Government lays out housing plans but Burnham backtracks on social renting pledge – UK politics live

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The government has set out its plans to spend an initial £10bn on a mix of subsidised housing in England, with a target of 60% being social renting.

The funding, which comes from the 10-year Affordable Homes Programme, is in line with the Starmer government’s policy and sees Andy Burnham backtrack on his proposal to rip up housing plans and boost social home building.

Burnham previously called for the programme to be spent entirely on social homes, which are more heavily subsidised and therefore more affordable than other types of government-funded housing.

He said when launching his campaign to become MP for Makerfield:

double quotation mark There’s £39bn allocated over a 10-year period … I’m saying that should be dedicated to council homes. Let’s not be coy any more … I’m saying council homes because control matters.

Under the plans announced on Monday, however, £10bn will be spent helping to build 70,000 homes outside London, about 60% of which will be social rented houses. The rest will be other types of accommodation such as shared ownership schemes and sheltered housing.

London will get another £6bn, which will be allocated at a later date.

Ministers said the investment would help bring the government closer to its promise of building 300,000 affordable homes over the next 10 years. It will be spent by 33 “strategic partners”, who will be guaranteed funding for the next decade to help deliver their plans.

The Guardian has learned that for the first time in the history of the scheme, three of those partners will be local councils, as the government looks to deliver what Burnham has promised will be “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.

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