In July 2024, Andy Burnham told me that his favourite Manchester band was New Order. It was just after The Labour Party won a general election with a historic mandate for the first time in over a decade. He was buzzing with excitement, beaming. His people were in power.
We were sitting in the offices of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and Burnham, then the mayor for the GMCA, who had been in post since 2017, was preparing for a DJ set at a local club, but he also had policies he wanted to discuss.
Manchester’s then-mayor wanted “change” on the Right to Buy policy and a Housing Revenue Account (HRA), which would give the GMCA income from housing as well as the ability to borrow to build its own housing, which it would then own and manage like council housing.
“Housing is a risk to growth,” Burnham said that day. “If people can’t find places to rent, they won’t move here because it’s too difficult to live.” He did not, he added, want to oversee a devastating “London effect” in Greater Manchester. “Nothing against London, but we don’t want people to be priced out of housing here,” he added defiantly.
Fast forward two years, which in politics is a lifetime. Just ask Sir Keir Starmer, who resigned as Prime Minister just hours before Burnham returned to Westminster as the new MP for Makerfield, and Labour’s new leader-in-waiting.
Now, for Burnham, housing is back on the agenda, but this time, it’s national. In a post on X shortly after Starmer announced that he was standing down, Burnham wrote: “As we move forward, our priority must be to work together to get the country back to where we all want it to be. People want to see progress on economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing and opportunities for the next generation. Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people’s lives.”
Instead of singling out education, defence or the NHS, Burnham chose housing. As he has warned himself, younger generations are struggling because they can neither afford to rent nor buy homes. Cities, and by extension Britain, have been changed by who can and cannot afford to live in certain places.
Becoming prime minister would be where the rubber of rhetoric hits the harsh reality of a hard road ahead for Burnham. Some of his critics argue that Labour’s newest MP is style over substance, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who scathingly described him as “eyelashes and a black T-shirt” this week.
Is that fair? Not entirely. In Manchester, Burnham has overseen a city that has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the UK, boasting an average annual growth rate of 3.1 per cent over the past decade, outpacing the national UK average of 1.5 per cent. The success and regeneration of Manchester may predate Burnham, but it was also fuelled by his leadership.
It is also true that Burnham took an innovative approach to housing in his patch. He secured a landmark devolution deal under the Tories in 2023, and pledged to use devolved funding to build 10,000 homes across Greater Manchester and later to buy up empty homes and use them to get families experiencing homelessness out of temporary accommodation.
Less discussed, but equally indicative of what might happen if Burnham becomes prime minister, is the fact that on his watch the GMCA somewhat controversially agreed to give a private developer a £50m loan from Burnham’s Good Growth Fund to aid the completion of a luxury skyscraper which includes 133 homes for social rent.
Housebuilding has remained strong under Burnham’s leadership. Between 2024 and 2025, 3,864 new homes were built in Manchester, an increase of 28 per cent in the previous year. As of 2025, it had around 12,000 homes under construction and another 7,500 with planning permission. In 2024-25, 99.8 per cent of homes completed were on brownfield land, and over 80 per cent were close to public transport.
Increasingly, economists on both the left and the right subscribe to the “Housing Theory of Everything” which argues that the housing crisis – specifically the supply of new housing – is the cause of many of the problems we face in Britain, from relatively low growth and productivity to the fact that young adults aren’t having as many children as previous generations.
They may well be right. In Manchester, Burnham certainly developed his own housing theory of everything.
If the King of the North becomes the prime minister, we can expect a more devolved approach to housebuilding as well as radical interventions: he has already said that he would like to overhaul property taxes (replacing council tax – and potentially stamp duty – with a land value tax) and that he would oversee a mass programme of council housebuilding like that implemented after the Second World War.
However, just like Starmer, Burnham would be confronted with Britain’s broken housing market.
It is a stagnant and sclerotic market where house prices are at near historic-highs relative to earnings set against a tough economic backdrop, which has been worsened by Trump’s war with Iran, causing costs to rise even further for the sort of housebuilders that the GMCA bailed out with that contentious loan in Manchester. He would also have to deal with the same cautious and reluctant Treasury officials that Angela Rayner battled for cash towards the Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) funding.
Burnham says he is committed to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, but would he go as far as allowing more borrowing to get Britain building?
That will be a serious item on his to-do list. Shortly before Starmer resigned, the rumour was that Reeves was considering private finance to build Labour’s flagship new towns because there wasn’t enough Government funding available.
Burnham was walking on air when I met him in 2024. He is, rightly, riding high again now after another massive win. But, in politics, gravity is an inevitable force, and what he would do once faced with it in housing is, much like what happens to Labour’s leadership process in the coming weeks, still one big, looming open question.
Perhaps the best clue about the answer is in what Burnham himself told me in 2024: “This feels to me like the moment to open up a more flexible and permissive approach to building housing of all types.”
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