Who's actually commissioning the next decade of housing

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 registered providers played a secondary role, buying affordable units through Section 106 agreements rather than leading schemes themselves. Burnham's pledge points somewhere else. If council housebuilding scales the way he intends, local authorities move from occasional buyers to primary clients, commissioning development management and cost consultancy work directly rather than inheriting it through a private-sector chain.

That shift changes more than who signs the contract. Councils operate under different governance than private developers. Decisions run through committees rather than a single director. Risk appetite sits lower, because public money carries public accountability in a way private capital does not. Procurement follows formal frameworks rather than relationships built over previous schemes. A consultant used to a developer client picking up the phone to resolve a cost query will find a council client needs that same query documented, reported, and signed off through a process built for scrutiny.

This is not a future hypothetical. Housebuilding group Vistry pivoted two years ago, shifting its business toward councils and institutional landlords instead of private buyers, and stands to capitalise on exactly the shift Burnham is now promising to accelerate. One of the country's largest housebuilders has already moved. Others will follow, and the consultants working alongside them need to understand the client they are now serving

For firms like ours, that means the fundamentals do not change but the application does. A drawdown pack from a registered provider needs the same rigour as one from a private developer, but the reporting has to answer to a different audience, one that will face its own questions from auditors, councillors, and the public. Cost monitoring built for a private client's board meeting will not automatically satisfy a local authority's finance committee.

Burnham's ambition is a post-war-scale programme. Whether it reaches that scale is a question for Westminster and for Rayner's department to answer. But the direction of travel is already visible in who is commissioning housing now, and the firms that adjust to that client base early will be the ones best placed when the programme starts moving at pace.