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The housing secretary is considering abolishing [Right to Buy] for newly built council houses and cutting the discount offered to existing tenants.

The deputy prime minister is facing growing pressure from local authorities to reduce the cost of Baroness Thatcher’s flagship policy, and a consultation on proposals will be launched in October’s Budget.

More than 100 local authorities called for the scheme to be axed on new council homes in a damning report into the state of Britain’s housing stock published on Tuesday. The report, commissioned by Southwark Council, said the policy was helping to burn a £2.2bn hole in local authority accounts and exacerbating the country’s housing crisis.

Ms Rayner attended an “urgent meeting” with local authorities last month to discuss housing reforms. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government told The Telegraph: “We are working at pace to reverse the continued decline in the number of social rent homes.”
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In Southwark Council’s report, local authorities said Right to Buy had created “a serious problem for the sustainability of England’s council housing”. Ms Rayner said in the summer that the Government was considering protections for new council homes.

Discounts on the scheme can reach as much as £75,000 outside of London, and over £100,000 in London. The cap, which is based on how long a tenant rents a property before buying it, is limited to £136,400 in London.
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In the last financial year, 10,896 homes were sold through Right to Buy and only 3,447 were replaced, official figures show – resulting in a net loss of 7,449. Since 1991, the scheme has resulted in a net loss of 24,000 social homes.

This is partly because under the current system, councils can only keep a third of the receipts from each sale to build a replacement home, with the rest going to the council and government for other purposes.

Following high-profile rows over the amount of time the likes of Reform leader Nigel Farage and ex-cabinet minister Nadine Dorries spent in the Commons or their seat, an overwhelming majority (77 per cent) of voters backed a minimum attendance rule for MPs.

The Savanta/38 Degrees survey, shared exclusively with [I], suggested just 6 per cent of the public would oppose such a move.

The poll also saw voters backing a series of reforms to improve MPs’ conduct after years of sleaze scandals, including banning MPs for deliberately lying in public (79 per cent), introducing a job description (77 per cent), banning MPs from betting on political outcomes (77 per cent), tightening restrictions on gifts (75 per cent), and banning specific second jobs (70 per cent).

But despite Sir Keir Starmer’s pledges to clean up politics and rebuild trust, more voters are more pessimistic (38 per cent) than optimistic (35 per cent) the Government will improve standards for MPs.

The lack of belief in the Prime Minister’s commitments come after a string of cronyism allegations levelled at Labour over the filling of Whitehall jobs since the election.

The lack of trust was also illustrated by the fact nearly two thirds (65 per cent) of voters believe that in the current political system, MPs who behave unethically are likely to get away with it.

This sentiment cuts across party lines, with 74 per cent of 2024 Reform UK voters, 61 per cent of Conservative voters, and 62 per cent of Labour voters expressing the same concern.

Sir Anthony Seldon is set to release his latest political biography, ‘Truss at 10: How Not to be a Prime Minister’ on 29th August, covering the turbulent 49 days that Truss was in the top seat.

The book is expected to contain some bombshell revelations about her time in charge, including insight into how she proposed to deal with the fallout from her disastrous mini-budget, which sent financial markets into a death spiral.

It also claims that Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg tried to persuade Truss to make him chancellor instead of Kwasi Kwarteng, and that he urged her to abolish inheritance tax, replace all tax rates with a 20p flat rate, and organise a stunt to promote nuclear power.

Seldon writes that the then cabinet minister told Truss: “We should get a nuclear submarine to dock at Liverpool and plug it into the grid. That would show it is safe.”

Sir Anthony says cabinet secretary Simon Case dismissed the idea as a “non-starter”, adding that “the subs are needed in operations”.

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Senior figures in the party are pushing for a controversial rule change at next month’s party conference, which would change the way Labour elects its leader if the party is in power.

The scheme is viewed as a way to avoid a repeat of the Tory leadership contest in 2022, when Tory members made Truss leader despite her not having the support of the majority of MPs.
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Allies of Starmer believe a similar [long leadership contest] should be avoided at all costs, by reforming how his successor is elected if the party is still in government. They want only MPs to have a say over who should succeed Starmer as leader.

Those behind the move also believe the timing is right for Starmer to use his first party conference as prime minister to tighten the centre-left wing’s grip on the party.

They are confident that conference delegates this year are tilted in the “moderate” wing’s favour and would pass the proposal if it were put to a vote.

“There’s a plan to bring a constitutional reform to conference that would cut out the membership for electing a leader when we’re in government, and only allow the MPs to decide,” said a senior Labour source.

