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It’s been a painful week for the government, with a migrant sex offender accidentally released from prison and a damning report on the spiralling costs of the asylum system. But is a plan to house asylum seekers on military sites really the answer?

Political journalist Zoë Grünewald – standing in for Coco as Nish’s co-host this week – dives into how this re-hashed Conservative plan has managed to piss off, well, just about everyone.

In better news – it’s curtains for the hated section 21 ‘no-fault evictions’ notices. The long-awaited Renters’ Rights Act has become law! Nish and Zoe talk to housing journalist Vicky Spratt about how big a deal this is for renters across England.

Plus – why Housing Secretary Steve Reed’s Maga-style ‘build, baby, build’ crusade looks likely to end in affordable housing targets more pathetic than they are now.

Then later – from spending £75,000 on flags to their only black party chair quitting – is Reform out-reforming Reform? And why is Jeremy Corbyn swapping parliament for panto this Christmas.

GUESTS

Vicky Spratt

USEFUL LINKS

Peckham Not For Sale

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/acapeckham/

CREDITS

Sky News

X / Steve Reed

Talk TV

LBC

Reform UK

ITV News

IG / Pleasance Theatre

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TRANSCRIPT

[AD]

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Nish Kumar.

Zoë Grünewald And I’m Zoë Grünewald.

Nish Kumar Coco is off with the lurgy. So our friend, the brilliant political journalist Zoë is my co-host for today. Zoë, great to have you back with us.

Zoë Grünewald Thank you for having me.

Nish Kumar Anyway, on the show today, are Britain’s institutions at breaking point? We discuss the accidental release of the sex offender whose crime sparked protests in Epping this summer, and a new report from MPs reveals billions have been wasted on asylum hotels.

Zoë Grünewald And the long-awaited renter’s rights bill is now law. What does it mean for tenants across England? We’ll be talking to housing journalist Vicky Spratt.

Nish Kumar And later, Nigel Farage claims reform is no place for racists. Polling reveals public opinion on this is shifting, and, as a much-needed antidote, we hear about local neighborhoods challenging the far-right flag campaign. Now, we want to talk about some incredibly good news for Renters, but first, we have to briefly mention what has been an incredibly bad week for the government. Another incredibly bad for the Government, I should say.

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, so they suffered a huge by-election defeat in the traditional Labour stronghold in Wales, losing Caerphilly for the first time in a century to the Nationalist Party-Plaid Cymru. Their grooming gang inquiry is in disarray, resident doctors have announced a fresh round of strikes.

Nish Kumar Perhaps the most monumental blunder of them all, Haddish Kavatu, the asylum seeker who’d been housed in the Bell Hotel in Epping and sexually assaulted a young girl sparking protests over the summer, was released from prison by mistake. Yes, that is not a joke. He was released for prison by a mistake.

Zoë Grünewald The Met Police finally found Kabatu on Sunday morning. He was mooching around Finsbury Park with a tote bag decorated with avocados, blissfully unaware of the manhunt after him.

Nish Kumar And perhaps the most gobsmacking detail of this fiasco was from a delivery driver who bumped into Kabatu outside Chelmsford Prison, here he is speaking to Sky News.

Clip So he kept saying, where do I go? What do I do? Where do I, I don’t know, I didn’t know. And then he’d come, they basically were almost sending him away. It’s like, go, you’ve been released, you go. So he come back out, goes back in. And it was about maybe fourth or fifth time.

Nish Kumar The driver said that he hung around the prison for about an hour and a half and returned four or five times. Kabata had also express that he wanted to be deported, so he must have been very confused to end up in Finsbury Park. He has since been deported to Ethiopia.

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, this would be so funny if it wasn’t so serious. The story raises some really big questions, not least of all, how the hell did this happen in the first place?

Nish Kumar So the Justice Secretary David Lammy has blamed human error, and the Prison Officers’ Union has called the suspension of a single officer unjust, and I think a lot of this seems to be connected with the Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor’s warning that mistakes in the release of prisoners are happening all the time and are, in his words, symptomatic of the chaos within the system.

Zoë Grünewald And of course, this isn’t a unique case. Government data shown that more than 260 prisoners were mistakenly released in the year leading up to March 2025.

Nish Kumar We’ve talked about this on the show a couple of times over the course of the lifespan of Pod Safe the UK. There is an absolute crisis due to severe underfunding and growing prison numbers. The MOJ’s budget was cut by around a third in 2010 and recent funding injections have not been enough to offset those earlier cuts. I mean, it feels like this is a time bomb that’s just been sort of waiting to go off.

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, this feels straight out of the thick of it, right? It’s this perfect coalescing of these two huge issues, prisons overcrowding, issues with the justice system and immigration.

Nish Kumar It feels like this story contains within it kind of three different strands about the kind of slow and steady failure of the British state. Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee has this week published a report showing how first the Tories and then Labour squandered billions of pounds on a failed and chaotic asylum system. So whilst our institutions are collapsing around us, we’re also just pumping money into an asylum policy that just isn’t working. And it is important to say that this is not just the fault of this government. This is a decade’s pattern, right Zoë?

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, absolutely. You can trace a lot of this to the kind of original sins of Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson’s governments, where they chase those hard headlines about coming down on asylum seekers and what they termed illegal immigration, but actually putting no money into the issue to sort out the backlogs, the failing equipment, the issues in the Home Office. And if you look at where all that money that was pointed out in this report went to, of course it went to private companies. So 10-year contracts with Clear Springs, Serco, et cetera. The cost of which have tripled from $4.5 billion to $15.3 billion since 2019. In the first five years between 2019 and 2024, the three companies named made a total profit of $383 million on the contracts.

