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.
The funding, which comes from the 10-year Affordable Homes Programme, is in line with the Starmer government’s policy and sees Andy Burnham backtrack on his proposal to rip up housing plans and boost social home building.
Burnham previously called for the programme to be spent entirely on social homes, which are more heavily subsidised and therefore more affordable than other types of government-funded housing.
He said when launching his campaign to become MP for Makerfield:
double quotation markThere’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.
Under the plans announced on Monday, however, £10bn will be spent helping to build 70,000 homes outside London, about 60% of which will be social rented houses. The rest will be other types of accommodation such as shared ownership schemes and sheltered housing.
London will get another £6bn, which will be allocated at a later date.
Ministers said the investment would help bring the government closer to its promise of building 300,000 affordable homes over the next 10 years. It will be spent by 33 “strategic partners”, who will be guaranteed funding for the next decade to help deliver their plans.
The Guardian has learned that for the first time in the history of the scheme, three of those partners will be local councils, as the government looks to deliver what Burnham has promised will be “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.
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.
