak to as many people as possible about the challenges we faced, the conundrums we had to overcome in negotiation and the justification of having to come to a deal which, above all, put the national interest first.

“I will be holding public meetings in the coming months and am keen to hear from all who have an opinion on the matter. My Parliamentary colleagues and I will be releasing a joint statement later in the day setting out our ambitions for Cornwall in the new Government.”

Lib Dem: You can’t trust the f***ing Tories

It seems we are inching towards a deal between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with both leaders due to meet their MPs today.

They should not underestimate the unease and distrust in their ranks at the – especially among the Westcountry contingent who have just spent four weeks slogging it out in one of the dirtiest election campaigns many said they had seen.

Today’s Western Morning News contains a number of juicy comments from both Tories and Lib Dems – some on the record, some off – which should give the consensual negotiators pause for thought.

It seems to have brought out the potty-mouthed worst among them.

Liberal Democrats

One Lib Dem in the region said a deal with the Conservatives would be a "f***ing travesty". This morning on the way into a sun-drenched Parliament, a Lib Dem MP told me: “You can’t trust the f***ing Tories.”
Another frontbencher said: "Not many Lib Dems joined the Lib Dems to help the Tories, but every party lost so we are where we are. There are probably quite a lot of Tories who are not thrilled by the prospect of working with Liberal Democrats."

On electoral reform, a Devon Lib Dem source said: "This is what we have been waiting for, for 80 years. The economic crisis is huge but will continue for a few years. Constitutional reform would last 100 years. I am left with the slight sense the Tories are just leading us a dance and don't really want a deal at all."

Conservatives
Tories in the region seem no keener to cosy up to Lib Dems.
Hugo Swire, Tory MP for East Devon and a former member of the Mr Cameron's shadow cabinet, ridiculed the idea that the Lib Dems are "the new, fresh party", saying they had been a "disaster" when running Westcountry councils.
"The reason we kicked them out of overall control in Cornwall, the reason we kicked them out of Devon County Council and Somerset County Council… is we know how completely useless they are when they are in power."
One option understood to be being considered is a "confidence and supply" deal, under which the Lib Dems would undertake not to bring down a minority Conservative administration in return for assurances on certain policy areas.

"Given how flaky the Liberals are, how long that will last, who knows," Mr Swire added.

Labour

A Labour source claims Lib Dems in the region will defect to them on mass: "There will be mass insurrection among the Liberal Democrat grassroots."
And Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw said: "I still find it hard to believe that the Lib Dems would agree to a deal with the Conservatives without a referendum on electoral reform and if they fail to reach a deal with the Conservatives then our door is always open.

"We support a fair voting system. It was in our manifesto. There is an alternative to a Con-Lib collation, in a progressive alliance of Lib Dems, Labour, possibly the moderate Northern Ireland parties, that could deliver that historic political reform and manage the country and the economy stably for the next two or three years."
2pm UPDATE: All morning I have been speaking to MPs, new and old, of all three parties. A selection of their views:
Labour: "Brown must go, it's just a question of when. He was toxic on the doorstep."
Tory MP on Lib-Dems: "They will sh*t on you, they will be b*st*rds and then they will stab you in the back."
Lib Dem MP telling Tories: "Play your cards right and I'll make you my PPS."