Nish Kumar So we should say that there are very painful human consequences for this. So there’s a lot of traumatized people that have spent years kind of trapped in hotel rooms that aren’t designed to be permanent homes and also now I guess becoming increasingly fearful as these hotels attract local protests and obviously at a time where we’re seeing these kind of rising racial tensions, the release of a man who has committed sexual assault is not going to help dampen any of those tensions, right?

Zoë Grünewald No, absolutely. But it also brings back into sharp focus this politicization of the asylum issue and of course just allows the far-right, reform, the Tories to make hay out of this, even though especially the Tories, their fingerprints are on a lot of this mess in the beginning. The government’s plans now to house asylum seekers potentially on military bases. That exact policy was announced by Robert Jenrick back under Rishi Sunak’s government. But it does give the Tories an opportunity to say, oh, we told you so. This isn’t so easy to sort out, even though a lot of this, as we said, is their fault to begin with.

Nish Kumar So you’ve already alluded to this new policy which is they’re going to house asylum seekers in disused military barracks to take pressure off the hotels, which is something that the Conservative Party tried and failed to do and were heavily criticized by the then opposition Labour Party. There’s a huge number of problems with this policy, right?

Zoë Grünewald Absolutely. The government is saying that it could potentially be more expensive to house migrants in military bases than hotels. How can you find money for this in an economy where you can’t find money for anything else? Especially not speeding up processing of claims, which we know would help reduce the backlog and help reduce those incentives that the people smugglers use to get people over here. But I think it also plays into this idea that the center can’t hold. As we said, this is a reheated policy. From the Conservative government, neither the Tories nor Labour are able to get a grip on this issue. So I think voters of all persuasions are going to think, okay, we need some radical solutions to get grip on the issue. And also, internally, for Keir Starmer, this is problematic, because MPs, across the political spectrum, of course, aren’t happy with the idea of bases in their area being used to house migrants. The issue of cost is huge, and of course putting them in bases might not remove them from local communities. The Inverness site that they’re looking at, for example, is in town. And of course, number 10 are not being clear about whether migrants, and I can’t believe we’re even saying this, will have the freedom to roam. Because, you know, legally, I don’t think they can prevent that. So this isn’t actually going to get a grip on any of those issues. I don’t think it’s going to neutralize any of reforms or tax. And if we’re talking about it being more expensive, I think that is only going to reheat those conversations about why are we spending so much money on this and what’s the solution.

Nish Kumar Emma Solomon, who’s the CEO of the Refugee Council, has said there is a better way by speeding up decisions for people from countries where we know most asylum applications succeed, subject to rigorous security checks, the government could end the use of expensive asylum hotels in 2026. So again, so much of this is policy that’s kind of driven by wanting to look, quote, tough on asylum and wanting to satisfy some itch from people who have columns in writing newspapers. But it’s not actually practical. The asylum policy is both inhumane and expensive. It’s a rare example of something that is a bad idea on literally every level you could possibly consider it. And specifically, Zoë, the sort of political fallout of this for Starmer, you’ve got these, almost these kind of two separate issues because the Kabatu case almost brings together these two examples of state failures because the asylum policy’s failing, but also. Our prisons are massively overcrowded. And again, some of it comes back to this idea of there’s a lot of people in prison for minor offenses that are clogging up the system. Why is the Labour government not willing to entertain any solutions that don’t seem to involve reheating conservative policies from about three or four years ago?

Zoë Grünewald So there was the David Gawk sentencing review, which was published earlier this year, which looked at reducing those sentences. I think there is some progressive thought in the Ministry of Justice now about how they can reduce the number of people in prisons and what they can do about it. But you’re absolutely right that while the government is trying to get a grips on this issue of asylum, which has been so politicized by the right and by the far right. Alongside the release of one of the most high-profile offenders in the country, who of course was an asylum seeker, it’s the perfect gift to Nigel Farage because any action the government takes to find a humane solution for asylum seekers or to say we still have moral obligations to asylum seekers, to refugees, we have our legal obligations, are undermined because Nigel farage can say well look what happens when you let these people in, you know it is the perfect political gift to the far right and I think for a Labour government that is not brave about this at all, that has been pandering to the right on these issues, I cannot imagine them suddenly finding their bravery to make that moral argument clear now. And I think it is absolutely the case that you cannot tackle the root causes of the small boats issue or mass migration. Without looking at A, the issues here, which is the lack of case workers, broken IT systems, the shortage of a proper accommodation, all those things we talked about that are legacies from the Conservative government, and the global push factors that are causing people to flee war-torn areas, areas with climate crisis that are only gonna get worse over the next few years. And of course, the fact that we took ourselves out of the EU and no longer have returns agreements with all these countries.

Nish Kumar That’s really important to say. I do feel like, again, because of the sort of a murder around Brexit, there is this sort of slightly under-discussed element to this kind of small, and I hate the fact that I’m using the phrase small-votes-crisis, I hate this kind-of sort of manufactured hysteria around this issue. But a lot of the reason that this, in inverted commas, small-Votes-Crisis happened is because of Brexit, right? It’s because we don’t have a returns agreement with the European Union. And so… We’re right, and we should be focusing on the failures of this current Labour government, but he’s pretty fucking cheeky of Nigel Farage, because by agitating for Brexit, he’s essentially engineered this specific small boats crisis, right? Am I wrong to say that?

Zoë Grünewald I think you can definitely see a huge jump in the number of small boats arrivals after we left the Dublin agreement and left our returns agreements with the European Union. Now critics on the right will say, well we actually very rarely use that, we actually very rarely deport people under the Dublin Agreement. But the point is it was a deterrent. Yes, right. And since then the people smugglers realize, oh there is this loophole now where if, It’s not even a loophole, it’s just there is this fact that if people… Do get on small boats and go over to the UK, they cannot be deported to other countries in the EU. You can see that Keir Starmer and Ed Davey have seen that and they’ve now started terming these boats, Farage’s boats. But I think it’s kind of a little bit too late. I think people now just see this as a crisis, as you say, that is kind of emblematic of all the issues in modern Britain. It is absolutely right that Farage, his Brexit it did not. Give this country more control over its borders. But it still feels like Nigel Farage is leading the conversation on this.

