Why Burnham’s housing revolution won’t work
Despite giving a passionate defence of everything home ownership can give to a family, Burnham’s actual policies do alarmingly little to address the scale of Britain’s housing crisis, writes Emma Revell
Leaders’ speeches to their party conference are either memorable, or not. Most are not, and if they are it’s not always for the reasons their givers would like. Think Keir Starmer being glitter-bombed, Theresa May losing her voice, having the sign behind her fall down and being handed a P45, Theresa May, again, trying to put to bed the ghost of the previous year’s speech by strutting on stage to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’.
Andy Burnham’s speech in Liverpool this week might not have had pranksters or comedic staging errors, but he did pack a surprising number of policy proposals – details, of course, to be confirmed – into just over an hour on stage. And when it comes to housing, he was effusive, passionate and more than a little scary.
The Prime Minister reflected on the role housing security played in his family’s story. Given he was speaking close to where he grew up, it’s not surprising that he opened with a story about his gran Kitty, who “walked three miles out of the bombed-out city after the war to put a deposit down on a house” without telling his granddad Jimmy. His family’s story, he told the conference, was ‘a story of working-class aspiration’: it was in Kitty and Jimmy’s home that his parents first lived, before finding a home of their own in which to raise him and his brothers. “That home on Keeble Drive,” he said, “unlocked the aspiration” in his parents that took their son all the way to Downing Street.
Whether you’re a Labour voter or not, these are touching sentiments. Many of us would attest to the immeasurable value of a safe and secure home. The problem is, despite opening with a passionate defence of everything home ownership can give to a family, Burnham’s actual policies do alarmingly little to address the scale of Britain’s housing crisis, veering instead between expensive, taxpayer-funded and ineffective subsidies and grants, to state-sponsored seizure of private property.
First, there was the recommitment to unleash a tidal wave of council house building, spearheaded by Angela Rayner. Yet as my Centre for Policy Studies colleague Ben Hopkinson has already pointed out, the programme’s apparent £39bn may only deliver between 14,335 and 15,494 homes per year, without even including the cost of purchasing any land. In the same piece of research, Ben calculated that in England alone, taxpayer subsidy for social housing is an astonishing £79bn per year, once you take into account the fact that social houses cost more in maintenance then they bring in in rent (meaning each property is a net cost to the taxpayer), the £32bn housing benefit bill, and the gap between social and market rent.
Second, Burnham announced the end of Right of Buy for new social rented properties. Promising to protect the right for existing tenants, the Labour leader said it was important to protect “the new homes we build so they are there for generations to come”. The idea that people living in homes may want to buy them – buy the security that Burnham recognised, just minutes earlier, gave his family everything – is apparently for me and not for thee.
Burnham does want to help young people buy a home, however – just perhaps not the one they grew up in. He announced Your First Home, a revamped version of Help to Buy that will allow people the chance to get a mortgage on a new build home with just a 2.5 per cent deposit, with a government-backed equity loan worth 20 per cent of the purchase price covering the rest.
So the Prime Minister’s plan is to spend tens of billions of public money, driving that £79bn figure even higher, in order to build just 0.05 per cent of the government’s 300,000 new homes a year target, while giving anyone else hoping to buy a massive taxpayer-funded loan. Surely that means he recognises that a strong private-rented sector and massive private housebuilding are necessary in the meantime, at least until his council house utopia is complete?
Not so much. On rents, the Prime Minister believes that the burdens imposed on landlords by the Renters Rights Act, which have seen them exiting the market in droves – with 562 previously rented properties sold each day in the third quarter of 2026, compared to 495 per day last year – don’t go far enough. He announced that his government would legislate to give local councils the power to seize empty properties, as well as rented properties which are not up to standard.
Of course, everyone wants housing to be the best possible. But the obvious solution to people living in sub-standard accommodation is to increase the supply rather than undermining the fundamental right to private property. And what is to stop future governments ratcheting up the criteria under which a property can be seized? Hazardous mould is one thing, but what about properties which don’t meet a certain energy rating? After all, earlier this year, the government announced that from 2030, private rented properties will need to have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rated C, up from the current E.
Given that many landlords won’t have the tens of thousands to make the expensive renovations to bring our aged housing stock up to that level, tenants are already facing a cliff edge. If a future government decided to claim such properties for the state, the taxpayer would be left footing the bill and the queue for social housing would grow even longer.
Hardly the secure footing from which to build a life that could see your children ending up as Prime Minister. For me, but not for thee indeed.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies