Andy Burnham, the newly elected Labour MP for Makerfield, and the man everyone expects to be our next prime minister, has made solving the UK’s housing crisis a priority for his new government.
In a speech earlier this week, he pledged to deliver the “biggest council house building programme since the post-war period”. But Labour has failed to get anywhere near its manifesto commitment to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. And successive governments have repeatedly struggled to deliver on their own promises to build new homes.
So will it work this time? Can Burnham really solve the housing crisis? Our writers, Kwasi Kwarteng, former Conservative Party chancellor, Sarah Harrison, chief executive officer at the Building Societies Association, and Vicky Spratt, The i Paper’s Housing Correspondent, offer their perspectives.
Kwasi Kwarteng: There is a market solution which will be more effective than this
Housing is always a problem. Andrew Burnham, our presumptive next prime minister, has firmly set this as a top priority. In so far as “Burnhamism” means anything, it means building new houses.