Nish Kumar After the break, the Renters’ Rights Act is now law, and we’re going to be speaking to housing journalist Vicky Spratt about what it means for tenants across England.

[AD]

Zoë Grünewald Now, some good news. The long-awaited renter’s rights bill became law on Monday. It’s been described as the biggest shake-up to renting in England in more than 30 years, scrapping no-fault evictions as well as giving tenants greater rights to challenge rent increases. We’re here to tell us if it’s as good as it sounds as housing and society correspondent for the eyepaper, Vicky Spratt. Vicky, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Vicky Spratt Hello, thanks for having me.

Nish Kumar Good to see you. Are we popping champagne corks?

Vicky Spratt Not yet, Nish, not yet. And I’ll tell you why. So the bill has received royal assent. The Renters Rights Bill has become the Renters Rights Act. This has been years in the making. The Tories first promised renters reform back in like 2017. I mean, I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives since then, and thousands of people have been evicted from their homes since then. More to the point. But just because we’ve got royal assent doesn’t mean we actually know when any of this is going to become something that actually impacts people’s lives. We’re waiting to hear from the government about a timeline for implementation. At the moment, I don’t really know when that is and nobody’s saying. So hold the champagne, hopefully it’s soon, but maybe it’s not. I mean, what’s going on? I’d love to know.

Nish Kumar First of all, if you don’t know, I definitely don’t. Just clarify for me before we actually talk about the specifics of this, why is this taking so fucking long? Because we actually talked about this on one of the very first episodes of this podcast back in May, 2023.

Vicky Spratt Yeah. Imagine how I feel as a housing correspondent. I mean, this has been almost a decade of my life. Great question. Okay. Let’s go back to the Tories. They just couldn’t get it past their own back benches ultimately. And also they kept ousting their leaders and bringing new ones in, which was very destabilizing for the country and for legislation. And actually in some ways, I think the Rent is Rights Act is a really good example of why political instability is the enemy of decent policy. This is something that’s going to stop people becoming homeless, right? And it’s taken that long for politicians to get their act together and it took a new government to actually get it over the line. They’ve gone further than the conservative version was going to go. We can get into what’s actually in it, but I think it’s more robust. And from them winning the election to now, just over a year for a piece of legislation. I’d say this is quite rapid.

Zoë Grünewald So one thing this bill does, which you mentioned, is end section 21, which is the no fault eviction clause. Landlords will now need a legal reason to evict you, like rent arrears or anti-social behavior. That’s a big deal, right?

Vicky Spratt It is a huge deal, Zoë, and at least we hope that’s how it’s going to work. And I think we need to see how it is going to be enforced. But yeah, in theory, now Section 21 will be gone. Section 21 meant a landlord could ask you to leave just two months notice and they didn’t have to give you a reason. So it was often, even though it wasn’t supposed to be used this way, a sort of retaliatory thing. If you asked for repairs or you made a complaint, are just easier to get you out. Now, they’ll have to use something called Section A, so they can evict you if you’re behind on your rent. Rent arrears is a legitimate reason for eviction. If you’re found to be guilty of antisocial behavior, having lots of loud parties or worse, you will be at risk of eviction, and there is another avenue, so if a landlord wants to get the home back so they could live in it themselves, or they can sell it, then they can evict their tenants. But they have to wait six months if they want to relist it for rent after they’ve done that. So some of your listeners may have come across a story that I put out in August about the former homelessness minister, Rishinara Ali, no longer the homelessness minister because she had made some of her tenants homeless by asking them to leave and saying she was going to sell and then relisting the property at a higher rent. She said she was trying to sell the property that wasn’t what she was doing. But the tenants disagreed. They said that their home was taken away from them and they had to find other places to live and one of them ended up sofa surfing for a bit. But that is now not allowed. If you say you’re gonna sell the property as a landlord, you have to sell it and you can’t relist it at a higher rent within six months.

Nish Kumar MOJ data shows that there’s been more than 11,000 no-fault bailiff evictions just in the last year. But it’s really important that you’ve stressed that there are circumstances like antisocial behavior and rent arrears that allows landlords to evict. Because I have read a few slightly hysterical opinion pieces. Saying that this now basically means that their tenants are allowed to just smash their genitals and their faces every morning and no one should ever be a landlord in Britain’s basically communist China. Like that I’ve read a few sort of opinion pieces of that flavor this week Vicky. Can you reassure the beleaguered landlord community that have suffered so partially at the hands of mouse a star, but that in fact, this doesn’t mean that tenants can take a big dump on the floor and smear it into the curtains and not be removed from their houses.

Vicky Spratt I really hope somebody has checked on those landlords this morning. That sounds terrible and certainly illegal. In the rage bait click bait era of online content, you will be unsurprised to know there are some people saying this is a terrible idea and it’s going to crash the housing market. I don’t think that’s true and I would point you to the fact that Granger, one of our countries. Biggest commercial landlords, they do a lot of build to rent properties, issued a statement saying how great they thought this legislation was and how much they welcomed it. So things can’t be that bad, can they? Landlords can absolutely still evict their tenants and they can get properties back, they can’t just chuck them out short notice for no reason.

Zoë Grünewald The act also legislates something that you should never have needed a law on in the first place, which is the right to be safe in your own home. This is Awab’s law, named after the case of Awab Ishak, a two-year-old boy who died in 2020 after prolonged exposure to mold in his housing association flat in Rochdale. His father had raised the issue multiple times. And of course his death, it wasn’t just a tragedy, it was a scandal. I mean, I couldn’t believe the other night I was listening to a radio phone in which had multiple landlords ringing up to say that mold is only ever the tenants’ fault, which I thought was extraordinary. But now, finally, social landlords, or generally the council or housing association, will be legally required to investigate and fix hazards within a strict time frame. But let’s be clear, this law exists because the system failed so catastrophically that a toddler died.

