Labour's Housing gamble
By grace wilson · 28th august 2026 · 3 min read· image: wikimediacommons.com
Burnham’s first major housing allocation has put Greater Manchester at the top of the table. The region will receive £529m to deliver around 4,400 homes through the Social and Affordable Homes Programme.
Who stands to gain most from Labour’s housing revolution? On the face of it, Greater Manchester. Burnham’s former authority has received the largest settlement among the six established mayoral regions, although the picture changes once population is taken into account, with Liverpool City Region and the North East receiving more per head. The £529m figure is therefore not quite the gift it might first appear to be.
West Yorkshire has 39.4 households on its housing register for every 1,000 residents, compared with 29.6 in Greater Manchester and 22.7 in Liverpool City Region. Yet Liverpool’s allocation amounts to around 8.5 homes for every 100 households on its waiting list, while West Yorkshire receives around 4.2.
There is no reason to suggest that Labour should simply have followed the waiting lists. They are an imperfect measure of housing need, and a government serious about building homes has to consider where schemes can actually be delivered. Labour is not simply putting money into the places where the greatest number of households are waiting for social housing. They are putting money into a mixture of need and the capacity to deliver. That is a perfectly defensible strategy. It is also one that leaves Labour with rather more to prove. If the justification for giving regions substantial control over housing investment is that local government understands its housing market better than Westminster, then those regions now have to demonstrate that they can turn funding into homes. Greater Manchester has pledged 10,000 new Social Rent homes by 2030 and 50,000 affordable homes by 2039. The government has now given it £529m with which to begin doing it.
House prices make the problem harder still. Greater Manchester’s average house price is around £251,000, while the average private rent is around £1,365 a month. A waiting list cannot capture everyone caught in that gap. Someone paying an increasingly large proportion of their income in rent, unable to save for a deposit and with little prospect of buying, is experiencing the housing crisis long before they appear on a council register. This is where the government’s two housing policies meet. Planning reform is supposed to make it easier to build; public investment is supposed to make these homes socially affordable. Sir James Cleverly has dismissed Labour’s planning reforms as a “smokescreen” and a “con”, but the Conservative critique will only carry so far. The shortage in housing has continued to grow for years. Labour now has the opportunity to test whether changing the rules and putting serious money behind housebuilding can actually alter that trajectory.
There is still more than £16bn to allocate outside London, so the first round cannot be treated as the final judgement of the programme. But it is enough to show the government’s basic approach. Labour is not choosing between housing need and economic deliverability; it is trying to satisfy both. The difficulty is that the two do not always point to the same places.
For Burnham, the programme puts the argument for devolution into practice. Greater Manchester has long sought greater control over housing and development, and the government is now giving the region both the funding and responsibility to deliver. If the homes are built, it strengthens the case that decisions on housing are better made closer to the communities affected. If they are not, it becomes harder to argue that a lack of powers or funding was the main obstacle. The £529m is therefore not evidence that Greater Manchester has been favoured. Nor is it evidence that Labour has solved the housing problem. It is the beginning of a much more consequential test: whether a government that aims to put the state back into housebuilding can actually make the numbers on the announcement translate into homes on the ground.