{"id":1108012,"date":"2026-07-24T06:32:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T06:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1108012\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T06:32:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T06:32:27","slug":"failing-quango-homes-england-causing-a-hidden-council-house-crisis-burnham-told","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1108012\/","title":{"rendered":"Failing quango Homes England causing a hidden council house crisis, Burnham told"},"content":{"rendered":"

Standing outside Downing Street, hours after visiting a homeless shelter, Andy Burnham<\/a> kickstarted his premiership with an impassioned pledge to end rough sleeping and launch \u201cthe biggest council house building programme since the post-war period.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the promise that could come to define his time<\/a> in Downing Street. But some of the evidence suggests it could fail \u2013 or worse, backfire.<\/p>\n

Burnham favours redirecting Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s<\/a> entire \u00a339bn Social and Affordable Housing Programme (SAHP) into social rent: the tenure most affordable to tenants and the most expensive to build, according to reports from the campaign trail.<\/p>\n

Whitehall departments are expected to be told to sell land at a discount for new developments. His post-war declaration is being taken at \u201cface value\u201d by councils. They now expect a greater chunk of the affordable housing budget after being \u201cbottom of the pile\u201d when it comes to accessing funding from Homes England, the Government\u2019s main housing agency.<\/p>\n

Homes England\u2019s programme is currently on hold while he decides how to proceed, and his Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, has just given his ambition a reality check. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge gulf between post-war and where we are today,\u201d she told BBC Radio 5 Live on Thursday when questioned about council housing. \u201cThe bar is really low.\u201d<\/p>\n

The i Paper\u2019s analysis of the funding, debt and delivery structures underpinning council housing suggests Burnham\u2019s ambition collides <\/a>with a system built, over the past decade, to work against him.<\/p>\n

The collapse in capacity<\/p>\n

Local authorities in England completed some 4,000 social rented homes last year. In the 1960s, the average was 120,000, according to government figures.<\/p>\n

Registered providers \u2013 housing associations and other approved landlords \u2013 can borrow from the National Housing Bank, an arm of Homes England, at interest rates of just 0.1 per cent. Councils, shut out of that scheme, are instead offered rates of around 5 per cent by the Treasury. A Homes England spokesperson said the Bank\u2019s role \u201cis to deploy capital on a commercial basis to support housing delivery,\u201d and that any investment must operate within government, regulatory and accounting frameworks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that registered providers get lower interest rate loans than local authorities is really galling to them,\u201d says Professor Janice Morphet of University College London, who has scrutinised hundreds of council papers and carried out in-depth interviews with 90 senior council housing officials in recent months.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is top of the pops for their anger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frozen out at Homes England<\/p>\n

Burnham has been warned that Homes England will have to be \u201ccompletely upended\u201d if his council housing drive is to succeed, according to Morphet.<\/p>\n

Her research has found that an overwhelming majority \u2013 95 per cent \u2013 of local authorities are gearing up to build homes but have found themselves \u201cbottom of the pile\u201d when it comes to accessing funding from Homes England. Most government grants for affordable housing, she says, go to private developers and housing associations instead.<\/p>\n

Councils told her that Homes England also denies them the long-term funding programmes routinely offered to private developers and major housing associations \u2013 funding they need to rebuild the house-building skills they lost after the post-war boom. Homes England, they said, would only agree funding scheme by scheme, and was \u201cvery slow\u201d making decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cLondon boroughs now build thousands of council homes each year after being offered long-term deals by the London Mayor,\u201d Morphet told The i Paper. \u201cIf Homes England did the same, local authorities outside the capital could potentially deliver tens of thousands more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morphet added: \u201cHomes England\u2019s attitude towards local authorities has got to change considerably.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince its recent restructuring, councils haven\u2019t been able to find a way to contact them at all. It needs to be completely upended.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CAMBRIDGESHIRE,Angela Rayner has been appointed as Housing Secretary and has given his council homes ambition a reality check (Photo: Chris Radburn \u2013 Pool\/Getty)<\/p>\n

A leading think-tank in this space, which Andy Burnham advised while Mayor of Greater Manchester, is calling on Burnham\u2019s No 10 North and Rayner to break up Homes England for \u201cblocking\u201d council house building.<\/p>\n