Vicky Spratt I couldn’t have put it better myself, Zoë. Honestly, I actually find our story quite hard to talk about sometimes because sometimes as a journalist, you have these moments where you think, I’m not writing what I’m writing, am I? Surely that didn’t happen. And in the detail of what was said to his family, you know, they were blamed for the way they were bathing, the way that they were cooking, for the mold and damp in their house by Housing Association. And their kid died from a respiratory problem that he developed because of that mold. Mold and damp, so, so dangerous. And landlords become very defensive about it. And I remember when I was a private renter, I’m not anymore. Once I was told that it was because I was drying my washing. I was like, well, what am I supposed to do? Because there’s no tumble dryer. Well, I mean, I’ve got to wash clothes. Like, what do you do? And I know when I reading, Um, everything that was said to our family, that was reminding me of that. And I think there’s so much victim blaming that goes on with tenants. Um, the, the our absorbs a really, really important piece of legislation. And I really think it really sets a standard for social landlords. And I hope that the renters rights act makes it clear that actually landlords are housing providers, right? That’s what they are. We should call them housing providers. Yeah. And I, and I think when you put it that way, these standards all make a lot more sense. You’re providing housing. That’s the same as providing food, right? There are food standards. If you go to a restaurant, you’ll see the certificates. There are inspections. Why have we accepted that not existing in housing for so long?

Nish Kumar That’s such a brilliant way of putting it, because I mean, if you’re a food provider, as a restaurant is, and you keep giving people diarrhea, that is probably going to impact your business model in the long term, but as things stand, this law, our law only applies to social rented housing. So is there, do you think that this has provided a kind of framework and a pathway to which we can get these kinds of things in place for the private sector as well?

Vicky Spratt Yeah, absolutely. My understanding is that the intention is that our absorb will also apply to the private rented sector. At some point, again, we’re waiting on the timeline for implementation, perhaps that will change. But that is my understanding of what’s coming down the track. And the decent home standard, which by the way, already existed in social housing and meant that landlords aren’t weren’t supposed to rent rent out homes with category 1 hazards, like mould applies to both sectors now. So, well, as soon as this all comes into force. So there are now minimum standards, but I’m not completely confident that the Renters’ Rights Act is gonna mean that suddenly we have a functioning system because I think councils are really overstretched. I keep writing about how services are crumbling, not just in housing, but in every other aspect of public life. And I do worry. This might be quite difficult to enforce, but the fact that we’re talking about it so much is a good thing.

Nish Kumar Let’s now just talk about affordability. I mean, that’s sort of kind of the core of the crisis here. From what I understand, Vicky, landlords can increase rent to market rate. But what is market rate? Like it’s, I’m not ordering fish in a restaurant. Like what, I, I I’m sort of slightly confused as to what that phrase means in this context. For listeners, Vicky looks very, very depressed.

Vicky Spratt I find it increasingly really difficult to talk about this because I get so much crap on Twitter every time I dare to talk about affordability, whether it’s in buying a home or renting a home. I actually think your analogy of market fish is quite a good one, Nish.

Nish Kumar I always accidentally stumble on useful points.

Vicky Spratt You’ve done it again, you know, it’s not the first time I’ve heard you do it. And I just want to congratulate you on how good you are.

Nish Kumar A stop clock.

Vicky Spratt So, basically, you know, like, when you go into a restaurant and they say, oh, this is the market price from today, you don’t really, like have a way of checking that, right? The rental market is a bit more accountable than that because you can see what homes are listed. But actually, the market rent is dictated by what people will pay. And yesterday, the day before I spoke to you guys, I gave evidence to the Housing, Communities, and Local Government Select Committee about some of this stuff. Based on what I’ve been seeing across the country. And I was sat alongside an economist from the Institute of Fiscal Studies. And he said, well, you know, market rent is quite a good measure of affordability because it’s what people will pay. And I said, yeah, but I know people who don’t eat, don’t go on holiday, feed their kids, not themselves, to be able to afford higher rent on a slightly nicer home. So is it a measure of affordable if they’re sacrificing so many other things that they could use their income to pay for. Because at the end of the day, you can’t not have a house, right? So market rents are generally linked to people’s incomes. When incomes go up, rents go up because people will pay a bit more, but also because landlords then start charging a bit more. So I think, I think it’s a really, really interesting area because the fact that fewer people have been able to afford to buy a home for really complicated reasons, including regulations that came in after 2008 and epic house price inflation. Has meant more people need to rent privately. The fact that we don’t have as much social housing as we used to have means you’ve got more lower income tenants renting privately. All of this has created more of what economists call demand, which has driven out rents, right? But I think you have to think about the difference between need and demand, because everybody needs a house, so of course they’re gonna pay whatever they can, or even what they can’t, right, like I remember once actually taking out a bank loan to pay rent on a flat that all my friends wanted to rent that I couldn’t afford, but I’d wanted to live with them, not strangers, so I took out a bank loan to cover my rent for five months. So, I’m sure there are other people out there doing that, but to go back to the Renters’ Rights Act, I think what’s really, really good about it, but again, controversial, is there’s gonna be a tribunal where if you are hit with an unfair rent hike that’s above the prices in your area, you can challenge it. Again, we’re waiting for the detail on how that’s gonna work. My understanding is that’s going to become clear in the coming weeks. But it is a good thing and they just introduced rent control in Scotland. Rent control, again, very controversial. The evidence is mixed. Does it work? Doesn’t it work. I guess we’ll see in Scotland, it can be a bit of a test case, but what we have got in England is now there’s some new statistics out this week showing that people are spending, um, you know, more than half of their take home pay on their rent. Generally speaking, if your housing costs exceed a third of your take home, pay is unaffordable. So that’s where we are.

