What should Andy Burnham’s priorities be?

Posted: July 17, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Homelessness, Local housing allowance, Rent control, Tax |Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

How much will Andy Burnham change on housing as prime minister? 

He has certainly not been short of advice from think-tanks and housing organisations in the weeks of the non-contest to become Labour leader. He was sympathetic to calls for more radical reform when he was mayor of Greater Manchester. 

But what will his priorities really be? Here are five areas to address.

Council housing

His headline pledge of ‘the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period’ has wide appeal on the left. 

However, much of the ten-year, £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme is already allocated for this parliament. Concentrating on social rent, as Mr Burnham has suggested, would mean lower, genuinely affordable rents but fewer new homes overall. 

If he really means switching back from housing associations to councils, as his comments about ‘public control’ suggest, that would be a popular on the Labour benches but problems remain.

For starters, housing finance has been moving in the opposite direction towards private equity investors and for-profit landlords. Is he happy for that to continue if there is a greater role for the public sector?

Even if local authorities had the capacity, unlike housing associations they are unable to raise private finance without it counting as public borrowing. 

Under the current rules, they are even excluded from low-interest loans from the National Housing Bank that are available to associations and forced to rely on more expensive borrowing from the Public Works Loans Board.

A Burnham government could write off councils’ historic housing debt. A report this month by Savills for Shelter estimates that for every £1 billion of debt written down, councils could deliver 9,000 new social rent homes. 

More radically, it could look to change the borrowing rules to give more freedom to council housing but Mr Burnham has pledged to stick to the current fiscal rules.

Finally, the government could take a broader look at how housebuilding and infrastructure more generally is funded. As Thomas Aubrey suggests, there is appetite in the bond market for lending for projects by public corporations for large-scale projects that generate revenue to fund the debt.

The LHA freeze

Andy Burnham has previously criticised the freeze in Local Housing Allowance (LHA) for forcing private renters into arrears and homelessness. 

A report from Crisis and other housing organisations last week found that only 2 per cent of listed rentals are currently affordable within LHA rates. 

The new government should end the freeze  in the Autumn Budget and re-link LHA rates to (at least) the cheapest 30 per cent of private rents.

But we have been here before: the last freeze ended in April 2024 but it was quietly reimposed in the next two years, recreating the same problems as before. 

The Treasury will clearly want to retain an easy way to control costs and will suspect that a permanent end to the freeze would lead to a constant ratcheting up in rents and the housing benefit bill. 

But that was the inevitable result of the decision taken in the 1990s to let housing benefit ‘take the strain’. If Mr Burnham wants to break with the Thatcherite era he could look to another option.

Rent control

Andy Burnham has previously called for powers for mayors to bring in a rent freeze in their areas and considerable momentum has built up behind calls for regulation of rents during the Labour inter-regnum.

Every left-wing think tank worth its salt has weighed in alongside housing organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and have begun to spell out what they mean by rent control.

At one extreme, private landlords would bite the government’s hand off if they were offered the same inflation-plus rent formula that applies to social housing but private tenants would be much less keen.

At the other, a crude rent freeze would immediately reduce the cost of living for renters but could finally turn scaremongering about a landlord exodus into reality.

There is no perfect system for regulating rents  – including the unregulated one we have now – but the details of how it will work and how it will interact with other parts of the housing system will really matter.

Tax reform

Momentum has been building behind this too. With Mr Burnham pledging to stick to manifesto pledges on income tax, national insurance and VAT, taxes on property could give him some vital flexibility. 

But anything he does on council tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax and stamp duty will inevitably be presented in the right-wing media as the King of the North’s war on the south.

Reforms have to be made with a clear purpose rather than just raising revenue. Done properly, they have the potential to make the housing system work better, release the stranglehold on council finances and give a huge boost to Andy Burnham’s campaign for more devolution.

The new prime minister has previously expressed support for the Fairer Share campaign to replace council tax and stamp duty with a proportional property tax that would raise the same revenue. 

A more radical option was presented in the Prosperity 2030 report launched last week by the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity with backing from leading economists. 

Alongside structural reforms such as abolishing the right to buy and reform of compulsory purchase, this calls for a 1 per cent property tax to replace council tax and stamp duty that would generate £18.1 billion a year to fund social care and community housing. 

Homelessness and rough sleeping 

The Labour government has made real progress so far but there are still big gaps to fill.

The homelessness strategy included modest targets but anything more ambitions – how about halving the number of families in temporary accommodation? – would have required spending commitments on homelessness, social housing and housing benefit that the government was not prepared to make.

Andy Burnham’s track record in Greater Manchester demonstrates a commitment to ending rough sleeping but progress on the ground has been much more modest. 

In search of a strategy

All of the above demonstrates the inter-dependency of different housing issues, including the headline target of 1.5 million new homes. 

Why that target matters, what happens when it gets missed and what else should be a priority are questions that have not been seriously explored.

The previous Labour government promised an overall housing strategy ‘in the coming months’ in July 2024 but two years on the schedule is ‘in due course’.

The worry is that there will be still more delays, particularly if devolution sucks up all the surplus energy at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. 

Hopes are high for the Burnham government but progress on housing depends on backing from the top at a time when many other issues will be competing for his attention. 

If we are serious about fixing housing, the government needs a strategy that amounts to more than three words that can be printed on the front of a baseball cap. 

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