Crypto News: How to build 1.5 million homes

Hi there, it's Helen Chandler-Wilde, a Bloomberg UK journalist and editor of the Readout. Hope you enjoy today's newsletter.

Today has a real end of term feeling. The sun is shining, people are heading off on their holidays, and Parliament is wrapping up business for summer recess which begins tonight.

Instead of steadily winding for the summer holidays, Chancellor Rachel Reeves took yesterday afternoon to deliver a load of bad news about the nation's finances. We took a first look at her speech to Parliament yesterday in the Readout, with further analysis coming overnight from Philip Aldrick, Alex Wickham and Ellen Milligan.

They write that all the cuts she announced yesterday – from trimming back winter fuel payments, scrapping rail projects and reviewing a hospital-building program – would together lead to savings of £5.5 billion. Given Reeves said there was a £22 billion shortfall in the books, that still leaves a £16.4 billion hole to fill. Our team thinks this means the speech has "laid the groundwork for a painful, potentially tax rising budget" on October 30.

In another massive dump-and-run announcement before the holidays, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told the Commons today about how exactly the government plan to stick to their target of building 1.5 million homes.

Source: Office for National Statistics

Rayner introduced the speech with litotes, saying that her plan wouldn't "be without controversy." Indeed. To start, compulsory housebuilding targets will be reintroduced, forcing the building of 370,000 new homes a year – but cutting London's target from 100,000 to 80,000. It will be easier to build on "poor quality" green belt land known as the "grey belt" – which includes old car parks and scrubland.

Already the plan to lower London's targets has been criticized by campaign group Britain Remade, who said it was a mistake. "London has Britain's most acute housing shortage and cities across the world show that 100,000 homes per year can be done," said Sam Richards, their chief executive.

The grey belt development idea has also previously been attacked by campaigners on the other side of the aisle, including Campaign to Protect Rural England, which argued that despite some lower quality land, "most of the green belt is high value countryside, including ancient woodlands, nature reserves and productive farmland which play a significant role in reversing our declining biodiversity, storing carbon, producing food and allowing people to access our countryside."

Housing is one of the most difficult, yet important, issues to get right. The UK has a deficit of 4.3 million homes, meaning the country would need to build another city the size of London to fix the problem. Average house prices have risen about 70% since 2010, making housing a top-four issue for Brits, according to YouGov.

This mismatch of supply and demand in housing feeds into nearly every area of policy, from difficulties finding staff in high-cost housing areas to affecting the number of children people have – something to watch given the UK's fertility rate is far below the 2.1 needed for replacement.

None of that will be fixed by the end of recess, or maybe even within this Parliament.

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The stories you need to know about this evening

Harris expands push to compete with Trump in swing states.
Network Rail to spend £2.8 billion to tackle climate woes.
UK boosting budget for renewables to record £1.5 billion.
St. James's Place shares jump most since 2008 after earnings.
Bill Ackman's US IPO, once eyeing $25 billion, now set for $2 billion.

Photographer: Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images

Keir Starmer, the UK's newly elected prime minister, campaigned on a promise to break Britain out of a rut of low growth and productivity. That won't be easy. But fixing the country's dysfunctional system of apprenticeships and vocational training would be a good start. There's much the Labour Party can do to make a difference.

Plainly, Britain is failing many of its young people, particularly those who don't go to university. Britons perform worse than their counterparts in France and Germany by the time they are young adults, even though tests of literacy and numeracy for younger teens are competitive.

Reversing this trend is urgent. Skills shortages, which doubled between 2017 and 2022, account for 36% of job vacancies. A lack of training and opportunity for young people is associated with worse physical and mental health, lower lifetime earnings, and an increased risk of long-term unemployment. With most new jobs over the next decade being created in fields that don't generally require a university degree, apprenticeships offer a practical route to a good career.

"It's less crap than it was."

Bill Winters

CEO of StanChart

Winters describing his company's stock price performance on Bloomberg TV this morning.

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Buckeye, Arizona, served by the Central Arizona Project canal Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images North America

For decades beginning in the 1920s, farmers in Crowley County, Colorado, prospered off the abundance of water from the Colorado River. It fueled a lucrative agricultural industry, and as nearby cities grew and demand for water surged, farmers sold shares of their water rights to developers for as much as $10,000 each.

Then came a long period of drought, and farmers who had bet on natural rainfall to replenish their water supply watched as thousands of acres of once-fertile land dried up. Gradually, people began moving away and local businesses shut down, leaving the county to spiral into decline.

"Over the slow change of 25 years, an economically robust community shriveled into a real depressed zone with very little farming remaining, a mostly elderly population and little to no income," says Abrahm Lustgarten, a climate journalist who reported on Crowley in 2016 as part of a ProPublica series on the water crisis in the American West.