Nish Kumar We’ve also seen post 2008, 17 years of wage stagnation, right? So I don’t really understand how do you derive market price? If market price is supposedly linked to wages and wages are not going up at the same rate, but housing is going up, it seems like a bit of an odd metric when it comes to housing. Anyway, we should move on to Labour’s new housing czar and Angela Rainier’s Replacement Steve Reed. Here’s a video he released after the Labour Party conference, and I will say, I found it quite strange. For the benefit of people listening to the podcast, there’s a lot of people in red hats that say, build, baby, build. And Steve Reed is sort of, he’s kind of conducting the whole thing like it’s a WWE SmackDown event. Very strange stuff, I would say, generally, before we get into the actual meat of what was going on there. Quite strange politically, right, for a Labour minister to be sort of symbolically invoking Donald Trump, I figure who’s sort of. Fairly unpopular in the United Kingdom, but specifically unpopular within the British Labour Party.

Vicky Spratt So I was at that rally. It was called a Rally for the Builders at Labour Party Conference. You know, let’s talk about the politics of it first. Really, really interesting. I was reform conference before I was at Labour Conference. And when I was in that room, it did remind me a bit of reform, I have to say. Where there was, you know, lots of American style rally behavior and flares going off as people came on stage and. You know, music that’s meant to get everybody going and caps and merch. There’s always merch at political party conferences, but Reform this year had football shirts with all of their big players’ names on, Farage, Tice. And these Bill Baby Bill caps were a more, you know Labour friendly version of that, but they did give MAGA. I think it’s impossible not to make that connection with a red cap, right? That’s what it symbolizes now. So I think this speaks to the division in the Labour Party at the moment, which is… Do we try and out reform reform, or do we try and speak to our base who are going to be captured by the Greens? And of course, they’re going to have to pick something. I don’t think they can be all things to all people. They’ve got a few years to figure it out.

Nish Kumar Reid’s promised to unleash the biggest era of house-building in the country’s history, but the reality is Labour’s house-burning pledges are currently sort of in jeopardy. What’s going on? A red hat’s no longer legally admissible as planning permission.

Vicky Spratt Shock headline news, red bucket hats do not equate to houses built. Firstly, I don’t know why Labour ever promised to build 1.5 million homes. It’s not doable. With the market where it is, for reasons that I’ll get into in a second, that was never possible. It’s kind of reminding me of, you know, like, when a tech company overvalues itself to get more investment. And then eventually ends up laying everybody off, and it turns out what they were promising wasn’t possible in the first place. It’s a little bit like that. It’s like we were never gonna be able to build 1.5 million homes over the course of the parliament. So saying you’re gonna do that might give you a good growth forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, but it doesn’t make it any more possible. So I really don’t know why they did that. It would have been much better and more honest of this government to come in and say, house building’s in a mess, the economy’s not in a good place. And we really need to get things going. We’re gonna build X number, slightly more realistic, really good quality homes and we’re gonna make sure it gets done and then actually deliver. That’s not what they’ve done. They’ve promised something undeliverable and they’re not gonna deliver it. So just to be really, really clear on that. But there’s a bigger economic picture here, which is over the last three decades, house prices have exploded, right? When Labour will last. Government or slightly before. The average home was sort of four times the average income. Now it’s more like eight. That makes it really, really difficult for particularly for first-time buyers or people who want to upsize, have bought a one-bedroom flat and they need a two, three-bed room house to get the kind of mortgages they need, because you’re looking at borrowing so much money. And because of 2008, the banks are really only allowed to lend so many what we call high loan to income, high loan, to value mortgaged, for good reason, because we don’t want another. Massive, massive crash, right? But the the sort of downside of that has been it’s really difficult for young people to get mortgages. So I think building homes supply absolutely part of the problem and Labour really do need to be building, but they also have to sort out the mortgage market and be really careful about it because what you don’t want to do is bring in another scheme like helped by which the Tories did after the crash to get the market moving again and get lots of young adults into enormous amounts of debt at inflated prices and risk another disaster. So I think, I think Labour actually have come in at a really, really difficult time. You know, you could not pay me enough money to do that job. However, they could be doing a better job than they are. I think they really should be talking about all aspects of the housing market and not just saying build baby build and pretending planning reform is a panacea, it’s not. Gonna have to make some really difficult decisions. I think Steve Reed really wants to do something and perhaps that is good, but there was a big announcement last week about temporarily cutting the number of affordable homes developers are required to build in London. The idea is that that will get house building going in London, Yeah, maybe it will, but who’s going to buy the homes?

Nish Kumar Yes. Now on that subject, I read a couple of pieces in City AM and the Daily Mail that had a pretty specific idea of who was to blame for the housing crisis. And I was surprised to find out it was me and James Acaster. I didn’t realize we wielded that kind of power. We’ve been doing, we’ve both done a benefit gig separately to raise money for Peckham Is Not For Sale, which is a local campaign against the redevelopment of the Alesham shopping center. So the plan is for it to be turned into 900 homes. Just 12% of which would be affordable. I apologize to everybody for spoiling the planning permission of the nation. Vicky, how, to what extent are James and I directly to blame and no one else for this?

Vicky Spratt I’m so glad we finally found the culprit.

Nish Kumar Yeah

Vicky Spratt All these years of searching, and finally I know who to blame. Let me just go away and rewrite what I was writing this morning. No, look, obviously, obviously it’s far more complicated than that. And I’m sure you have been accused of being a NIMBY for talking about that, right?

Nish Kumar Yes, specifically those words in the Daily Mail.

