From the front garden of the red-brick terrace where she has lived for nearly three decades, Coral McKeown, 50, points to the gleaming new council house she was supposed to move into five years ago.
It sits behind heavy metal fences surrounded by building work and an empty construction vehicle. She does not expect it to be ready until next year at the earliest.
This is Collyhurst Village, where lines of beige-brick terrace properties make up the first element of Manchester’s Victoria North, a 15,000-home addition to the government’s slate of new towns.
The project in Andy Burnham’s former backyard illustrates why the putative prime minister wants to give councils back control of residential development sites and the masterplanning of amenities, transport and home construction.
In a speech on Monday setting out his vision for what he would do as Keir Starmer’s successor, Burnham said he wanted a Labour administration under his control to “oversee the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.
The challenge is huge. Burnham linked the loss of almost 1.5m council homes since the 1980s to the number of families on social housing waiting lists nationwide rising to a similar level, many of them having waited a decade or more. There are also thousands of low-income households who would benefit from a broader range of affordable properties.
At the same time, the government’s housing target of 300,000 new homes a year in England, creating an extra 1.5m by the end of this parliament, has already veered off track.
Figures from the property agent Savills show that just over half the target – 840,000 homes – are expected to be under construction by mid-2029 after an almost stagnant two years since Labour came to power. Sluggish construction activity is forecast to continue well into 2027.
Yet Burnham knows first-hand from his time as mayor of Greater Manchester the limited powers available to local leaders. By his own admission, without delegated authority and more funds, he lacked the ability to extend the number of affordable homes or cut social housing waiting lists.
He urged private developers to build thousands of homes, offering them loans and helping to clear planning obstacles, only to find that just a few properties qualified as affordable, or even rarer, as social rents.
His plan is to revive the spirit of the great postwar council housing programme, which came after the first majority Labour government passed the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Housebuilding soared and by the 1950s it was topping the 300,000 a year mark, with more than half built by local authorities.
It remained around that elevated level until the mid-1970s, but after Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Housing Act gave tenants the right to buy, local authority construction cratered. The policy was also harmed by estates gaining a reputation for high crime as well as scandals around poor quality construction work.
In Collyhurst Village, 1970s homes considered sub-standard – which themselves replaced a 1950s estate – are being knocked down to make way for modern terrace homes.
“We were all for it at first,” says McKeown’s husband, Darren McKeown, 45. As the delays from Covid, trade tariffs and the Iran war have dragged on, however, the less the couple have wanted to move.
They have come to feel that the development, a partnership between Manchester city council and the Hong Kong-based developer Far East Consortium (FEC), represents a kind of two-tier regeneration where those relying on social housing are treated differently.
“One of my main gripes is private tenants are getting toilets on the top floor and we’re not entitled to that,” says Darren McKeown. “Our ground-floor toilet will be in the kitchen but they say they can’t move it. Even the bathrooms, they [private renters] got tiles, we got lino.”
With their unusual rectangle shape and vertical windows, the three-storey beige-brick townhouses could be mistaken for student accommodation instead of family homes.
And then there is the price. Some are on the market for as much as £425,000, about £100,000 more than the average Manchester semi-detached house and significantly pricier than other properties in Collyhurst.
Julie Froud, a professor of financial innovation at the University of Manchester, said private-sector developers presented councils with several obstacles. They needed to drip-feed homes to maintain prices, and funding models were designed to limit the number of homes for social rent.
She is part of a group promoting development based on “foundational” principles that focus on the provision of “everyday universal basics like food, housing, health services and transport within planetary limits”.
Burnham had adopted the basics of the foundational economy in his election platform to be mayor, though Froud said he stopped short of the plans under way in New York.
Where Burnham had a voluntary landlords charter, New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, introduced a citywide rent freeze, after which the Google boss and billionaire Sergey Brin dumped the shares he owned in a local real-estate fund.
As PM, Burnham could adopt a more Mamdani-esque level of intervention, sidelining private developers in favour of direct council control to eliminate two-tier housing and honour his promise of “good homes for all”.
He would be building on policies already put in place by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Steve Reed, the housing secretary. In January they announced a £39bn, 10-year social and affordable homes programme, aiming to build 300,000 homes, 60% of them for social rent.
These initiatives sit alongside the £2.5bn National Housing Bank loans scheme, a 10-year rent settlement restricting social landlords to rent rises of inflation plus 1% each year until 2036, and changes to the right-to-buy policy, allowing councils more leeway to use funds from the sale of council homes.
According to plans leaked to the Guardian late last month, Reed has also been working up plans for a state-owned housing developer that could borrow at lower rates than private developers and housing associations to expand funding for new homes.
That could help to speed up the construction of the proposed new towns, among them a site at the village of Tempsford in Bedfordshire, potentially transforming a former airfield into a 40,000-home market town. The original number of towns was seven, but the future of the Enfield project is in doubt after the council withdrew in May.
Henry Overman, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics, said Burnham would need some easy wins when he was constrained by a tight budget, further squeezed by a near-£5bn hole left in the defence spending bill.
Overman believes that devolution offers the best route to speedier decision-making, but he urged the next prime minister to focus on only a few projects.
“Burnham says he wants to raise economic output and living standards everywhere, giving people good homes everywhere. Yet this would dissipate his energies and lead to diminishing returns. He needs to be targeted, or he won’t achieve anything.”
Homes could emerge faster at Collyhurst now that it falls within the broader Victoria North new town scheme. However, the history of local authority control leading to massive and often flawed estates that need to be knocked down after only a couple of decades has left the British public sceptical.
Gavin White, Manchester city council’s executive member for housing and regeneration, said he understood the concerns of Collyhurst tenants but laid the blame for delays on unexpected international events.
“We are seeing significant impacts across the construction sector nationally, from inflationary pressures affecting all parts of the building industry and workforce, to supply chain issues and unexpected delays linked to utilities at the site, and unfortunately Collyhurst and the Victoria North programme are not immune.”
White said giving more powers to councils would prevent two-tiered developments. A former architect, he said the council would relish the chance to develop stylish homes that not only functioned well but also looked good.
Other councils, many of which have lost their expertise in housing development after 40 years of privatisation, may not be so confident.
White said the council chose the developer FEC “because they shared our values and had the ambition to match our vision”.
He added: “This is one of the largest regeneration programmes in the UK and we could not achieve it without a partner who was willing to build at scale and accept a level of risk over the next two decades that comes with significant upfront cost and without immediate profit.”
