Is Burnham’s plan for a housing revolution anything more than a pipedream? | John Harris

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Nearly 2 million children are housed in dire conditions, anxious families are living out of carrier bags. There’s little sign of the hope our PM promisedTwo days after the…

Nearly 2 million children are housed in dire conditions, anxious families are living out of carrier bags. There’s little sign of the hope our PM promised

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…

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.

At root, this is a story about people’s lives.

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