Listed UK housebuilders are taking some punishment this morning on the back of Michael Gove's cladding plan - they're down 2.5-4.5% while FTSE 100 is flat
Early days of course, but a sign that the market, at least, judges they might be compelled to fork out sizeable sums
...Analysts at the stockbroker Jefferies say the official letter unearthed by #newnight 's @lewis_goodall shows the Treasury is determined that housebulders should pay for remedial action *not* taxpayers - hence the hit to their share prices today...
...don't read too much into market reactions as to the impact/effectiveness of government policy - but it's notable that traders aren't currently assuming Gove's plan will leave housebuilders' profit outlooks unscathed
...Suspect this bit of Gove's letter to the housebuilders alone might explain the shareprice move...gov.uk/government/pub…
...the colossal boost given by Help to Buy to housebuilders' profits is well known (FT article expands) - if such government schemes were likely to be less forthcoming in fututre that alone would justify a share price correction ft.com/content/048fd6…
Housebuilders end trading day 🔽3 to 5%
A bad day for the listed housebuilders 👇
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The Conservatives have released a host of adverts about the state pension on Facebook which we at #BBCVerify think are misleading.
Here's why...🧵 1/9
“Remember when Labour increased the state pension by only 75p?” asks the Tory video adverts, contrasting this with a claimed £3,700 increase since the Tories came into government in 2010...2/9
BBC Verify analysis of the ad library data of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, suggests they have run 975 versions of this single campaign message - just changing the name of the town or city being targeted - since 21 June...3/9
The Green party (England and Wales) leader Adrian Ramsay told @BBCr4today:
“We would still be near the bottom off the European league in terms of tax base overall [if we implemented our proposed tax rises]”
Let's look at this...#BBCVerify
OECD data shows tax as a share of GDP in 2021 was 33.5% - certainly below most big EU countries and the average of the EU14 (countries who were members of the EU prior to 2004)...
But, as we know, tax is rising as a share of UK GDP.
And by 2027/28 the @TheIFS estimate it would be 37.7% of GDP - putting us closer to the middle of the European pack...
There was an odd claim this morning by Jeremy Hunt in his media round:
“Living standards have fallen by more [than the UK] in Germany, Austria, or Sweden”...
Brief 🧵...
...He didn't specify over what time period he was talking about, or what measure of living standards he was using, or why he'd selected those countries to compare...
...At Verify, we've been pressing the Treasury for some guidance on all these points.
They've told us the Chancellor was referring to this measure from the OECD called "Real gross disposable income per capita of households"...data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?fs[0]=Topi…
...Second thing to note is HMT using a different figure for defence spending - it's "Nato-qualifying defence spending" which includes items such as the Single Intelligence Account & military pensions etc