Can Andy Burnham really solve the housing crisis?

Andy Burnham, the newly elected Labour MP for Makerfield, and the man everyone expects to be our next prime minister, has made solving the UK’s housing crisis a priority for his new government.

In a speech earlier this week, he pledged to deliver the “biggest council house building programme since the post-war period”. But Labour has failed to get anywhere near its manifesto commitment to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. And successive governments have repeatedly struggled to deliver on their own promises to build new homes.

So will it work this time? Can Burnham really solve the housing crisis? Our writers, Kwasi Kwarteng, former Conservative Party chancellor, Sarah Harrison, chief executive officer at the Building Societies Association, and Vicky Spratt, The i Paper’s Housing Correspondent, offer their perspectives.

Housing is always a problem. Andrew Burnham, our presumptive next prime minister, has firmly set this as a top priority. In so far as “Burnhamism” means anything, it means building new houses.

Council houses, or houses built by the state out of public funds, have become unpopular. Since 1979, governments have been increasingly reluctant to use public money to build houses owned by the state. As late as 1979, more than 30 per cent of people in Britain lived in a house or flat owned by the council. Today that figure has dwindled to 6 per cent.

Burnham clearly would like to reverse that trend. “If you don’t give people a good home, what chance do they have of having a good life?” he asks.

You want to increase children’s education prospects? Build new homes. You want to reduce the welfare bill? Build new homes. You want to grow the economy? Build new homes. But how can this be done? There are notorious difficulties associated with this simple statist solution of just building more homes.

Let’s look at the sheer cost of building the 1.5 million houses by 2029 which the Starmer Government originally promised.

There are skills and labour shortages which would frustrate such an ambitious programme of housebuilding. It has been estimated that 240,000 more construction workers would be needed to realise this Government plan. The new homes in new communities would need new schools, new health provision and more resilient traffic infrastructure, imposing further burdens on the public purse. It is unclear how all this extra spending would be funded.

My sense is that a housebuilding programme of this kind would, even if desirable, cost an amount the country could not afford. Much looser planning regulation and private capital would lead to much faster provision of housing at far less cost to the Exchequer.

The freeing up of planning regulation will enable developers to deploy capital more efficiently. There is a market solution which will be more effective than North Korean style state planning and control.

Andy Burnham is right to put housing at the forefront of his incoming government. Housing is not simply another policy area, but central to opportunity, security and growth.

His speech in Manchester was striking not only for its call to rewire Britain’s economy, but for the historical thread he chose to pull through it. By invoking the spirit of the Rochdale Pioneers and the origins of the co-operative movement, he reminded us that some of Britain’s most durable answers to insecurity have come from people and places organising with purpose, pooling resources and building trust.

Britain faces familiar challenges in modern form: too many people locked out of homeownership, too many local economies struggling to generate sustainable growth, and too many households without the financial resilience to cope with higher bills or unexpected shocks.

Building societies and credit unions are born from this same instinct. Long-term thinking, helping people buy and build homes, and “people-focused” decisions that balance commercial strength with the needs of savers, borrowers and communities.

For homeownership, that matters profoundly. Britain needs more than just housing targets; it needs finance that understands place, household circumstances and long-term affordability. Building societies are ready to do more, but they need better access to capital, smarter regulation which is more risk based and open to innovation, and planning reform that gets homes built. Burnham’s focus on housing is welcome. The next step is to back the institutions already delivering place-based solutions.

Burnham’s appeal to the Rochdale tradition should be taken seriously. It is not nostalgia; it is a reminder of agency. When people are given the tools and institutions to act together, they can solve problems that feel too large to face alone.

“Home”, as the poet TS Eliot wrote, “is where one starts from.” I’d be surprised if Andy Burnham isn’t a fan of Eliot as housing, so far, seems to be the policy area where all of his ideas for the future of Britain meet.

There is good reason for this. Firstly, almost everyone in Britain (even those who are, on paper, reasonably wealthy) is now affected by expensive housing. And, secondly, as Mr Burnham put it to me in 2024, unaffordable “housing is a risk to growth” because people don’t move around if they can’t afford to rent or buy a house.

The mobility of the labour force in any country is considered vital by economists on both the left and the right. As Dame Kate Barker explains in my BBC Radio 4 series Housing Britain, building new housing that people – in particular younger workers – can afford, is crucial infrastructure if we want our economy to expand. Barker, who is a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, also believes that no politician since Tony Blair has prioritised building affordable and social housing, particularly when they should have done when interest rates were low.

Whether Burnham can deliver on his promise to oversee a huge council house building project is up for debate. The reasons for this are complex and not entirely under his control. Inflation, for instance, means builders’ costs have soared. Building council housing, in particular, would not be cheap either as interest rates are no longer being kept artificially low as they were after the 2008 financial crash, and the cost of government borrowing for Britain is volatile.

After the Second World War, Labour prime minister Clement Attlee made it possible for capital funding from the Treasury to subsidise the cost of building new council housing. There is a reason why the current Chancellor and Prime Minister have not followed his lead. It is that borrowing to build council houses would be counted as part of Britain’s national debt, and that would get in the way of the fiscal rules that Rachel Reeves has stuck so closely to. If Burnham wants to build council housing at scale, he would have to consider this problem very quickly.

And as we wait to hear more about his plan, there might be a clue about what he might do in an interview I did with him a couple of years back. He told me local mayoral authorities should be able to take the rent from the houses they own, which they could then invest in housebuilding. Along with a bit of capital funding, over time it could see thousands of new homes delivered.

The key part of that sentence above is that this would happen over time. And, as Burnham has learned from Sir Keir Starmer, voters want results now. The one thing prime minister’s don’t seem to have these days is time.