Will Burnham's drive to build homes be successful?

Recent governments have been a lot better at setting targets for new homes than actually getting them built. The only year since World War Two when more than 300,000 homes were built in England – which both the current Labour government and its Conservative predecessors have set as their annual target for housing completions – was 1969.Of these, nearly half (44%) were built by local authorities. Despite a small uptick in recent years, it is a long time since councils were such big players in housing delivery.During the same period, overall completions of new homes by authorities have plunged, thanks to Margaret Thatcher's anti-council housing crusade.There is a link, says a London local government source. ‘The only time we've ever delivered anywhere near that number is back when local authorities were delivering huge numbers of homes.'But that is all set to change if Andy Burnham is to be believed. Council housing featured heavily in the recent speech at Manchester's People's History Museum, where he set out his stall.Housing was on a list of ‘essential services' the MP for Makerfield wants to ensure ‘greater public control' over, which also includes energy and water.And Burnham pledged in the speech that the No10 North unit, which he plans to establish in Manchester as a counterweight to the South East's traditional dominance of government policy-making, will oversee the ‘biggest council house building programme since the post-war period'.Use of ‘vacant' public land will help to reduce costs.This shortage of affordable homes means the country is locked into a ‘housing trap' with an increased reliance on the private-rented sector, which has in turn pushed families into homelessness and placed unfunded pressures on councils forced into paying for expensive and often poor-quality temporary accommodation.Jonathan Webb, principal research fellow in housing at Sheffield Hallam University, says council housebuilding was one of the ‘central messages' in Burnham's Manchester Museum speech.And use of the term council as opposed to affordable housing seemed ‘deliberate' he added. In the sector's jargon, affordable typically refers to homes developed by housing associations that cost more to let than councils' social rented stock.The noises in Burnham's speech are ‘positive' and much needed within the context of the capital's housing crisis, said the London housing source: ‘If you are to deliver the number of homes that London needs, councils have got to be building as well as enabling delivery.'Possessing their own stock gives councils flexibility when dealing with issues like temporary accommodation, homelessness and refugee housing, they added.However, the focus on council housebuilding may be surprising to those who have followed Burnham's spell in the Manchester mayoralty, said Webb: ‘It's not been a central plank of what he's done around housing when it comes to Greater Manchester. But on the flip side, there isn't necessarily that much mayors can really do around house building and development.'One of Burnham's signature policies when he ran for Greater Manchester's first elected mayor nearly a decade ago was to tackle the city's rough sleeping scourge.Jack Shaw, chair of the Labour Housing Group, says the new PM was heavily involved in his ‘A Bed Every Night' programme. The level of rough sleeping in Manchester fell across the first four years of the programme and is ‘still lower than when he was first in post' even though it has risen since then.Shaw added that Burnham has also worked ‘closely' with the Centre for Homelessness Impact to support a cross-local authority approach to tackle homelessness across Greater Manchester.This work has helped Manchester City Council, where many of the conurbation's rough sleepers tend to flock, to start cutting its use of temporary accommodation, said Shaw, adding that ‘very few councils across England have seen that.'Manchester city centre's residential building boom under Burnham's mayoralty has been driven by private developers, including build to rent institutional investors, he said.Nevertheless, the slow pace of affordable housing delivery on developments like the city's showpiece New Victoria new town regeneration scheme has probably shown the new PM that the private sector cannot be relied on to remedy gaps in public provision.The problem for Burnham though is that councils have largely been out of the housebuilding game since the early 1980s.Matthew Warburton, policy adviser for the Association of Retained Council Housing (ARCH) said: ‘There are significant obstacles. It's not just a question of turning on a tap, there are a significant number of issues to be faced.'Chris Naylor, who set up Barking and Dagenham LBC's BeFirst housing company while chief executive of the London borough, argues that the Government must be ‘realistic' about local authorities' capacity to ramp up housing delivery.‘It (housing delivery) is a muscle that hasn't been exercised for a long time. That all adds time,' he said, adding that the Government should focus its housing investment on councils and vehicles like Burnham's own erstwhile Stockport Metropolitan Development Corporation that has a track record of delivery and possesses the required expertise in areas like land acquisition and planning.