Thursday 09 July 2026 5:53 am  |  Updated:  Wednesday 08 July 2026 5:04 pm

London doesn’t need more social housing, it needs more housing full stop

By: Emma Revell

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Andy Burnham’s plan for a huge social housebuilding programme will be expensive and won’t solve the root cause of the housing crisis: we just haven’t built enough houses, says Emma Revell

Andy Burnham isn’t letting a little thing like constitutional reality get in the way of starting his premiership with some big announcements.

The de facto Prime Minister hasn’t met the King yet, never mind moved into Downing Street, but he’s already gone further than Boris Johnson in deciding that No 10 doesn’t need some new wallpaper, but does need half its functions moved 200 miles up the M40. 

As if setting up a whole new hub for government conveniently located near his existing home (and football team) wasn’t enough, Burnham has also pledged to tackle the housing crisis by “launch[ing] the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period” because “nothing else will fix it”.

As my colleague Ben Hopkinson wrote, it’s a great soundbite – but shoddy economics.

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Earlier this week, Ben published a briefing which set out what our existing social housing stock actually costs the taxpayer. The numbers aren’t small. The implicit and explicit subsidies provided for our social housing stock – the fourth-highest as a share of all housing in the OECD, by the way –........

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