Andy Burnham’s £10bn plan to build 70,000 new homes has been billed as the return of the council house – but plenty of Independent readers aren’t convinced it goes far enough.

The prime minister unveiled the funding this week, with 60 per cent earmarked for social rent – a climbdown from his earlier pledge that the whole pot would go on council housing.

The charity Shelter has already warned the total falls well short of the 90,000 homes a year needed to end homelessness, and our community picked up on that gap.

Many pointed out that Britain used to build far more council housing than this, with one commenter estimating annual output was many times higher decades ago than it is now, making Burnham’s promised uplift look modest by comparison.

Others traced the shortage back to Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy sell-off in the 1980s, while a lively side debate broke out over who should actually qualify for a council house in the first place.

Here’s what you had to say:

The plan to allocate funding to councils to build 70,000 new homes is a positive start, although many more will be needed given the shortage of affordable places to live. It’s important for everyone to have a safe, comfortable home – homelessness is never acceptable.

On every occasion when new houses and apartments have been built in my area of Suffolk, promises to add social housing into the mix have been broken, much to my disappointment. This has been happening at intervals over the past 24 years. I really welcome this change in policy and look forward to seeing these buildings completed as soon as possible!

JanetC

So how’s that housing pledge coming along, Angela? 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament equates to 300,000 housing starts a year. After two years of Labour, housing starts are running at about 160,000 annually – 10 per cent less than were being built under the Tories in the pre-Covid years.

The housing industry employs about 2 million skilled workers – brickies, electricians, plumbers, plasterers and so on. To increase production to 300,000 units a year, we’d need over a million additional skilled workers. We do not have a million skilled workers idly sitting around, so they’d have to be imported from overseas. Their first ten years or so in the UK would be spent merely building enough new homes to accommodate themselves. Duh.

tobias1

Sad to see such negativity and pessimism in the comments – no wonder this country struggles to build anything! This is genuinely good news: when these homes are built, they’re built on brownfield, town-centre sites at a reasonably high density with good infrastructure – exactly the places private developers don’t go. I’d like to see powers to strip land from developers who are land-banking, too.

Garlbalunzie

£9bn to councils – that’ll soon melt away into the black hole of the public sector machine.

Councils, irrespective of their political make-up, are painfully slow, bureaucratic and expensive to run. Give them £1,000 for a project and you can bet £950 will be spent on consultants and committees before a brick is laid.

Burnham, Reeves and the chancellor need to find the money for the water, drainage and sewage infrastructure to support all this new building too – and that’s before even one new home is built, let alone the 1.5 million being banded around.

Pablo

If the build speed is like a site near us it will be 2050 by the time they build them. Four years to build 72 houses, with numerous issues created for the users of the A road it was built along.

GrampyJeff

If the country can get these houses built, great. But I think the entire process of allocation needs to be re-examined and clarified.

Are council houses to be allocated for life, or only for as long as need exists? The late Bob Crow, of the RMT, had a salary of around £145,000 and yet still occupied his council house. With that level of income, he could have afforded a regular mortgage – by staying in his council house, he was effectively denying its use to a family in greater need.

A family with a son and a daughter may be allocated a three-bedroom house – once the children have grown up and left, should the empty-nest parents be required to downsize? Whatever the outcomes are, they must be transparent and justifiable to the public.

DaveAni

The building of new council homes has to be renamed ‘social housing’, and they should never be for sale to tenants or renters. They are designed to accommodate the poor and the needy, not as a money-making proposition. These homes should only be available to local UK citizens and families – end of story.

PJK

Oh dear – so after all the complaints that there aren’t enough affordable homes, it seems, from the comments before this one, that those sounding like angry Reform voters don’t actually want that at all. None of them seem to have read or understood the criteria for being given social housing, including the importance of being locally born or having worked locally for some years – one of many criteria local councils use.

Fallingapart

We moved from the Birmingham slums to a new suburban council estate in the early 50s. It was wonderful, but there was no resemblance to today’s sink estates. First, everyone worked. Second, your council house was ‘your’ house for life, and everyone looked after their property accordingly. Third, we knew our neighbours and hardly anyone moved away. Fourth, there were no gangs of riff-raff making life a misery, and we didn’t even have to worry about locking the door. In Birmingham there were even annual garden competitions that were taken very seriously. This peace and stability for ordinary, lower-income working people – and particularly their children – was destroyed by Thatcherite dogma, and will never return.

Frankie

Excellent plans to reverse the damage done by Margaret Thatcher and the successive Conservative governments that followed. Notwithstanding the lack of council housing, the most serious issue facing would-be house buyers is excessive house price inflation – particularly in London, where property investors and existing homeowners are using equity from that inflation to fund second homes and first-time purchases for their children. These buyers make up a significant percentage of house purchases. Taxing house price inflation as a capital gain would discourage investors and release houses for genuine home buyers.

Rack

Being PM is a poisoned chalice. No matter what they pledge and what they do, people will always moan and find fault. I really hope Burnham can find a way to build more social housing, but I won’t join in with those who’ve already written him off so soon. Remember, the alternative is Reform – and that doesn’t bear thinking about.

LV426

Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.

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