Lord Livermore (Lab)

I thank my noble friend for his question. He is absolutely right. The Government are providing the biggest boost to social and affordable housing investment in a generation, and giving social housing providers the long-term certainty that they need to focus on development. We are putting in £39 billion for a successor to the affordable homes programme. We are making a 10-year social housing rent settlement from 2026 at CPI plus 1, alongside a consultation on how to implement social housing rent convergence. We are putting in over £1 billion of new investment to accelerate the remediation of social housing. So I think that is genuinely, as he says, transformative, and I am glad that those experts in this field have welcomed that allocation. As my noble friend said, it is a gradual increase, which is probably sensible for public finance reasons, but probably for delivery reasons too, to ensure that it can actually be implemented, but he is absolutely right to point to skills. In this spending review, we have a record allocation in terms of skills, but also, at the time of the Spring Statement, the Chancellor set out a construction skills package, which I think is vital. Clearly, not just on housing, we are doing a lot of infrastructure investment and a lot of infrastructure spending. We must have the skilled workers to do that work; I absolutely agree with my noble friend on the vital importance of skills alongside this investment.