Vicky Spratt Yeah. So for anybody who doesn’t know what that nerdy acronym means, not in my backyard, what you’ve said is what I think a lot of people in communities feel. And this isn’t just my opinion. It’s based on polling. You know, we want to make sure local people can, can afford to live in our, in our communities. We don’t mind homes being built as long as we can access them. And I think the Elsham redevelopment is a really, really good example, you know, in and of itself, not necessarily bad, right? But if they’re gonna be more luxury flats, some of which sit empty, because we know that happens a lot in London, or some of, which are like 800,000 pounds. Then you have to wonder who they’re for. I’m from London, I live in London. I grew up in London I think one of the biggest things I’ve seen change over my 37 years on this planet is, my friends are leaving. And it’s really sad. And moving out as far as they possibly can. Changing their ideas about what their lives would look like. And we’re the lucky ones, right? Like we all have a bit of money, kind of middle-class, if that’s even something that exists anymore. And if you have less than we do, you can’t get a social home, you just don’t live here anymore. I mean, I do stories about that all the time. People who become homeless, families, you know, particularly who are then moved out of London by London councils to Newcastle, to Halifax, to the Kent coast. It’s, it’s happened already. So I, I do understand your concern. Um, and I think, I think there’s a question for the government, right? Do they want to build for building sake to boost the number that they’ve chosen to boost growth, or do they want, to make sure London is a functioning city where there are people who can clean the fancy hotels, work in them, who can staff the restaurants where we all want to eat. I think you have to take. A sort of 360 view of the housing market, because whatever you do in the housing market will shape the communities that you have. So I think everybody needs to pause and zoom out and think about what we’re actually building and what we want, particularly London, but also our other communities and cities and towns to look like in five, ten, fifteen years time, because everything that’s happening right now, sorry to sound like dramatic, but That is going to be the consequence, right? This is… Going to define what, particularly what London looks like. And there are already schools closing because there are no children living in the area. If you want people growing up in London, you want them to live here, start businesses here, contribute to society here, then that they have to be able to afford to live there. It’s that simple.

Zoë Grünewald And of course, one of the issues with house building is that construction uses quite a lot of greenhouse emissions more than three times than aviation and construction, of course can take decades. There are new amendments in the Planning Bill that are quietly tearing down some of these environmental protections to help developers. How can we get more houses without new construction? Is it actually more important to be securing our rights and retrofitting existing buildings, I mean, is there just another way? Where nature isn’t necessarily sacrificed to build, baby, build.

Vicky Spratt It is interesting, right? Because when you start talking about this policy area, you realize how it’s linked to everything else that we do in particularly really, really thorny subjects like the environment. It is possible to do both. I think we can build good quality new homes and also think about the future. I just visited a really interesting development in a place called Halton, which is a new town just outside of Rugby, where they had really thought about that and preserved a lot of nature. Similarly, I was in Cornwall near Truro at a new, it’s kind of a new town, it’s a bit small. They’re calling it a garden village that’s being built where they’re making sure all the energy is geothermal. So yeah, of course there are gonna be emissions while they’re building it, but those homes will probably be a lot more environmentally friendly than some of our older housing stock. The planning and infrastructure bill, let’s see what happens to it, but I… Think it has tried to work with environmental groups as opposed to as against them. Although I understand that not everybody’s happy about it. But to answer your question, like, is there a better way? Everybody keeps saying this to me, Vicky, but what about all these empty homes we’ve got? Nobody has been able to give me and I’ve asked because I’d love to do something on it. Really good data on how many empty homes there are, what kind of homes they are and where they are. Because those are the questions I have about that, right? Are they in places where people want to live, can live, can work? Are they mansions? Are they flats? You know, I imagine it’s a combination of the two, but that keeps being trotted out as a solution. You know this is so difficult and there are so many trade-offs. There’s no easy solution. Obviously we need to make sure we’re protecting the environment. We need to think about emissions. We need to think about. Climate change. We also need people to be able to live near the people they love. So I don’t have an easy answer for that. But if anyone listening has got the data on where all these empty homes that we could just fix up and have people live in are, I’d love to see it.

Nish Kumar It sounds like what we were hoping today was to go, it’s all fixed, the rent bill has done it, but it sounds like this is going to be an ongoing conversation. Vicky, I hope you’ll join us again to talk about it as things progress. But in the meantime, thank you so much, as ever, for joining us on Pod Save the UK.

Vicky Spratt Thanks for having me as always.

Nish Kumar Now, after the break, is reform racist? Alarm bells are being sounded from within the party itself. And as the Your Party confusion rumbles on, what Jeremy Corbyn is turning to for some light relief.

[AD]

Zoë Grünewald So, the questioning of British minorities and their belonging is ramping up. Last week, Reform MP Sarah Pochin was left absolutely fuming in this interview with TalkTV. Can you guess why?

Clip Drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, people that basically are anything other than white people.

Clip What’s wrong Sarah? What’s wrong with that?

Clip It doesn’t reflect our society.

Nish Kumar Well, I mean, I’ll be honest with you. I’m not sure she’s a listener anyway, but I imagine this podcast must do Sarah Pochin’s head then. She must be furious. Thank God you’re here Zoë.

Zoë Grünewald I know, I know.

Nish Kumar At last, a white person on this goddamn show.

Zoë Grünewald Can I just say, for any listener who, for this is their first introduction to Sarah Pochin, congratulations on having avoided this woman for so long. She is, in my view, the hard right David Brent, okay? I have had the misfortune of listening to several of her interviews. Did you know she was planning to come out on stage at Reform UK’s party conference in a turquoise hijab until Richard Tice talked her out of it?

Nish Kumar Wait, what?

Zoë Grünewald Yes.

Nish Kumar What? I didn’t know this!

Zoë Grünewald Yes, she did. I know, it’s been very under-reported. She admitted to it on LBC.

