Ministers set out plans to spend £725bn on UK infrastructure over 10 years
Ministers have pledged to spend £9bn a year on fixing crumbling schools, hospitals, courts and prisons over the next decade as part of the government's infrastructure strategy.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, set out plans on Thursday to spend a minimum of £725bn over 10 years to boost UK-wide infrastructure and achieve a 'national renewal'.
Jones announced that £6bn a year would go to repairing hospitals in England, £3bn to fixing and upgrading schools and colleges in England and £600m to courts and prisons in England and Wales.
The money will fund building improvements including removing crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in hospitals and strengthening safety and security in prisons.
Jones told MPs: 'Done properly it will result in tangible improvements to the fabric of our country, our local roads and high streets renewed so communities are even better places to live.'
The strategy also includes £1bn to fix roads, bridges and flyovers across the UK and £590m to start work on the Lower Thames Crossing project. Some £16bn will go towards building 500,000 new homes through a new publicly owned National Housing Bank.
Richard Fuller, the Conservative shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, urged ministers to set out which major projects are being abandoned and explain why.
Business and industry groups, who have long argued the need for a long-term vision to provide certainty and encourage investment, broadly welcomed the strategy – although the government portal of actual projects will not now be launched online for another month. This project 'pipeline' will be updated every six months.
Alex Vaughan, the CEO of construction and engineering firm Costain, said the launch was 'a crucial step towards ending the short-termism that has held our sector back'.
The Railway Industry Association chief executive, Darren Caplan, said a 10-year strategy and the commitment to publish a pipeline in July was extremely welcome, adding: 'We look forward to seeing the full details of the pipeline, which will need to give businesses sufficient clarity to plan ahead.'
Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: 'A government operating within the spending rules it has set for itself demonstrates real commitment – one that can unlock private investment and finance, which will take confidence from this stability.'
John Dickie, chief executive at BusinessLDN, said it showed welcome government recognition 'that Britain needs a clear, committed, long-term pipeline of future public investment to give the private sector the confidence to invest'.
Sam Gould, director of policy at the Institution of Civil Engineer, said it was 'a significant moment' with lots of positives, but added: 'The sector will need more information on private finance models, and on how [it] will meet the demands of our changing climate.'
The strategy does not cover so-called megaprojects, which cost more than £10bn and take more than 10 years to deliver. These include the HS2 railway, Sizewell C nuclear plant and the Dreadnought submarine programme.
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Tears and fury of the Labour rebels: did Reeves go too far over welfare?
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The high-stakes exchange capped one of the worst weeks for Starmer and Reeves since the pair entered Downing Street a year ago. • The Sunday Times view: A year on, Labour is a long way from fixing Britain Where once Starmer and his chancellor appeared unassailable after the party's landslide victory, they are now facing mutiny from an army of Labour MPs and growing impatience from an increasingly fractious cabinet. 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Labour MPs blame him for alienating and ignoring backbenchers and presiding over a 'bunker mentality' in No 10, leading some to suggest that the time has come for 'regime change'. These calls are only likely to grow louder this weekend after claims McSweeney's plans to stave off the rebellion involved suspending 10 Labour rebels every hour until 50 had been reached. At which point, McSweeney is said to have insisted the insurrection would be over. It is understood that McSweeney, who denies the specifics of the allegation, was told that the scale of the rebellion was such that the usual sanctions — removing the whip — would have little or no impact. Despite the whips privately briefing No 10 for weeks that there would have to be concessions, Starmer and Reeves ignored the warnings. 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Graham has found herself an unlikely ally in Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, who will warn this week that Labour has created a 'punishing welfare trap that shuts people out of going back to work'. In a speech to the Local Government Association Annual Conference in Liverpool on Wednesday, Badenoch will also spell out the political trap the prime minister has now fallen into with his tax-and-spend plans in chaos and being dictated to by his own MPs. 'Labour told us 'the adults were back in charge', but this is actually amateur hour,' Badenoch will say. 'The prime minister is incapable of sticking to a decision. If he can't make relatively small savings to a benefits bill that is set to exceed £100 billion by 2030, how can we expect him to meet his promised 5 per cent defence spending, or ever take the tough decisions necessary to bring down the national debt?' 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Times
