Policy setbacks and funding constraints continue to hamper ambitious social housing initiatives across the country. Andy Burnham initially pushed for the entire £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme to fund social rent, but the opening £10bn tranche will only allocate 60% toward social homes. To bolster housing revenue, Labour has raised rents and curbed the Right to Buy scheme, while Burnham plans to release a comprehensive 10-year strategy later this year. However, initial results from the national programme will not materialize until roughly 2029.
Key points
Labour will fail to meet its overarching first-term goal of constructing 1.5 million new…: Labour will fail to meet its overarching first-term goal of constructing 1.5 million new homes.
Independent assessments from Shelter indicate the country requires at least 90,000 new so…: Independent assessments from Shelter indicate the country requires at least 90,000 new social homes annually through 2036.
Andy Burnham intends to outline his long-term regional development strategy in a 10-year…: Andy Burnham intends to outline his long-term regional development strategy in a 10-year housing plan published later this year.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Two days after the Christmas of 2024, Andy Burnham put up a post on X that linked to a piece about housing in the Guardian. The then mayor of Greater Manchester, who was beginning to find his voice as a frank critic of Keir Starmer’s new government, did not mess about: “The Government should make building hundreds of thousands of council homes its defining purpose,” he said. “No other policy, achievable within a parliament, would have greater social and economic benefits.”
In his first Labour conference speech as party leader and prime minister, Burnham reprised much the same argument, promising “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar era”. But by that point, he had also served notice that his commitment to a thoroughgoing council house revival might not be quite as cast iron as it seemed. The previous month, having insisted that all of the £39bn Rachel Reeves had promised to spend on the Starmer government’s Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) until 2036 should go on homes for social rent, he made something of a brazen U-turn, announcing…
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