Clip You were going to wear a turquoise burqa.

Clip I was just making the audience laugh. It’s always good to come on with a little bit of a joke. A bit lighthearted.

Clip But you were persuaded not to, weren’t you, by Richard Tice?

Clip We had a bit of giggle about it.

Zoë Grünewald When Richard Tice has to talk you out of your racism, that’s when you know you’ve gone too far, right?

Nish Kumar I am stunned into silence. What the fuck is going on? She was going to walk on stage.

Zoë Grünewald In a turquoise hijab. She thought, oops, she said, just a bit of fun. Don’t know what goes on in her mind. Anyway, she is a elected MP. So, you know.

Nish Kumar I mean, even for reform, this is bad.

Zoë Grünewald I feel like she is the canary in the coal mine of public opinion for reform, right? They send her out there to just say whatever she wants.

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah.

Zoë Grünewald And they just see how it’s received.

Nish Kumar She did apologize and say that her comments have been phrased poorly, but obviously that anecdote now really casts a totally different light on that fucking apology. All of this is obviously immensely troubling for Nigel Farage. He’s always been clear that reform is no place for racists, but did he condemn his MP? Let’s find out. Here he is speaking at a press conference on Monday.

Clip I understand the basic point, but the way she put it, the way she worded it, was wrong and was ugly. I thought that the intention behind it was racist, but I would have taken a lot more action than I have to date, and that is because…

Nish Kumar So he didn’t. And I think we can all agree that ultimately, whenever I’m wondering if something’s racist, I think I should consult Nigel Farage. This is my oracle on what is and is not racist. So on balance, the gavel has fallen. Judgment has been passed. Nigel Farage, the arbiter of whether things are racist or not, has decided she was not intentionally racist. She sort of phrased it a bit poorly. But alarm bells have been raised within the party itself. Neville Watson, who’s the only black party branch chair in reform, quit last week. He said that he had not faced any racism directly, but the tenor of Britain’s migration debate is doing more harm than good.

Zoë Grünewald That’s right, Watson’s worth quoting in full. So he said, whether it’s Nigel banging on about these small boats or Robert Jenrick talking about Hansworth, politicians are stoking a fire. Some might be stoking it with a smaller stick and that type of conversation with the boats, the asylum hotels. I feel it’s doing more harm than good in terms of community relations. Politics is losing its compassion as politicians try to out reform reform. And I no longer feel that is compatible with my Christian faith.

Nish Kumar I mean I guess my first question is, what did he expect? I mean, I’m not sure which bits of your deep Christian faith reform is cut.

Zoë Grünewald Well, I mean, it’s interesting that you should say that because recently there’s been quite a lot of reporting that there is this creeping Christian influence in the reform party. So Farage recently appointed the right-wing anti-abortion theologian, James Orr, as reform senior advisor. It’s definitely worth listeners reading up. There’s a few profiles of him knocking around at the moment. It is mental. And at the same time, this big anti-abbortion group in America. Called the ADF, which is the Alliance Defending Freedom, has been quietly courting the party since 2024, according to claims in an article by the New York Times.

Nish Kumar Yes, it’s a really, really interesting piece, and we’re actually going to be speaking to the author of that investigation, Jane Bradley, who’s a New York Times reporter, on the show next week. It seems that reform is interested in Christian beliefs, but only the weirdest shit. The bearded hippie who was telling people to love each other, they’re not interested in that stuff. They’re interested exclusively in the weird shit. I do think that Never Watson, this is quite a significant story, it should probably have received more play that it has. Can’t restate this often enough, he is the only party branch chair in Reform who is black. And he has left the party sounding an alarm about its impact on community tensions and racial tensions in the United Kingdom. It does feel like that is something that we should be discussing more intensively. Farage keeps saying that Reform is not a racist party, but public opinion on this is shifting. So according to a YouGov poll, that was conducted this week, the number of people that think reform is a racist party is higher than it was in 2024, and I can’t imagine this sort of shenanigans are helping.

Zoë Grünewald No, no, absolutely not. I think it’s very difficult to interpret Sarah Poechin, what she said, the sentiment behind it, and the way she said it, as anything other than racist. And I think that is where public opinion is. It is interesting to see how other politicians have responded to this, of course. We know that the government has come down hard on her remarks. Starmer condemned the comments. West Streeting and David Lammy both called them racist. It’s good, finally, to see a line being drawn somewhere right by this Yeah.

Nish Kumar There is a mainstreaming, though, of racist views. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch avoided saying that Pochins remarks were racist on Monday. She told Robert Peston on ITV, frankly, and I say this as a black person, I’m tired of having to argue about whether or not what reform is doing fits into a particular category. And more recently, Tory junior minister Katie Lam, who lots of bits of particularly the right-wing press, they’ve been tipping her as a future party leader. Obviously when I heard Sarah Pochins remarks, the alarm bells were ringing. But Katie Lam’s remarks may have disturbed me more. So Katie Lam essentially has proposed deporting legal residents. She said that there are people that are in this country that have arrived legally, and while she said it’s not their fault that they’re here, they shouldn’t have been allowed to come here. She’s proposing deporting illegal residents to create, and this is group of people. So this is how far we’ve gone now. We’ve got a kind of leading light in the kind of junior ranks, somebody who people think will be the future leader of the Conservative Party, saying that under her leadership, potentially, they would seek to remove people who are settled here legally. What’s even more concerning about that is when asked about Lam’s remarks, Kemi Badenoch spokesperson said they are broadly in line with party policy. This is deeply, deeply alarming. The idea of creating a culturally coherent group of people. It’s essentially a kind of quick thesaurus scan. Some words have been changed, but the meaning is preserved of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.

