Angela Rayner was the real winner of this year’s Spending Review. The Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary looked serene as she watched Chancellor Rachel Reeves announce a raft of measures in her statement to the House of Commons this afternoon. Rayner – a former council tenant herself – has managed to secure £39bn worth of grants over ten years for a new affordable homes programme. This will support local authorities, private developers and housing providers to build a new generation of social housing. Housing associations and landlords will also be allowed to raise social rents by 1 percentage point over inflation, a measure the sector has long called for.
Months of tense negotiations between the Treasury and other Whitehall departments culminated in a mad rush last week as ministers begged to squeeze requests into their departmental envelopes. Rayner was the penultimate minister to agree her settlement with the Treasury, agreeing a deal with No 11 on Sunday evening (only the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, took longer to reach an agreement with Reeves). She is also rumoured – alongside the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband – to have stormed out of a meeting with the Chancellor over proposed spending cuts early on in the negotiation process.
This outcome is a sign of Rayner’s influence. After battling it out to the bitter end, the Deputy Prime Minister received one of the biggest slices of the Spending Review pie (her department’s settlement was second only to Ed Miliband’s in terms of capital spending). That Rayner secured a ten-year guarantee for social rents, with annual increases capped at 1 percentage point above inflation, demonstrates her importance.
The money raised will go towards an increase in council housebuilding and the improvement and maintenance of social housing blocks. This is a tricky request; in 2024, a report by the Social Housing Action Campaign found that nearly 363,000 social housing tenants were in arrears. Increasing social rents amid a harsh cost-of-living crisis is a challenging move. But the result suggests the strength of Rayner’s lobbying capabilities; the sector asked her to secure something, and she did.
Over the past month, a few stories of Rayner’s positioning herself as a potential candidate to replace Keir Starmer have swirled. She has been trying to distance herself from some of the messier decision-making of No 10, and she has the backing of members of the soft left and of the unions. The outcome of the Spending Review shows that rather than sidelining Rayner as a new insurgent enemy of the Starmer project, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are clearly more scared of pissing her off.
[See more: Rachel Reeves’ economic credibility is on the line]
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