Speeches by Caliskan.

“I will try to be brief. For clarity, Mr Pocklington, when you refer to the whole-life budget, are you referencing the budget of the project or the pipeline of projects?”

“Okay, but the pipeline is open for 25 years.”

“My second question is about the fact that this is a moving field. Technologies evolve almost all the time, and when you are talking about an agreed envelope of money—whether it is from the taxpayer, privately funded or coming through levies—a project plan over such a long period of time is at risk of changing that enve…”

“I welcome the Government’s decision to appoint Dame Margaret Hodge as the anti-corruption champion. She will do important work on illicit trading, not least in relation to drugs in Syria. We must not allow those routes to be a source of resource for violent terrorist groups. On the night when it became clear that the A…”

“That is really helpful. I am sorry to interrupt, but I think we will come on to house building later. I wanted to refer to that £1.8 billion figure, which I know you absolutely recognise is a burden on the public finances, but it is also a burden on local authorities. In most cases, it is the thing that will tip them o…”

“That preventive work had halted or reduced over the last few years, hadn’t it?”

“For context, from somebody who was a council leader, you get the homelessness grant every year and you have some flexibility in how that can be used. It goes into a budget and, broadly speaking, you have to make some choices. You either say, “I’m going to use some of this money to help people to put a deposit down so t…”

“I am interested in what officials think about that point. How can we use taxpayers’ money to help drive up standards through either procurement or other legislative powers?”

“With your permission, Chair, I just want to make a point on value for money. Obviously, a huge amount of taxpayers’ money is used to cover the cost of homelessness, but one reason why the public find it so difficult to accept that such an amount of money is spent is that the quality of the housing that it is spent on i…”

“I do not think I have any further questions.”

“I think you have probably answered this, but the question was, realistically, what needs to change for housing targets to be met?”

“I should acknowledge that the announcement on right to buy is really welcome. Particularly for local authorities that are losing their housing stock, being able to retain 100% of their supply will make a difference. I will return to the point about viability, because it is fundamental to supply: the housing crisis will…”

“Specifically on the capitalisation—will it be in exceptional circumstances, and will each local authority have to approach the Department for that, or is the intention to allow a more generic model that allows local authorities to just capitalise?”

“The reason I asked—and I will re-familiarise myself with that—is that local authorities are often not forward in talking about the challenges they are facing. If we are honest, often their financial situation is politicised, which puts them off being as communicative as they need to be. We do not want to find ourselves…”

“I will be quick. According to the Local Government Association, in 2023 local authorities subsided for about £200 million compared with £40 million 10 years previously, because the DWP only subsidised local authorities based on the 2011 LHA rates—so you can quantify it. I understand the point about Ministers making dec…”

“I want to focus on the supply of housing, beginning with a very open question. Do you agree that the housing crisis demonstrates a broken housing system nationally, and that it is fundamentally caused by the lack of supply of housing?”

“I want to focus on the role that local authorities can play in housing supply. Over the last few months—probably 18 months—there seems to have been a particular challenge around the viability of the housing pipeline. I want to get a sense of your understanding of how many projects are being held up because of viability…”

“With that in mind, according to the LGA, local authorities have called for a variety of measures—for example, preferential rates from the Public Works Loan Board—that might help them to get viability in place for a number of their schemes. I mention that in particular because there are suggestions that the amount of mo…”

“Is it your understanding that projects that were viable a few years ago are now no longer viable, for a variety of reasons? It might be because interest rates have gone up, for example.”

“That takes a number of years, doesn’t it?”