Buying own home has ‘got harder’ under Conservatives, Rishi Sunak says
The Labour Party has seized on Rishi Sunak’s admission that it has become “harder” to own a home under his government, branding it “damning indictment” of his party’s time in power.
In an interview with the BBC, the prime minister said he wanted to make it “easier” for young people to get on the housing ladder and argued the “biggest challenge” was the difficulty in saving up for a deposit.
According to the Resolution Foundation, the most common living arrangement for those aged between 18 and 34 in 1997 was in a couple with children – but that has now changed to living with parents.
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Analysis by property firm Savills found the average house price across Britain of £340,837 could buy a large five-bedroom property in some parts of Scotland, Wales and northern England typically – but just a studio flat in central London.
Asked whether owning your own home had got “harder under a Conservative government”, Mr Sunak replied: “It has got harder and I want to make sure that it’s easier and what we will do is not just build homes in the right places and do that in a way that is sensitive to local communities, but make sure that we support young people into great jobs so they can save for that deposit.”
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Put to him that young people were “not worried” about the deposit or stamp duty because they could not afford to leave their parents’ home, he replied: “No, actually when I speak to people it is the deposit that is the biggest challenge because many people earn enough to cover a mortgage payment, but the struggle is saving up for a deposit.
“That has always over the last few years been the number one challenge.”
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Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said: “Rishi Sunak’s confession that having a home of your own has got harder under the Tories is a damning indictment of 14 years of housing failure.
“Home ownership is a pipe dream for young people in Britain today.
“Never once in 14 years have the Tories met their 300,000 a year housing target, and their recent decision to appease the Tory MPs on their backbenches and abolish mandatory housing targets has seen housebuilding take a nosedive.”
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Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said the BBC interview showed Mr Sunak was “heading for the exit because he is totally out of touch”.
“No prime minister so out of touch with the hurt his government has caused so many people can expect to be re-elected,” she said.
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Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
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Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
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The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
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