an hour ago
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Green firebrand challenges Corbynites: Join me in the radical left
On June 29, 2016, Jeremy Corbyn appeared at a central London rally and made an attempt to move on from the Brexit referendum held the previous week. The Labour leader was instead heckled by a 33-year-old hypnotherapist actor who, unbeknown to the left-wing activists present, had just launched his political career as a candidate for the Liberal Democrats. 'What about Europe, Jeremy!' Zack Polanski jeered. 'Where were you when we needed you?' Corbyn, brow furrowed, appeared speechless, leaving his supporters to hiss and drown out the noise. Today, Polanski is neither an unknown on the left nor a Lib Dem. The tiggerish London Assembly member is running to become leader of the Green Party, of which he is already deputy and whose politics over the past decade have tracked him in moving steadily leftwards. He is still generating headlines and posing complicated questions of Corbyn and the Corbynites. The surprising dynamic is that Polanski — a gay vegan Jew who long ago traded his native Salford for north London — is now doing so in the spirit of comradeship. Addressing the question of his transformation, he invokes Corbyn's hero, Tony Benn: he is interested in where people are going, he says, not where they are from. As such, Polanski has spent recent weeks positioning himself as the radical socialist and pro-Palestine — for which read Corbynite — candidate for the leadership not only of the Greens but of the British left in its entirety. The size and political complexion of the Greens' grassroots membership today is poorly understood (last year it was estimated to number about 57,000, albeit it is thought to have grown since) but his 'eco-populist' vision has generated more noise than his two rivals, MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, who are running on a joint ticket. In the event that he wins the contest, the results of which will be announced at the start of September after a summer of campaigning, he wants the independent MP for Islington North in the tent. Speaking from the Glastonbury festival, where he is busy canvassing, and where Corbyn appeared on the Pyramid Stage at his peak in 2017, Polanski said: 'Anyone who aligns with our values in the Green Party is very welcome to join the party, and so I'd love to see progressive left-wing MPs in the party.' Does that include Corbyn? What of his parliamentary protégés, including those in the Socialist Campaign Group, the left-wing faction of Labour MPs? He confirms: 'Anyone who aligns — and I believe that Zarah [Sultana, the firebrand MP for Coventry South] and Jeremy do align with where the Green Party are — that's a decision for them.' He rattles off a list of socialist positions he would seek to enact: 'protecting the NHS'; 'building social homes'; a 'wealth tax'; and stopping the 'genocide in Gaza'. The reason such pronouncements are causing much debate, and a degree of discomfort, on the left is that it has spent the almost two years since October 7 discussing the future of progressive politics — but failing to identify a clear solution or leader before the next election. Polanski, as one Corbynite puts it, is threatening to 'eat [our] lunch'. Since last year, Reform UK has taken centre stage as the main opposition to Sir Keir Starmer and the established order in Westminster. Yet the Greens won four seats, their most so far and one fewer than Reform, secured two million votes, and came second in 40 seats. Elsewhere, disgruntled socialists and Muslim voters delivered five independent MPs, Corbyn among them. The difference is that Nigel Farage has long personified the anti-immigrant, anti-woke sentiment; is a dominant figure within Reform who has vanquished all internal allies; and has singular communications skills. The radical left has no such person. It has a more complicated relationship with hierarchy in the first instance. It is also less of the view that parliament is the only place where proper politics can be done, especially on the issue of Gaza. Parliamentary chicanery has had far less impact, and visibility, than weekly marches up and down the country, attacks on allegedly pro-Israel businesses and the recent infiltration of RAF Brize Norton. Polanski is adamant that opposition to Israel's actions in Gaza is not limited to the party's traditional urban base — in cities like Brighton and Bristol — nor the British Muslim community. He says of the Red Wall areas where Greens have performed surprisingly well — among them South Tyneside council, where they are the second largest party now: 'In fact, I think in those seats, people are equally concerned with the genocide in Gaza, and people are really affected by inequality.' The Greens — who were the first party in England and Wales to call the Jewish state an 'apartheid' and the first to say it was committing 'genocide' — has at times faced criticism for its track record on expelling antisemitic councillors, but also its focus on the Middle East. Its current leader hand-delivered a petition to her local council asking the mayor to write to the foreign secretary to demand a ceasefire, and prior to the last election circulated leaflets featuring the Palestine flag and images of rubble. Polanski is unapologetic about that. 