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 that the allocation of the first £10bn would reflect the existing social homes target of 60%. But this was leavened with another bit of old-time Labour religion: “Councils built this country out of a housing crisis once before. Backed properly, and trusted to get on with it, they will do it again.”
The clock, however, is loudly ticking. John Healey’s underwhelming budget could only find an extra £1.5bn for social and “affordable” housing – which, apart from anything else, once again underlined the fact that the latter term is often all but meaningless. Thanks partly to a downturn in private housebuilding, Labour’s manifesto promise to oversee the building of 1.5m new homes of all kinds in this government’s first term is simply not going to happen. All this feels as if it symbolises how swaths of Burnham’s policy agenda still seem to be missing, fiscally strangled, or in a frustratingly early stage of development. But hope remains alive: the unveiling of his 10-year plan – which he insists will appear this year – could conceivably flesh out the kind of ambition we heard from him over the summer, as could next year’s spending review (note: I try hard to sound optimistic sometimes, and that is this week’s attempt).
At root, this is a story about people’s lives. It centres on depressed and anxious families living out of carrier bags and constantly moving from one friend or relative’s home to another, and thousands of children trying to lead relatively orderly lives amid the chaos of temporary accommodation. About 1.7 million children live in damp, mouldy, cold, or otherwise non-decent accommodation. Given that Alan Milburn’s report about young people and employment will apparently be published on Tuesday, we should also remember that the sheer impossibility of owning or even renting a secure home is a huge part of the reason why 16- to 24-year-olds feel so estranged and alienated from the everyday world of work, earning and somehow making a life. As Aneurin Bevan famously said, the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, and this one is self-evident.
So where are we? Since Labour took office it has made some good moves: introducing restrictions – with more to come – on the right to buy scheme whose various iterations have so depleted our housing stock, increasing rents to boost social housing revenues and, perhaps most significantly of all, returning at least part of the political conversation to such matters. The biggest step of all, though, is the SAHP, and the billions beginning to be spent on it.
That may sound impressive, but the first results of that programme are unlikely to even start to be seen until 2029 or so. Besides, the consensus among housing insiders is that on the optimistic reading, even if everything works out – which is dependent, among other things, on Labour winning another election – the result will be about 19,000 new social homes a year, totalling just under 200,000 in all. I am sure that everyone who works at the housing charity Shelter is now sick to death of reciting this statistical counterpoint, but they believe, quite rightly, that in order to meet the UK’s dire level of housing need, at least 90,000 new social homes need to be built each year between now and 2036, which is some indication of the gap between official policy and cold reality.
History, moreover, suggests that our ambitions should be even greater. I have spent the last week immersed in Michael Foot’s magisterial biography of Bevan, the postwar Labour government’s health and housing secretary. Before you read one of its more head-turning passages, imagine a distant world of Bakelite phones and bombsites: the kind of place we now would imagine moved chronically slowly. “At the Blackpool conference of the Conservative party in 1950, when the Labour housing programme was running at the rate of just over 200,000 houses a year,” Foot writes, “the floor forced on the platform a target of 300,000 houses a year.” Most of these would be council houses. Foot goes on: “Within two years, under Harold Macmillan’s direction at the Ministry of Housing, the figure was attained.” Those two sentences shame both our main parties.
I recently had long conversations with Martin Wicks, and Charlie Berry, respectively a leading light in the redoubtable Labour Campaign for Council Housing, and a policy manager at Shelter. Once you look under the bonnet of housing policy, they both explained, the mind boggles. For instance, thanks to an arcane agreement struck between Whitehall and local authorities back in 2012, councils now hold £31.8bn in unsustainable debt, the servicing of which inhibits the building and acquisition of new homes (as one London council leader told me earlier this year, “We have sites with planning permission, but we can’t build on them because of the state of our finances.”) Given that it represents a tranche of money owed by one part of the public sector to another, writing it off would be fiscally neutral. So why not just do it?
More such questions abound. Why is it that councils must take out 30-year maturity loans for housebuilding from the Public Works Loans Board at an interest rate of more than 6%, whereas the government has offered an interest rate of 0.1% to housing associations and “for profit registered providers”, claiming that it has refused the offer to councils “because of the fiscal implications”? Given that private housebuilding is in such a slump, does the government not therefore realise that now would be the perfect time to hire construction workers and acquire what the building industry calls stalled sites?
And one last one. If answering our housing crisis demands additional borrowing, could ministers not sell the idea to those infamous bond vigilantes through a simple enough pitch, reflective of the basic idea of investment? As a recent Shelter report put it: “the government must wholeheartedly recognise that large-scale social housebuilding is a safe investment and presents minimal market risk even in today’s climate … it improves public finances by supporting economic activity and generating substantial public sector savings and revenue.”
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Last week, for a new Anywhere but Westminster film about the gobbling up of British landscape by datacentres, I was once again in Slough, where they are putting up vast architectural leviathans at a speedy rate. If that kind of everyday giganticism is possible, why isn’t the provision of roofs over people’s heads? Most of us surely know it as a matter of inarguable truth. As the man who now leads us said, no other policy would have greater social and economic benefits, nor more comprehensively restore that scarce feature of our national life that Burnham so wants to revive: simple hope.
