Rishi Sunak to intervene in Sadiq Khan’s London housebuilding plan
Rishi Sunak is intervening in Sadiq Khan’s housing plan as he says not enough dwellings are built.
But the mayor of London has criticised the prime minister’s “disappointing and disingenuous claims” about the capital.
On Thursday, the government said Mr Khan has until the autumn to “look at opportunities to accelerate residential development on inner city brownfield industrial sites” or Housing Secretary Michael Gove will intervene directly.
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Downing Street criticised the mayor’s London Plan and wanted “to address issues such as single-story warehouses being prioritised over new homes on central London sites within a few minutes of tube stations”.
Mr Khan was quick to highlight his record on housebuilding, claiming that more homes had been completed under his leadership than at any time since the 1930s.
He pointed out progress had been to beat a target of starting 116,000 affordable homes in the capital between 2015 and 2023.
The government, meanwhile, claimed that “London’s own local housing plan says that 52,000 new homes are required – after the Mayor’s London Plan was not deemed credible to deliver the original 66,000 homes a year that he estimated to be needed”.
“Despite this, only around 30,000 have been built in recent years, and the latest indicator suggests only 21,000 new homes started development last year”.
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Mr Khan’s spokesperson said: “These disappointing and disingenuous claims appear to show a fundamental lack of understanding of housebuilding in London.
“The mayor delivered record numbers of affordable homes over the last six years, consistently exceeding government targets despite the impact of the pandemic and Brexit. This has included starting more council homes than at any time since the 1970s.
“The mayor’s London Plan was approved by the government in 2021 and the ministers should know that the housing figures included within it are reliant on sufficient government investment being made in infrastructure, particularly transport.”
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In the aftermath of the Conservatives’ narrow win at the recent Uxbridge by-election, it was clear they had taken two key lessons from the result.
Tory MPs interviewed in the early hours said it was about showing what Labour in power was really like and that single issues, like ULEZ (the Ultra-Low Emission Zone) could be weaponised to win votes.
Less than a week later, it appears that the prime minister has wasted no time in applying what many in his party think could be the strategy that enables them to cling on to power at the next election.
Which is presumably why Rishi Sunak popped up on a London building site today to trash Sadiq Khan’s housebuilding record in the capital.
Focusing on the Labour mayor enables the prime minister to avoid his own party’s record which, assessed against almost any metric, is a disappointing one.
Their 300,000 homes a year pledge, established in 2017, has been oft ignored and at times watered down, with Housing Secretary Michael Gove last year downgrading it to “advisory”.
The party’s one serious attempt at meeting it with ambitious planning reforms and country-wide targets was met with a furious wave of opposition from its own MPs and council leaders, many determined to protect the picturesque Tory shires.
It was clear that approach had been abandoned this week when Mr Gove set out a new vision focused instead on cities, including a significant expansion of Cambridge – a scheme immediately condemned by the area’s Conservative MP.
Meanwhile, the most recent homelessness figures show record number of families living in temporary accommodation, including 131,000 children without a home.
Add to that the recent economic turmoil that has pushed up rents and mortgages to eye-watering levels and you get a toxic combination that underpins a dysfunctional and deteriorating housing market.
Rishi Sunak’s response? To point the finger at the London mayor and to say he will now step in to sort it out.
Given his government’s record across the rest of the country, Londoners may be forgiven for thinking this is anything more than electioneering.
Mr Sunak said: “We are on track to build 1 million new homes over this parliament, having already delivered over 2.2 million across the country since 2010.
“But the reality is that too few of these homes are being built in London, and for too many Londoners the dream of owning their own home is beyond reach.
“The mayor has failed to deliver the homes that London needs. This has driven up house prices and made it harder for families to get on the housing ladder in the first place.
“That is why we are stepping in today to boost house building and make homeownership a reality again for people across this great city.”
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In its plans, the government said it wanted to support a “Docklands 2.0”, which would see increased building in parts of east London like Thamesmead, Beckton and Silvertown.
It also said £150m for housebuilding will be passed onto London boroughs, bypassing the mayor’s Greater London Authority.
And another £200m will be spent on developing unused brownfield sites.
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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Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
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Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
A group of crypto organizations has pushed back on Citadel Securities’ request that the Securities and Exchange Commission tighten regulations on decentralized finance when it comes to tokenized stocks.
Andreessen Horowitz, the Uniswap Foundation, along with crypto lobby groups the DeFi Education Fund and The Digital Chamber, among others, said they wanted “to correct several factual mischaracterizations and misleading statements” in a letter to the SEC on Friday.
The group was responding to a letter from Citadel earlier this month, which urged the SEC not to give DeFi platforms “broad exemptive relief” for offering trading of tokenized US equities, arguing they could likely be defined as an “exchange” or “broker-dealer” regulated under securities laws.
“Citadel’s letter rests on a flawed analysis of the securities laws that attempts to extend SEC registration requirements to essentially any entity with even the most tangential connection to a DeFi transaction,” the group said.
The group added they shared Citadel’s aims of investor protection and market integrity, but disagreed “that achieving these goals always necessitates registration as traditional SEC intermediaries and cannot, in certain circumstances, be met through thoughtfully designed onchain markets.”
Citadel’s ask would be impractical, group says
The group argued that regulating decentralized platforms under securities laws “would be impracticable given their functions” and could capture a broad range of onchain activities that aren’t usually considered as offering exchange services.
The letter also took aim at Citadel’s characterization that autonomous software was an intermediary, arguing it can’t be a “‘middleman’ in a financial transaction because it is not a person capable of exercising independent discretion or judgment.”
“DeFi technology is a new innovation that was designed to address market risks and resiliency in a different way than traditional financial systems do, and DeFi protects investors in ways that traditional finance cannot,” the group argued.
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In its letter, Citadel had argued that the SEC giving the green light to tokenized shares on DeFi “would create two separate regulatory regimes for the trading of the same security” and would undermine “the ‘technology-neutral’ approach taken by the Exchange Act.”
Citadel argued that exempting DeFi platforms from securities laws could harm investors, as the platforms wouldn’t have protections such as venue transparency, market surveillance and volatility controls, among others.
The letter initially drew considerable backlash, with Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger saying Citadel’s stance was an “overbroad and unworkable approach.”
The letters come as the SEC looks for feedback on how it should approach regulating tokenized stocks, and agency chair Paul Atkins has said that the US financial system could embrace tokenization in a “couple of years.”
Tokenization has exploded in popularity this year, but NYDIG warned on Friday that assets moving onchain won’t immediately be of great benefit to the crypto market until regulations allow them to more deeply integrate with DeFi.
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