Government lays out housing plans but Burnham backtracks on social renting pledge – UK politics live

£10bn for housing with 60% social renting is at odds with PM’s previous call for programme to be spent entirely on social homes Good morning and welcome to the UK politics live blog. The government has set out its plans to spend an initial £10bn on a mix of subsidised housing in England, with a target of 60% being social renting. There’s £39bn allocated over a 10-year period … I’m saying that should be dedicated to council homes. Let’s not be coy any more … I’m saying council homes because control matters. Andy Burnham has said he plans to travel to the US next month to join European leaders lobbying Donald Trump to supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles. The UK prime minister told Bloomberg he was “looking forward to going to New York” in September, which is when the UN general assembly will meet. He said details of the trip were not “fully confirmed” but it was “likely” to go ahead. AI models trained on Ukrainian battlefield data will be used to stop protesters and foreign states targeting UK defence sites, railways and energy plants under a deal struck between London and Kyiv. Private companies will also be given access to the vast trove of data from Ukraine’s Avengers AI lab to help build new systems, the first agreement of its kind in the UK. Social housing tenants will be evicted if they fail to keep their gardens well maintained under a Reform UK government, the party has announced. Lee Anderson, the party’s chair, said that if Reform came to power it would insist that those in social rented homes would be required to keep their properties decorated and gardens looked after. Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, is on course to earn as much from the social media platform X as he does from his salary as an MP, after surging income from posts that include demands for mass deportations. Lowe has earned £932 an hour for his posts on X, formerly Twitter, since the start of the year, according to his own declarations in the register of MPs’ financial interests, which detail how many hours he has spent on X for each payment he received from the platform. Continue reading...

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