Andy Burnham and council housing

Over a series of articles, I am going to examine Andy Burnham’s pledge on council house building which alongside devolution, is one of his signature policies so far.

These articles will explore the challenges involved in a major council house building programme, including questions of state capacity, democracy, land availability, building materials, finance, workforce and other related issues.

But let’s start with what Burnham has actually said. In a speech on 29 June 2026, he declared:

“Number 10 North will oversee the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era.”

This statement does not set a clear annual house-building target. However, from what I can see, the post-war period up to the introduction of Right to Buy in October 1980 saw an average of around 140,000 council homes built each year.

To put that into context, only a few hundred council homes have been built so far this year. Around 10,000 to 12,000 social rent homes are built annually. If so-called “affordable” homes are included, that adds a further 50,000 to 65,000 homes a year.

Taken together, that amounts to fewer than 80,000 homes that might, even very roughly, be compared with traditional council housing. So that leaves a shortfall of more than 60,000 homes compared with the historic average of 140,000 council homes a year. No doubt the government will produce a figure well below 140,000 and argue that it still represents the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period. But even if the target is reduced to 100,000 homes a year, it would still require a substantial increase in construction.

So why does Andy Burnham care? Why does he want more council homes to be built when previous Labour Prime Ministers such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer showed little interest in expanding council housing?

Well, Burnham argues: “Britain has lost almost 1.5 million council homes since the 1980s and around the same number of people are now on housing waiting lists and have been there for a very long time.” As a result, he says, the country is trapped in a housing crisis. He goes on to argue:

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

And later:

“If you don’t give people a good home, what chance have they got of having a good life? What chance is there of making the health service sustainable if people are not living in good accommodation, or of children getting a good education? Everything starts with a good home and this country finally has to put that at the top of its priority list.”

Burnham is right to link the shortage of council housing and the pressure on local authority finances. Increasingly, councils are being pushed towards bankruptcy by the rising cost of placing people in temporary accommodation and by the expense of topping up housing benefit.

He is also right to stress the importance of secure housing for health and well-being. But I think you have to go further and say that housing should be seen as a social necessity rather than primarily as a market commodity.

Therefore access to a decent home is not simply an economic issue. It is part of building a better and fairer society. I will come back to that in a future article.

For the next article though, I will look at Right to Buy and the question of state capacity.