Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first conference as Labour leader opened with a promise to young people locked out of the housing market: a new-build home for just a 2.5% deposit, supported by a government-backed equity loan of up to 20% of the property’s value. Your First Home is a more targeted Help to Buy, aimed at first-time buyers who don’t have help with a deposit from the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’. In many ways, this is an admirable goal, especially given that the National Audit Office found that 3 in 5 of those who accessed the previous version of the scheme could have bought the same home without it.
Demand-side fixes for structural problems in the housing market fundamentally mean public money boosts developer profits by inflating demand for new homes and subsequently the cost that can be charged for each unit. But beyond this, Your First Home raises bigger questions about progressive approaches to housing.
A generation of people are struggling to find secure, affordable housing. Private rental unaffordability is now a national phenomenon, with rents in every region growing between 6% and 9% per year and 1 in 5 private renters reporting cutting back on food to afford housing costs. The average age of renters is increasing, with the numbers of households aged over 55 in the private rental sector growing by 70% over the last decade. The average age of first-time homeowners is also increasing across the country, rising to 34 years old.
The aspiration of homeownership is not one that should be dismissed. For millions of people, the dream of owning a home is about being free from the anxiety of eviction, or an unaffordable rent increase that tacitly serves as one; it’s about painting walls and making a house a home; about staying close to community, or near their childrens’ school. Ultimately, it’s about security, dignity and control. But why is homeownership the primary route to access these?
A more ambitious vision of housing security would expand people’s choices and control over their homes, rather than making it easier for a fortunate minority to climb the property ladder. The Government’s commitment to a council housing revolution is one way to do this.
For decades, millions of people found security and affordability in council homes. Not only is it a more affordable tenure type, but it’s an explicit form of long-term housing that enables people to put down roots. At its peak in the 1950s, Britain was building more than 200,000 council homes a year, a scale the market has never matched, and to higher standards than private builders were required to meet. By 1979, almost a third of households rented from their council.
Right to Buy turned this collective good into a private asset. Since 1980, around two million council homes have been sold off, with 14,275 sold under Right to Buy during 2025–26 – a 90% increase on the previous year. More than 40% of these former council homes are now owned by private landlords. Research by Common Wealth found that Right to Buy has cost the taxpayer £200bn, and councils are increasingly buying-back homes sold off under Right to Buy at inflated costs. In particularly egregious examples, council houses sold off under Right to Buy are being rented back to local authorities as Temporary Accommodation (TA) just months later. In Havering, a home sold for £102,000 has cost the council £350,000 renting it back as TA; in Newham, a home sold for £77,300, has seen the council pay £200,000 in rent. Given that local authority spending on TA has doubled over the last five years to a record £2.9bn, the problem isn’t that the state is failing to spend on housing. It’s that it’s spending a fortune on the most expensive, least secure version of it – paying exorbitant rents to private landlords, rather than building homes that will still house families in decades to come.
Indeed, that the people living in council homes can stay in them for as long as needed, regardless of whether income rises or falls, has always been a central part of the council house offer. The growing argument that social housing subsidises the ‘wrong’ people, as The Economist put it this summer, is not only wrong, but has been tried before. In 2016, a proposal to make higher earning social housing tenants pay market rents to stay in their homes was dropped before taking effect. It deserved to be. Treating council and social housing as a temporary safety net is precisely what residualised the tenure from a mainstream option for a broad mix of people to a last resort concentrated on the poorest and most vulnerable, while also weakening the public support needed to build more.
Burnham has said housing should be treated as an essential service, not a market of winners and losers. Your First Home, however well targeted, helps a few more people become winners. If the Government is serious about ending forty years of neoliberalism, then the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war era is a worthy place to start. But it should be equally serious about what made those homes worth building: yes, lower rents, but also the promise that you could stay. Security, dignity and control over your home shouldn’t depend on whether you can raise a deposit, and the true test of a progressive housing policy shouldn’t be how many people it helps onto the ladder, but how many it gives a secure place to call home.
Would you like to write for Red Brick? Email rose.grayston@gmail.com to pitch your piece (c.600-1200 words)
