The problems with Burnham's council-house building blitz, according to insiders

Andy Burnham’s pledge to deliver a council-house building boom has sparked fears it could deliver fewer homes than those promised under the Labour Government’s current scheme.

The prospective prime minister unveiled plans to kickstart the biggest council-house building programme since the end of the Second World War in order to “repair” the country’s public housing stock, led by a new “No 10 in the North”.

Burnham’s team said the proposals would seek to “replenish” Britain’s supply of council homes, which they said has been in “decline for more than four decades”.

But insiders have warned this may not be as much as the Government’s current major £39bn social and affordable housing scheme.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

England’s stunning victory over the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may have England fans elated, but some are wondering if Tuchel is still the right choice to lead the team to a World Cup victory.

England had never lost to an African side in a World Cup match, and only once in their entire history.

Inside seven minutes, a defensive calamity and mistake from Jordan Pickford put the DRC on the cusp of history. 

It was Kane’s two goals within the last fifteen minutes of the match which saw England narrowly take the win.

England’s full-backs were a mess against DRC because Tuchel went weird with his selection and Ezri Konsa looks jumpy.

Gareth Southgate protected an average defence that was the weak point of the team and England became boring to the point of fault. Tuchel is ostensibly doing mostly the same but without the defensive protection bit.

England now face Mexico in Mexico: far harder, far more altitude, far better opponent, far more febrile atmosphere. The worry from Atlanta that won’t leave this brain: what if better are better against us and we’re already living on the edge of incompetence?

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.

They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.

One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door. 

She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.

We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…

I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.

Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.

She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.

It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.

Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.

Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.

On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.

I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender. 

But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.

It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.

According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.

The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them. 

National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.

In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.

Hunt them down

Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.

Check everything

You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.

Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.

Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.

The former mayor of Greater Manchester has previously said that he would devote the Government’s entire £39bn affordable housing budget to build more council homes.

But government insiders have warned such a move could derail the existing Social and Affordable Housing Programme (SAHP) and lead to fewer affordable houses being built.

It could also severely affect the viability of some housing developers, which have already started bidding for projects as part of the programme, one source said.

Labour insiders said the current £39bn scheme is set up to provide 60 per cent of its homes for social rent, with the rest going towards affordable housing. Social housing associations have the abilty to borrow and build, but if the SAHP were focused purely on council homes then it would deliver fewer houses.

This was echoed by a housing industry source, who said any move to focus more of the £39bn on housing for social rent would lead to fewer units being delivered because they are more expensive to fund.

To avoid this, Burnham would have to find further funds to expand social housing construction, which could prove difficult under the current fiscal rules and existing spending constraints.

Burnham said he wanted to “take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport”, based on the model that allowed him to take over the bus networks in Greater Manchester.

He also warned Britain’s housing crisis is “having a ruinous impact on its public finances”.

And he added: “So, working with local areas, No 10 North will oversee the biggest council-house building programme since the post-war period. We will use public land, vacant public land to reduce costs.”

Akash Paun, programme director at the Institute for Government, said Burnham’s pledge was a “big deal” and could lead to a massive devolution of control over social housing in the regions.

“That’s an area where the outgoing Government has made big commitments to massive social and affordable homes building programmes by putting in tens of billions of pounds through Homes England,” Paun said. He added: “But it is possible, and maybe quite likely, that his instinct will be just to devolve a lot of that funding from Homes England, which is a central government agency, and put the resource into mayoral fees to lead on, so that could be quite a big deal.”

However, government insiders have cast doubt over the capacity of regional authorities to oversee and deliver such vast quantities of housing.

Burnham said it would be a 10-year programme based on the “housing first” model implemented by Finland, which has become the only country in the EU to see homelessness go into reverse.

Under the scheme, people are taken out of temporary accommodation and private rented sector and given unconditional access to social housing along with provision of support services.

The move was strongly weclomed by homelessness charity Crisis, which said the plans would be “transformative with benefits for employment, health, and economic growth”.

Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, said: “The level of ambition set out today – the biggest council-house building programme since the post-war period – is exactly what is needed in the face of rising homelessness and record numbers of households in temporary accommodation.

“Words will need to turn into action, but from a housing and homelessness perspective this was one of the most hopeful speeches I’ve heard in many, many years.”