‘Leaning in heavily on existing delivery' will mean Burnham is going to see an increase in housing starts before the election, said Naylor, who is now a consultant at Inner Circle Consulting.Jonathan Seager, policy delivery director, research and impact at Business LDN, agreed. ‘Anybody in the broader housing sector wants to see councils get back into the game but you can't just go from 0 to 100. They need time to gain the skills.'Warburton said Burnham's council homes push builds on the work carried out by Angela Rayner, who was housing and local government secretary during the first year of the Labour Government, and is back in her old role following last week's reshuffle instigated by the new PM.Homes England's affordable homes grants programme has already seen a ‘shift' towards local authorities, said Webb: ‘It seems now the direction of travel is very much towards social housing and within that, local authority provided social housing.'Figures published this month by the London Assembly show council home starts increased in 2025-26 to 3,865 from 1,300 in the previous year.Seager said: ‘We're talking small numbers here but that's over double and that has come through very specific and concerted work with councils to start getting them back into building game.'Burnham has suggested in the past that he would like to see Homes England's affordable housing grants, which primarily go to housing associations now, prioritised for local authorities instead.Sidelining housing associations from the race for affordable homes cash is risky, said Seager: ‘We definitely want to avoid a very binary approach to things. We need an approach which gets everybody building but equally thinks about who can deliver in the short to medium term.'Meanwhile any attempt by councils to boost house building is likely to run up against the site viability challenges, which currently bedevil much housing development, such as construction inflation.Housing associations have decades of experience of delivering new homes as well as established relationships with the private contractors, who in practice will actually build any new homes, he said: ‘The Government really has to tread carefully. This is not to say that they can't think about new ways of doing things, but it shouldn't be at the expense of getting going and ensuring the most important thing, which is to build a new home as quickly as possible.'Vicky McDermott, Newcastle City Council's director of housing and communities, said that, while the authority has a goal to build 1,500 of its own homes, it will continue to work with private developers and housing associations.And capacity will be an issue if councils want to access Homes England grants, Warburton said: ‘If you're a preferred (Homes England) supplier, you can either bid scheme by scheme or you can apply to draw down money at will. To get into that place, which is where you need to be if you're going to be a big supplier, you've got [to have] a track record and capacity.'To ensure delivery in the short term, the likelihood is a mixed economy of housing provision with local authorities encouraged to build more housing amid a continued reliance on the broader housing sector to ensure delivery, said Webb: ‘If he (Burnham) could point to more social homes being built in the next two or three years, when in theory he'd have to hold a General Election, I don't think people would scrutinise too much how many of those were built by authorities.'The gilt-linked rates on offer from the Public Works Loan Board, councils' main source of housing lending, are more expensive than those on offer to private developers and housing associations through Homes England's National Housing Bank, said Warburton: ‘It's all about money.'Meanwhile any attempt by councils to boost house building is likely to run up against the site viability challenges, which currently bedevil much housing development, such as construction inflation.McDermott suggested that the biggest fillip Burnham could provide for Newcastle's housing ambitions would be to help pay the cost of remediating the city's ex-industrial brownfield sites so they can be reused for new homes.Webb suggested Burnham has indicated he doesn't want to significantly change the Treasury's existing fiscal rules, which makes a major boost in the level of housing grants unlikely.Given these tight fiscal constraints, many council housing experts see cutting local authorities' housing debt costs as a potentially more productive route to pursue.The gilt-linked rates on offer from the Public Works Loan Board, councils' main source of housing lending, are more expensive than those on offer to private developers and housing associations through Homes England's National Housing Bank, said Warburton: ‘It's all about money.'And even if councils raise the cash to build new homes, securing sites is likely to be an increasing headache, he said: ‘In most of the last decade, to the extent that councils were doing any building, what was making it possible was that they were doing it on their own land.‘Once this is gone – and it will go soon because there's not that much of it – land assembly is going to be an issue.'Shaw said: ‘We need that real willingness to say this is a serious housing crisis, and, it's definitely not just about the number of homes and the units, these are places and people, and they need good quality, but we need to do that at speed and at scale because the challenge is so acute.'

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HOUSING

Will Burnham's drive to build homes be successful?

By David Blackman | 28 July 2026

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