Think tank Re:State, which describes itself as independent and \u201cnon-party\u201d, says centralised Government quangos like Homes England lack the \u201cbandwidth\u201d to help the number of councils which now want to build homes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of its decisions go up the chain to its central office,\u201d says its Re:State policy director Simon Kaye. \u201cBut there are hundreds of councils and while they are probably working as fast as they can, bottlenecks slow down decisions,\u201d he adds. \u201cThey are inadvertently blocking councils\u2019 ambitions to build homes. It should be the business of No 10 North to push for the break-up of Homes England,\u201d Kaye adds.<\/p>\n

A Homes England spokesperson said it supports hundreds of local authorities and mayors in managing \u201csignificant public investment\u201d and building homes \u201cat scale,\u201d adding that local authorities are \u201ca vital partner\u201d in delivering new homes \u2013 pointing to its regional operating model and \u201cdeep investment\u201d in long-term partnerships with councils and mayors.<\/p>\n

The debt trap<\/p>\n

Underneath all of this sits \u00a331.8bn of council debt, costing local authorities \u00a31bn a year in interest payments to the Treasury, according to analysis by the estate agency Savills \u2013 a leading authority on council housing finance. If that debt were cancelled, local authorities could build up to 284,000 new social rent homes.<\/p>\n

John Perry, senior policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Housing, says that debt is the single biggest obstacle. In practice, that means the Treasury forgiving some or all of what councils owe on their housing budgets \u2013 potentially in exchange for firm commitments from each council on how many homes they\u2019d build in return. \u201cSome significant alleviation of debt is required,\u201d he says, \u201cpossibly in return for agreements with each council that alleviation will result in promised levels of new build.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even with debt relief, councils would still need to borrow to build. And under current rules they\u2019re excluded from the National Housing Bank\u2019s cut-price loans altogether.<\/p>\n

The gamble<\/p>\n

This is where Burnham\u2019s ambition carries real risk. Any reorientation of the entire \u00a339bn programme towards social rent \u2013 the most expensive form of affordable housing to deliver \u2013 will require new money on top of what\u2019s already committed. Without it, according to Perry, the total number of affordable homes built could fall, not rise, before the next election.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo orientate the SAHP more strongly to social rent will require extra funding \u2013 or else it might reduce numbers overall,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"LONDON,
Burnham favours redirecting Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s entire \u00a339bn Social and Affordable Housing Programme (SAHP) into social rent (Photo: Marcin Nowak\/Getty)<\/p>\n

Under current plans, the \u00a339bn programme aims to deliver 300,000 different affordable products but with at least 180,000 for social rent.<\/strong> Following hikes in building costs, recent industry analysis by Homes For People We Need \u2013 a group of major affordable housing developers and landlords \u2013 found each social rented home now requires on average \u00a3209,260 of Government funding.<\/p>\n

This total would fall significantly if Burnham pushes through with his plan to focus on social rent.<\/p>\n

His housing ministry is now describing his plan to divert more cash to councils and social rent as \u201cpure speculation\u201d.<\/p>\n

What it would take<\/p>\n

But Paul Harvey, vice chair of the Local Councils Network, says delivering on Burnham\u2019s campaign trail pledge \u2013 which he takes at \u201cface value\u201d \u2013 will mean a \u201cserious financial commitment\u201d. \u201cSocial housing is more expensive, but of all the affordable housing products it is the key one for solving the housing crisis,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cCouncils are the best vehicles to deliver affordable housing, but it will require central government to give up their powers to us, and this will be a really hard thing to do. The Government is also going to have to let councils step into the SAHP so that we can prove we can deliver \u2013 and then go back for more.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the meantime, with the whole programme on hold while the new Prime Minister weighs up his options, the supply of new affordable homes has stalled.<\/p>\n

Some 17,000 new affordable homes are at risk because of delays to the SAHP, the Government was warned in June by the National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations.<\/p>\n

Any further delays while Burnham\u2019s administration finalises its plans will make the delivery of affordable homes even more difficult, according to the Land, Planning and Development Federation, an umbrella body for the development trade.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will be urging the Prime Minister to expedite decisions on the current Social and Affordable Housing Programme, because providers are being held up,\u201d says Perry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Standing outside Downing Street, hours after visiting a homeless shelter, Andy Burnham kickstarted his premiership with an impassioned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1108013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5008],"tags":[8916,9311,748,72535,393,4884,6333,6334,16,15],"class_list":["post-1108012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-england","tag-andy-burnham","tag-angela-rayner","tag-britain","tag-council-housing","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-housing","tag-housing-crisis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116973560375857058","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1108013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}