Andy Burnham has promised Britain's biggest council housebuilding programme since 1945. That is the headline everyone has taken from his first week in office, and it is worth pausing on the word "council," because it points to a shift in who commissions housing in this country, not just how much of it gets built. For most of the last two decades, private housebuilders have set the pace. They chose the sites, ran the programmes, and instructed the consultants. Councils and reg

Homes England's figures for 2025/26 landed last week, and the temptation in Whitehall to call this a turning point will be strong. The agency enabled just over 40,000 completions, its best year since 2020, alongside more than 42,000 starts on site, and it beat two of its three government targets while lifting completions for social rent by 65 per cent, the tenure that matters most to people in greatest need. For an agency that has spent much of the past decade fielding critic

Every so often a report comes out that makes you stop and think. The latest HBF analysis is one of those moments. £9bn sitting unspent £3bn held for more than five years £2bn allocated for schools £700m set aside for affordable homes These numbers are not alarming to me. They are energising. They show how much potential is already in the system and how much can be turned into real schools, real homes and real community benefit. One line in the report stood out: “There is a gr