Andy Burnham stood up in Liverpool on Tuesday and promised to fix Britain’s housing crisis. His answer is a huge expansion of council housebuilding, the biggest push since the war, alongside an end to Right to Buy on new council homes and fresh powers for town halls to take control of empty properties and the worst private rentals.
It is an ambitious pitch. And, politically, you can see why it lands.
His attack on bad landlords was greeted with loud cheers. “We don’t let people sell food which damages health,” he said, “So why let people rent out homes that do?”
Fair point. I have walked through plenty of rental properties that should never have been let to anyone.
There is no excuse for landlords who allow people to live in unsafe, unhealthy conditions. If a property is genuinely unfit, it should not be on the rental market.
But then we get to the difficult bit: what happens when politicians move from making speeches about housing to actually interfering with the property market? Burnham wants councils to have powers to take over long-term empty homes.
The problem is that councils already have powers to deal with empty properties. They simply don’t use them very often.
Why? Because taking over an empty property costs money, takes months and requires people to do the work.
Andy Burnham has promised promised to fix Britain’s housing crisis
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GETTYTown halls are already stretched. Giving them another power does not magically give them another pot of cash, or a team of experienced property professionals to use it.
Personally, I hope widespread compulsory acquisition of empty homes never becomes the norm. Apart from anything else, the optics would be dreadful, and the uncertainty could unsettle the market.
There is still something deeply uncomfortable about the state deciding that your house is no longer really yours because it has been empty for a particular period. “An Englishman’s home is his castle” may sound old-fashioned, but property rights matter.
And then there is the proposed six-month trigger being discussed. Six months is nothing in property.
A house can easily be empty for six months because somebody has died and probate is taking longer than expected. A sale can collapse.
A refurbishment can overrun. A property can need substantial work before it is suitable for occupation.
Treat every empty property as suspicious and you risk punishing perfectly ordinary homeowners while frightening the very people who buy tired properties and bring them back into use. I know, because that is what I do.
And there is another problem here which politicians sometimes overlook. The threat does not have to become law to have an effect.
If a small landlord hears that councils might eventually have powers to acquire their property, they may simply decide that the risk isn’t worth taking. They sell up.
Another rental disappears. Do that often enough and you have fewer homes available to rent.
Fewer homes mean higher rents and less choice. And higher rents and less choice mean more people struggling to find somewhere to live, precisely the people Burnham says he wants to help.
So yes, build council houses. On that, there is a serious argument to be made.
Burnham is right to point out the scale of the problem. More than a million households are on council waiting lists, while hundreds of thousands of homes have been lost from the social housing stock through Right to Buy over the decades.
But here is the question nobody can escape. Who is going to build them?
The same construction industry already struggling with labour shortages, rising costs and a lack of skilled workers. Bricklayers don’t suddenly become more plentiful because a council signs a bigger contract.
Materials don’t become cheaper because the houses are being built for social rent. And borrowing doesn’t become free because the political objective is admirable.
Burnham has also argued that building more council homes can save billions in housing benefits over time. There is certainly a long-term economic case for having a larger stock of social housing.
But housing is not an instant-return investment. A house costs an enormous amount of money to build, and the rent takes decades to recover that cost.
Depending on financing, construction costs and interest rates, the full economic payoff can stretch far into the future. We are talking about something that could still be playing out around 2050.
And that is before you ask how much additional borrowing will be required and what happens if the cost of that borrowing remains high. None of this means the idea is wrong.
It means the housing crisis cannot be solved with a speech, a new power for councils or a headline-grabbing pledge. It requires land.
It requires money. It requires planners.It requires builders. It requires landlords.
It requires councils that can actually deliver projects. And, crucially, it requires confidence from the people who are already investing their own money in Britain’s housing stock.
That is why I have mixed feelings about Burnham’s announcement. The problem he is describing is real.
The need for more genuinely affordable housing is real. The case against dreadful landlords is real.
And, above all, he offered something that politics has been rather short of lately: hope. Burnham is a great orator.
He has a heart. He has a message that ordinary people can understand.
You can see why people respond to it. But housing is where political hope eventually meets the cold reality of bricks, mortar, planning departments, labour costs, interest rates and supply.
The question is not whether Burnham can persuade people Britain needs more homes. It is whether his plans can actually produce them without driving away the very people who are already providing them.
And for that, I suspect, we are going to need rather more than hope.
Jonathan Rolande is a leading property expert. For more information visit rolande.property