Speeches by Blake.

“Has the Treasury done a value-for-money assessment of the overall amount that is being spent on private rent and temporary accommodation through housing benefit, compared with the overall investment in new social housing through grants?”

“You are thinking about it—that’s great. That is a good first step.”

“Do you think the Treasury might have a role in terms of value for money?”

“Okay. “Affordable” rent is not affordable in most of the country. I would argue that the Treasury should have a view on the overall value for money of how that money is spent and who decides. What scope is there for the Treasury to influence who decides where the £39 billion is spent?”

“I want to talk a bit about the distribution of that spend. Who is in charge of whether the £39 billion goes towards social housing, affordable housing or intermediate housing?”

“Could you describe how the £39 billion interacts with the National Housing Bank?”

“So they are entirely separate. At an operational level, who decides the extent to which those two sources of funding can be used together?”

“Would it be a good idea to have some numbers that could inform your thinking?”

“The spending review had a box in it that said that the OVFM would be reporting on temporary accommodation. The terms of reference say that it will be published in June. When are we going to see the report?”

“Collaborative info sharing for you: the terms of reference say that the policy development section would take place in March. This is something that London local authorities are spending £4 million a day on. If as much of a project management approach as possible could be applied to that, it would be very beneficial to…”

“That would be really helpful.”

“As if you needed more encouragement, I will refer you to the LGA report on this: local government spends £700 million, which, if we were procuring it more effectively, could be going into other things.”

“Let me move on to another solution to the problem: the £39 billion for affordable housing. Is that enough, and is it significantly above what was previously committed?”

“The reason that is matters is how it flows through the spending review, but also how it flows into local government spending. It is a huge brake on local government spending, which is then driving the overall demand for local government spending. Do you agree?”

“Adversarial?”

“That is fine—as long as we are agreed about the diagnosis of the problem.”

“In a very different era—2008—there was an £8 billion programme. Given the levels of build cost, inflation and land value, I think we should consider the scale of that programme compared with the scale of this programme.”

“More. We should make sure that we are comparing those two things.”

“Sorry, but I just wanted to follow up. If there is an acceptance that there is a significant risk, what is standing in the way of your proposals around counterfactual explanation statements being some kind of requirement in order to add to the transparency of these models?”

“Google, IBM, Accenture and Microsoft have adopted these systems.”