Rob Gershon

Brave to have made a private landlord the homelessness minister in the first place, really.

If MPs wish to be less busy with casework, they should change the policies that are driving the majority of people to seek their help. Better housing enforcement, restoring local authority funding and stop driving people into poverty with welfare nonsense.

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’ Common Wealth report calls discounted sales of council homes one of the ‘largest giveaways in UK history’

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’ www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Racheal Maskell's speech during the welfare cuts debate was one of the few things that made it seem that maybe the party hadn't been taken over by complete lunatics.

Another petty counterproductive move from Starmer. Punishing MPs who stood against a widely unpopular policy won’t endear him to the public or improve discipline in the party. It just makes him look like he hasn’t learnt a thing - morally or practically - from the disability cuts. Because he hasn’t.

Maybe dehumanising and criminalising people through extra-judicial sanctions for - often structural - unemployment hasn't been a glaring success after all.

Disabled will lose £3,000 a year in 'stain on the Labour Party' plans, MPs told Labour backbencher Rachael Maskell told the Commons that welfare reforms that would cut the Universal Credit health aspect would be a 'stain on this great party'

Labour backbencher Rachael Maskell tells Commons welfare reforms that would cut the Universal Credit health aspect would be a 'stain on this great party'

Stripped-down welfare Bill will still see hundreds of thousands of disabled people lose £3,000 a year by 2030
www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

MPs and much of the media have spun a false narrative about tonight’s Universal Credit vote. The PIP pause has created the myth the government has fully u-turned on its disability cuts. But £2 billion is about to be pulled from the sickest and poorest people in the country.

Welfare bill will now lift 50,000 out of poverty after U-turns, assessment finds Revised bill passed after UK government rowed back on cuts will mean fewer rather than more people in relative poverty in 2030

This is nonsense. The impact assessment starts from an imaginary baseline incorporating reforms planned but never implemented by the previous government

In the real world, the cuts that remain in the Bill will push around 50,000 disabled people into poverty www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

100% Hard Bastard

What about biggest success? Here it’s not a particularly cheery verdict from the public. Asked in their own words, nothing dominates the word cloud, followed by the NHS.

So much to like in this thread and the announcement, sensible detailed housing policies after years of awful decisions. But there are questions: crucially why only 60% for social rent? Why less than 30% for London? How much social rent is expected from s106 and regeneration? Not clear so far.

Newly-built council homes to be exempt from Right to Buy for 35 years Pennycook announces further reforms, including changes to use of receipts, eligibility and discounts

Brilliant news for #ukhousing thank you @matthewpennycookmp.bsky.social @teamlabouruk.bsky.social
make it so @stevehilditch.bsky.social @simplicitly.bsky.social @alisoninman.bsky.social @martinhwheatley.bsky.social @tomemurtha.bsky.social
Free at last, good god almighty, free at last

(The sector has been boring on about innovation for more than a decade and come up with precisely zero ideas for anything that has improved anything. Doing process change is not innovation in the sense it keeps being cast as, that's just the work of business analysts). end/end I'm going away now.

£1m Innovation fund.

This is weird. Delivering better outcomes for social tenants is not a mystery or something in need of wasting a million quid on people who talk tosh. There are a tiny handful of landlords who have been prepared to give up power and/or include Resis in decisions. Do that. 6/6

>> Again, it's not a bad idea but more clarity needed on what information is available, and what it can be used for. 2024 Regulation Of Social Housing Act contained as-yet unfulfilled idea that information could be used to change landlord policy of which there are few/no signs. 5/n

Access to Information needs fleshing out. What information will tenants be able to access and will most of it be published like the Tenant Satisfaction Measures or on request? The TSMs have not led to a meaningful way of tenants judging their landlord against others, nor might this. >> 4/n

The Competence and Conduct standard still risks being too high level, and still has absolutely no content relating to conduct. 3/n

Going to put Awaab's Law and Safety aside for now. Have talked a lot about this over the years and a test-and-learn approach isn't necessarily bad but damp and mould are not mysterious new issues that landlords don't know how to deal with, and govt risks giving them too much leeway. 2/n

Not sure I'll read it all but lots of questions remain until we have more detail on Step 3: Establish an effective and stable regulatory system. Arguably it's already stable. Effectiveness is still very much split on whether it's Viability, Governance or Consumer standards.

1/n

The original reforms, that have now been battered into an odd an confusing shape thanks to campaigning and climbdowns, were Mel Stride's idea. Labour just picked them up and ran with them at first.

‘This isn’t a U-turn’: disabled people react to passing of watered-down welfare bill Campaigners call government’s climbdown on personal independence payments ‘desperate’ and vow to fight on

“It’ll take days bedbound to recover, but if we don’t fight our own corner, who will?”

I spoke to disabled people fighting the welfare bill - and got their reaction on last night’s chaotic vote. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"People who declined to be identified because they were talking balls."

Chart showing: Changes to welfare spending announced in the Spring Statement or Pathways to Work Green Paper, at the time of announcement (left) and after the UC-PIP bill (right): UK, 2029-30

Expectations vs reality

Won't somebody think of the people who can afford to save £20,000 in cash each year? £40,000 for a couple.

Guess this is the outcome though - all 335 now look a bit spiteful.

Just means the actual votes are a less clear way of knowing who is fine with punching down than they were in the Coalition's 2013 effort.

Because of the concessions, we can't really be sure which MPs in the government party were just fine with the harshest versions of the cuts. Though some of them have made themselves very clear on TV.

This has also been a narrow miss for registered providers of social housing, who have absolutely no idea in most cases how many tenants use other benefits threatened in UC/PIP Bill to meet their rent shortfalls from specific housing benefits.

I hope they reshuffle Kendall, who has repeatedly shown to be wrong about everything, and Timms, who is arguing against all the things he pretended to stand for in opposition. Put Abrahams in as SoS and make the chair of the DWP committee someone from another party.