Andy Burnham’s address to Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool set out the most detailed commitment to a Burnham council housing programme heard from any senior party figure in recent memory, promising ‘the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era’ and anchoring the ambition in a deeply personal account of his upbringing on Merseyside. The speech, delivered on Tuesday afternoon, also carried consequences for how the built environment professions understand the scale of the delivery gap now facing local authorities.
The scale of what councils must rebuild
The gap between Burnham’s stated ambition and current output is stark. According to the Institute for Government, councils built fewer than 2% of new homes in England in 2024/25, and at the peak of the post-war housebuilding drive they were completing 50 times as many dwellings each year as they managed in that period. BBC News has reported that in the 1950s councils were building almost 200,000 new homes a year; by 2024/25, around 65,000 new affordable homes were completed across England in total, of which just over 12,000 were built for social rent. Those figures frame precisely what ‘the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era’ would need to overcome.
Burnham’s speech drew an explicit line between housing stability and life outcomes: ‘Our journey starts where I started, in the Old Roan, not far from here, with housing, a home. That home on Keble Drive unlocked the aspiration in my mum and dad for a better life for us all.’ He also noted that over a million people are on housing waiting lists, ‘almost exactly the same number as the homes we lost through right to buy in the 1980s.’ The Burnham council housing programme, as outlined, would be supported by returning building powers to local authorities and making use of unused public land to keep costs down. Further detail is expected in this autumn’s budget.
On the supply side, housing secretary Angela Rayner, speaking on the Monday of conference, announced measures to make it easier for councils to bring empty homes back into use, alongside ‘a new duty on public services to work together to provide that wraparound support to prevent homelessness, before families reach crisis point.’ She also pledged to make it easier for councils to purchase social homes from providers. Luke Tozer of Pitman Tozer Architects, speaking on behalf of Architects Action for Affordable Housing (AA4AH), welcomed the direction: ‘Thank goodness we finally heard a message of hope, positive change and determination to make it happen. [Burnham] gets how foundational a good home is for health, education and opportunity.’
Modular homes, emergency powers and the infrastructure blockage
Beyond the headline commitments, fringe panel discussions exposed the texture of the delivery problem. More than 177,000 children are stuck in temporary accommodation, according to government data cited at conference, and several panels focused on modular construction as one route out of that specific crisis. Graeme Craig of Places for London agreed that prefabrication could be the answer for high-quality temporary housing, though he noted that modular home manufacturers might require initial subsidy before the model could be scaled up.
Northampton South MP Mike Reader used the conference to make the case for Covid-style emergency measures to accelerate delivery, citing the Nightingale hospital built by Mace during the pandemic, designed by BDP, as evidence that procurement and consultation timelines can be compressed dramatically in a genuine emergency. He argued that declaring housing a national emergency could allow housebuilders to bypass lengthy planning stages. Infrastructure provision, however, remains a blocking factor even where modular solutions are proposed.
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook, speaking at a Fabian Society event on Tuesday morning, defended the government’s planning reform record but was candid about the 1.5 million homes manifesto target: ‘It was always a stretching target. It has become a lot harder. We are putting every lever that we can as a government to try and get numbers up.’ The fringe sessions also reflected a general absence of answers on how retrofit and adaptive reuse could be achieved at the mass scale the climate transition demands, with design quality largely absent as a topic except at RIBA-organised events, where President Chris Williamson made the case for city architects.
New towns, prominent at last year’s conference, drew notably less attention this time: just one fringe event was dedicated to the subject, compared with four in the previous year. Devolution featured heavily instead, with Burnham framing local control as his ‘theory of growth’, though concern was raised that elected mayors in some areas could become blockers rather than enablers of development in the national interest.
On climate, Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh pledged to rebuild political consensus for action, acknowledging the pressure that consensus is now under: ‘My job, as I see it, is taking that on and trying to rebuild that consensus. Climate action is, yes, about the environment, but it’s about protecting our communities.’ The Burnham council housing programme, and the carbon implications of whether that new stock is built to genuinely low-energy standards, will be central questions for the built environment professions as autumn’s budget approaches.