'I think fundamentally, there's a genocide in Gaza. And actually, the Palestinian people are the story here,' he says. 'And I think often we can all get distracted by talking about groups and actions. And actually, I'd much rather focus on stopping the war, working for a ceasefire, and ending the occupation of Israel.' Adding to the complexity is the fact that many of the left's leading lights — such as Sultana — are still part of Labour, even if she is currently suspended. And others still suffer from what their nemesis, Lord Mandelson, has called 'long Corbyn': the trauma of his suspension from Labour, his repudiation at the ballot box in 2019 and the allegations of antisemitism. Still, leading figures on the left are increasingly of the view that something needs to be done to capitalise on the political moment. Gaza remains a galvanising force — and anti-Labour sentiment is not going away, either on the activist left or in the Muslim community. Support for Labour among committed progressives has fallen from 67 per cent in 2019 to 49 per cent at last year's election, and down to 39 per cent last month. Over the past week, three Greens have won council by-elections triggered by defections or resignations from Labour — including most recently its first in Greenwich. Current polling suggests that — even without a Corbynite tilt — the party would win ultra-safe Labour seats such as Huddersfield. Meanwhile, Luke Tryl, of the pollster More in Common, points to the fact that, in local elections in May, in seats where more than 30 per cent of voters were Muslim, half voted for independent candidates. Within a political tradition known for its splittism, there is unanimity within the left only about the fact such feeling demands one of three things: a new party, a parliamentary grouping or a national movement. To that, Polanski's rejoinder is simple: all three already exist in the form of the Greens. In the event he wins, he says, he intends to depart from the party's traditional identity — as a 'single-issue party' of polar bears and saving the countryside — and pivot towards full-fat leftism. He explains: 'So it's up to anyone what they want to do in terms of starting new things. But actually, I'd encourage anyone right now, whether they're a member of another party, or indeed, an MP from another party, if they align with our values, to join with the Greens.' While his party has a quixotic structure that requires leadership elections every two years and involves the grassroots in policymaking, Polanski has been unusually prepared to speak the usual language of conventional politics. He says the party needs to be less timid and to 'learn' from Farage, whose communications skills, and clarity of vision, have made him favourite to be the next prime minister. And despite the queasiness on the left about the role of parliament, Polanski has resolved, as Farage did, that all roads to power run through Westminster. He says: 'I actually have a constituency in mind, and I want to be one of the first group of new London MPs, or first group of London Green MPs.' • Baroness Jones: You're never too old to be arrested as a Green The question then — beyond the outcome of the race — is whether or not the rest of the left has a rival plan. After a More in Common poll suggested a party led by Corbyn could win 10 per cent of the vote, Andrew Murray, his former aide, last week revealed in an eyebrow-raising account in the socialist daily Morning Star two options had long been under consideration. One was Collective, a new national party founded by Karie Murphy, Corbyn's former chief of staff, whose central idea is to install him as interim leader. The other, which is nameless, seeks to create a looser parliamentary grouping of pro-Gaza MPs, possibly with Corbyn or Sultana as figureheads. Murray added that those two tendencies had now combined, indicating a new organisation could be launched imminently. For the Greens, or any new party, there is a final question. Even if the left found a way to unite, what is the best it could achieve at a general election in 2029? The idea of a progressive alternative to Starmer has acquired momentum precisely because of his rightward shift and his determination instead to court Reform votes. Yet if he continues to fall in the polls, would liberal and left voters not support him in order to avoid opening the door to Farage? More in Common says that most Green (57 per cent) and Lib Dem (51 per cent) voters would vote tactically to keep out Reform. For now, it appears that, whatever its configuration, in Westminster at least, the left is likely to remain on the periphery.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Class still decides our elections, even in this mixed-up world
A few years ago, while out gauging public support for Ukip in a by-election town, I asked a late-middle-aged couple leaving a supermarket if they had ever thought of voting for the party. The woman seemed on the verge of vomiting, and looked at me with the kind of hate-stare you get when you ask someone if they can perhaps move their bags from a train seat so you can sit down. The man was more avuncular and just raised his two shopping bags aloft. 'What do you think?' he asked, displaying the Waitrose logo. 'You're at the wrong supermarket. Try Morrisons, or the Co-op.' A year or two before this, I had been snapped at by a very smartly dressed elderly woman when I asked the same question. 'How dare you?' she hooted. 'You should be looking for elderly men with no teeth on mobility scooters.'