Zoë Grünewald I mean, both the comments Sarah Pochins and Katie Lam’s are extremely sinister, but I think there’s something very, very dark, as you say, about Katie Lam’s remarks, which is it has overtones of authoritarianism. How are you actually going to decide what cultural coherence is? What does that slip into? What has that become? I think it is extraordinary that the Conservative Party are mainstreaming this kind of opinion.

Nish Kumar Yeah.

Zoë Grünewald Um, and, you know, I would say as well with, with Kemi Badenoch, I was listening to an interview with her the other day. It took her a long time to call Tommy Robinson far right. She’s refusing to use that terminology over and over again. She said she didn’t want to label him. If you are not able to label someone like Tommy Robinson as far right, and you were not allowed to, uh, remove yourself or distance yourself from those kind of, uh comments, what, what do you stand for?

Nish Kumar But we should also move on to another reform-based story because people need to understand what reform are about and what they seem to be about based on this week’s news is harboring people with absolute batshit views and also running local councils incredibly incompetently, okay? So reform’s version of Doge is already the wheels are coming off of it. All these people who voted for reform because they wanted big governmental efficiencies and more money spent on potholes and improving local services will be thrilled to hear that their new council is spending £75,000 on flags. So the reform-led Nottinghamshire County Council will display 150 Union Jack flags across 82 locations at the cost of £457 per flag. Remember, they are talking about governmental efficiency. DOGE is the Department of Governmental Efficiency and they, reform have repeatedly and explicitly said they want to bring a UK version of that here if they’re elected into government. So that efficiency has resulted in them spending £75,000 on fucking flags. So, Councilor McBarton defended the decision to ITV News.

Clip Flags versus libraries, versus portfolios, versus send education, versus adult social care. But that is money that could be spent on those things, isn’t it?

Clip We’re delivering all those services and we’re delivering them in a good manner. Well why not deliver more with £75,000? Because we’re putting these banners up, we feel it’s the right thing to do. There will be people who will say that this is not so much about celebrating things like that, it’s culture wars. No it’s not, definitely not. No it is not. Well, I mean, reassure them. Well it’s not.

Nish Kumar Yeah, I’ve never felt more reassured in my life, man. I’ve ever felt more assured than a man who looks like he recently shat himself and hasn’t had time to go home, change and wash his little bottom, is now standing there saying that things are not culture war-y. I mean, yeah, it is pretty astonishing stuff.

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, and I’m sure if you ask the people of Nottinghamshire, would you rather have your bin collected a little bit more often? Or a £75,000 worth of flags put up, they tell you the bins. But across the country, we have been hearing stories of local residents organizing against the far-right’s flag campaign. So here’s one from Coco resurrected on her sickbed. I saw these posters popping up in the window in my local area saying South Woodford Against Racism and one stead is for everyone. I was curious so I looked it up and it’s basically residents fighting back against the St George’s Cross and Union flag being misused in ways clearly intended to intimidate local residents.

Nish Kumar And Tanya, our executive producer this week, shared a story from a friend who was part of a similar act of community resistance in Maidenhead. They said, in the dark of night, flags from Commonwealth countries were put up in Maidainhead, joining the Union Jacks and St George’s flags, which had already been strung up by the far right, each one meant to represent the birth nation of someone who’s come to the UK and enriched the country. There have been lovely comments on social media in response. One resident, Gareth, wrote, it brought a smile to my face when I drove past. Thank you for this.” And another Christina said I saw flags too in town today and it made me smile and feel good.

Zoë Grünewald Listeners, we’d love to hear more stories of community resistance and solidarity like this. They are small acts, but they do matter, so email us at psuk at reducedlistening.co.uk or drop a message in the comments.

Nish Kumar Elsewhere in British politics, good news for the Green Party, the Green party’s membership has surged beyond 150,000 members under Zack Polanski’s leadership, and a new YouGov poll on voting intention shows them on a record 16%, which is just 1% behind Labour. That’s the highest polling for the Greens ever, and also the lowest polling for Labour ever. And again, we need to take polling with. Blood pressure endangering amount of salt. Okay, we are a long way off from a general election. So does it suggest that something is shifting?

Zoë Grünewald Yeah, clearly people are rejecting Labour on both the left and the right, and it is the left and it’s Labour’s core vote that propelled them into government, and all pollsters are saying, Labour, ignore your core vote and your progressive center at your own peril because those are the voters you need to turn up for you.

Nish Kumar And the confusion around your party is also rumbling on, not helped by the fact that they still don’t have a name, so this week members received yet another email, it said that people who have signed up to the your party, which was Zarah Sultana’s party, are still also members of your party. But the members who signed up via the link that turned out to not be your party have to submit yet another form because the your part is actually their party and doesn’t have their members’ data. I just think in terms of launching a new political party, you don’t want most of the news coverage to be around what email form people have used to sign up for the party.

Zoë Grünewald And if you want an indication of how seriously Jeremy Corbyn is taking all of this, well, he’s announced he’s going to appear in a drag panto this Christmas as the Wizard of Oslington. Oh no he isn’t!

Nish Kumar No, he seriously is. That’s something that’s really happening. Here’s a clip. For the benefit of listeners, we’re watching a video of Jeremy Corbyn wearing a very fetching green trench coat looking thing with a wizard’s hat. He’s filming a video that’s going to be played as part of that panto that’s gonna run at the Pleasance Theater in Islington. You know, worst things have happened in that theater. I know because I’m responsible for a few of them. That’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. Don’t forget to follow at Pod Save UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter and on Blue Sky.

Zoë Grünewald Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

Nish Kumar Thanks to producer May Robson and digital producer Narda Smilionage

Zoë Grünewald Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Tanya Hines and Casey Long, with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Zoë Grünewald And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursday on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Nish Kumar And remember, if you’re all worried about whether something is or is not racist, contact Nigel Farage on nigelfarage@racismexpert.co.uk.