I’m not quite sure what the point of today’s Coalition Mid-Term Review was. Apart from reasserting that the Coalition intends to go the distance – and beyond? – the main thing that was clear was that they’d really rather like the media to change the metaphor and stop talking about a loveless marriage.

The document itself is largely a list of what the Government has done. It is not an evaluation of that programme. It does not, for example, compare what it has done with what it was planning to do. Nor does it reflect upon why the latter has, in many areas, fallen considerably short of the former.

And it is not – perhaps understandably – a critical document. All the actions the Government has taken thus far are presented unselfconsciously as positive in themselves, commensurate with the scale of the challenge they seek to address, and contributing positively to the achievement of the Coalition’s overall, shared agenda.

It is, therefore, largely a PR puff. As befits a government led by a former PR man.

Much of the document is taken up with what has happened since May 2010. But some of it is given over to listing future plans. I have been through the whole document and my sense is that a substantial slice of these future plans will not come as news. Lots of the individual initiatives have already been announced. That isn’t to say that there is nothing new in the document. Just that you have to hunt quite hard for it.

My first instinct was to search the document to see what it has to say about housing. This is, after all, as Nick Cohen reminded us earlier today in the Spectator, one of the biggest problems we currently face. Continue Reading →