“This is seen as the last reform that needs doing to syphon off any threat from the left,” they added. A second said: “It’s known as the ‘Liz Truss lock’. The Tories compounded the country’s misery by letting their members put someone in No 10 the parliamentary party wouldn’t work with. So we need to make sure that can’t happen again.”
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Labour declined to comment. However, a source denied the party leadership was behind the move or would support it, calling it a “non-starter”.

Starmer did successfully change the rules for a leadership contest in 2021, when he managed to raise the number of MP supporters a candidate needed to make it on to the ballot from 10 per cent to 20 per cent.

He also tried to move the leadership voting rights back to an electoral college system, but was forced to abandon it in the face of opposition from union leaders and other left-wingers.

It is an increasingly common message from websites: browse for free - if you allow us to track your data and target you with personalised ads - if you don't, hand over some cash.

The model is known as "consent or pay" and, while it may be becoming increasingly common, questions remain over whether it is ethical or even legal.

The UK data regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has launched a consultation, external on the practice - it will report its findings later this year.

"In principle, data protection law does not prohibit business models that involve 'consent or pay,'" the ICO says on its website.

But it continues: "However, any organisation considering such a model must be careful to ensure that consent... has been freely given and is fully informed, as well as capable of being withdrawn without detriment."
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Newspapers such as MailOnline, The Sun, The Independent and The Times have all recently brought in "consent or pay" models.

"It's basically saying, 'We're giving people a choice. They can either pay and get ad-free access to our articles, or they can be tracked, or they can walk away and not read it,'" Philippa Donn says.

This question being considered by the ICO and others is - is that a fair choice?

Labour lost 37,000 more members during 2023, leaving its total membership at 370,450 at the end of the year.

Although it still has the most members of any UK party, the figure is significantly down from a peak of 532,046 at the end of 2019.

The Liberal Democrats saw their membership fall by around 11,000 to 86,599, though the party said it had seen a rise in new members since its gains in July's general election.

The Conservatives do not publish membership figures, but their income from membership fees fell from £1.97m to £1.5m.

However, the Green Party saw its membership remain stable at around 53,000.

Reform UK said its membership had grown "significantly", although it did not publish figures.
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In a turbulent year for the Scottish National Party, which saw the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as leader and an ongoing police investigation into the party's finances, its membership fell by around 18,000 to 64,525.

Archive

Reeves intends to introduce a 10-year formula in October’s Budget that will increase annual rents in England by the CPI measure of inflation — currently 2.2 per cent — plus an additional 1 per cent, according to government insiders.

The move is aimed at encouraging the building of more affordable homes by providing certainty over cash flows to housing associations and councils — which are grappling with heavy debt burdens and large maintenance backlogs.

In recent years local authorities have almost stopped building homes, leaving housing associations — not-for-profit organisations — to build most new social housing in the UK.

The government sets rent levels in subsidised social housing using a national formula. Guaranteeing higher rents will delight housing associations but could worsen the cost of living for millions of tenants and could land the government with a much higher benefits bill.
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The previous Conservative government made a similar promise in the early 2010s but ministers subsequently ripped it up on several occasions.

David Cameron’s coalition set a 10-year annual rent settlement in 2012 based on the retail price index, plus 0.5 per cent. But then-chancellor George Osborne reneged on the agreement in 2015 with four years of below-inflation increases in order to reduce housing benefit costs for the Treasury.

More recently, the Conservative government announced a five-year settlement of CPI plus 1 per cent in 2020, but was then forced to cap rent increases at 7 per cent following a jump in inflation to more than 11 per cent in 2022. It extended the settlement for one further year this April.

Although that provided relief for the 30 per cent of the 4mn households in the social housing sector whose rent is not covered by housing benefit, it put further pressure on already cash-strapped providers.
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Labour has made big commitments to address the UK’s chronic affordable housing shortage that has left a record 109,000 households in England living in temporary accommodation, including more than 142,000 children, according to the latest government data.

Angela Rayner, the UK’s deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, told MPs last month that the Budget would provide “rent stability” to help deliver the “biggest increase in affordable house building in a generation”. She also promised “appropriate protections” for tenants against exceptional rent rises.

Guaranteeing rent certainty was a critical demand of 20 of the UK’s largest local council landlords who published a report last month warning that England’s council housing system was “broken”.

It warned that councils were facing a £2.2bn “black hole” in housing budgets by 2028, partly as a result of the Osborne-era cuts that they estimated had reduced council landlords’ rent revenue by £2.4bn between 2016 and 2020.