Burnham’s promises: what do they add up to?

Housing for all?

In June, Andy Burnham promised ‘the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period’. The previous month, while campaigning in Makerfield, he was more direct:

‘There’s £39bn allocated [by Keir Starmer to build 300,000 new homes outside of London] over a 10-year period … I’m saying that should be dedicated to council homes … because control matters.’

Indeed! But Burnham is not proposing to increase that amount. In August, his reappointed housing minister Angela Rayner announced the allocation of £10bn of that money to build 70,000 homes over 10 years, with just 60% of it going towards social housing and only three of the 33 developers receiving the cash being local councils.

So where has the ‘control’ gone? Out of the government’s hands. Housing associations are not accountable. Nominally ‘not for profit’, they routinely pay their top executives six-figure salaries.

Housing associations can and do swiftly renege on promises to allocate units to social rented properties, citing costs. Some sell homes on their estates to asset-strippers or hedge funds, which raise rents astronomically, thereby forcing tenants out, and convert family homes into houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).

Rayner’s excuse is that councils are not ready, telling them to ‘get your plans in order’ and ‘scale up now’. Councils were lumbered with a £29bn housing debt by the Tory–Lib Dem coalition in 2012. It’s still there, weighing them down. The least Rayner could do is cancel that debt and provide the funds for local authorities to ‘scale up’ their direct labour forces.

Then there are the numbers, which simply don’t add up. The Local Government Association and Shelter put the need for new social-rent homes at 100,000 a year. So 300,000 over 10 years is less than a third of the actual need, meaning the crisis would still grow under Labour’s plan. Most of the four million people currently on social housing waiting lists would still be waiting in 2036.

Meanwhile there is no indication of rent controls being introduced, despite private landlords raising rents by 40% since the Covid pandemic. There is no stipulation that new homes should be fitted with net-zero-compliant features like heat pumps, insulation and solar panels. And the goal of abolishing rough sleeping by Christmas ignores the plight of 400,000 people, including 175,000 children, living in temporary accommodation, costing councils £2.8bn a year.

Decent, affordable housing is a human right. Labour’s plans don’t add up. Labour and trade union members should demand:

• Cancel council debts and grant funding to build homes with council labour.
• Build a minimum of 100,000 new council homes per year.
• Nationalise housing associations and construction companies and train young people to build homes for the future.

Tackling youth unemployment?

One million young people under 24 years old are unemployed. The bosses, commentators and politicians often refer to these as ‘NEETs’—not in employment, education or training—but this euphemism cannot hide the fact that capitalism is once again failing to provide jobs for young workers.

According to Alan Milburn’s interim report into the subject, 30% of these have ‘good GCSEs’ and 15% a university degree. Yet four in ten cite mental health issues as the main impairment to getting a job. Milburn predicts the numbers will only rise on the present course.

This is a national scandal and Andy Burnham is right to highlight it. But will his proposals turn the tide?

Let’s look at three of Labour’s proposals: Milburn’s Young People and Work Review, due to publish its ‘solutions’ report in September; new technical and educational pathways for 14–18-year-olds; and the Youth Guarantee scheme.

While Milburn’s final report is not out as we go to press, his interim report, published in May, gives an indication of its contents. The former Blairite minister and Tory–Lib Dem adviser constantly reiterates that ‘for every £1 that DWP spent on employment support for young people, around £25 was spent on benefits’. He claims this provides a ‘perverse’ incentive to stay on benefits.

But his own findings contradict this by pointing out that 84% of young people on health benefits desperately want to find a job. The danger with this review is that, while oozing empathy, it will end up cutting the health element of Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for young people. This coercion ignores real need and threatens to punish young people, driving them into low-paid, dead-end posts rather than finding them decent jobs on a living wage.

Burnham’s revival of technical education routes also sounds promising. Socialists agree that young people in their school and college years should be introduced to the world of work, to modern, technologically developing occupations—not through super-exploitation and low pay. But the scheme presents serious problems.

His proposals envisage young people engaging in non-academic pathways from the age of 14 and revive the Conservative concept of university technical colleges (UTCs) from the age of 11. This division, where middle-class children take academic courses leading to positions in high-tech and management, while working-class kids train for lower-paid manual jobs, would just reproduce the old secondary-modern/grammar-school divide of the 1950s.

Also, as Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said: ‘Where will the teachers, lecturers and physical infrastructure to support these new routes come from without proper funding?’ There is no extra money for schools or further education colleges. In fact, funding is set to fall. Without this, the programme will fail, like all its predecessors.

The headline-grabbing 110,000 new jobs created by Sainsbury’s, Boots and other retailers, on the other hand, are sheer illusion. Although the Youth and Jobs Guarantee scheme promised a six-month, fully paid—and fully subsidised by the government—job, the first batch offers only two to four weeks of unpaid work experience.

Rather than a break from 40 years of Thatcherism, this is a revival of her Youth Training Scheme and Youth Opportunities Programme. Both were reviled in their time as super-exploitative, leading to no guaranteed job at the end. Like the housing programme, it has started with a whimper.

Corporations run along profit lines, not for the benefit of the nation’s youth. By relying on the private sector to employ more young people, the taxpayer ends up paying the bosses to take on young workers, then discard them.

We say:

• Guarantee every school leaver a permanent job, an apprenticeship on full pay or a college placement.
• Fully fund schools and colleges to expand technical training.
• No return to ‘secondary moderns’—for the right of young people to choose their own educational pathway and to change pathways.

Call out Israel for genocide

On 8 September, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced a series of new sanctions on Israel as part of Labour’s ‘reset’ of relations between the two countries. Andy Burnham has added, ‘The suffering of the Palestinian people is a scar on the conscience of the world,’ adding that ‘Britain must be willing to lead.’ The tranche of measures is welcome after years of Starmer’s endorsement of Israel’s siege of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It has led, predictably, to rage and countersanctions from Israel.

All imports from the illegal West Bank settlements will be banned and sanctions imposed on construction companies building and financing them. Advertising land sales for property in the settlements will be banned, and violent settlers will be sanctioned. Export licences for weapons used in the occupied territories will, he said without specifying them, be withdrawn.

Along with 11 other European countries, the UK government also called on Israel to cease all illegal settlement building.

Yes, this is a step forward, but what he did not say is also important. He failed to call out Israel for the ongoing genocide, or to call for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli Defence Forces from Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Indeed, he doubled down on sanctioning Hezbollah and Hamas.

To underline his continued opposition to the global Palestine solidarity movement, Miliband said, ‘I wholeheartedly oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, campaign.’ In other words, this was a purely diplomatic gesture, designed to pressure Israel before the October elections, not a move to support Palestinian national rights.

But activists can use these new measures, however inadequate, and Israel’s hysterical reaction to them as a recognition that we have been right all along, while emphasising that Israel, with the help of the US, will simply shrug this off and carry on with the genocide. We should demand Miliband and Labour go much, much further:

• Call what Israel is doing in Gaza by its right name—genocide!
• End all trade and investment in Israel—bring its economy to its knees.
• Close down all enterprises producing or selling arms to the Zionist regime.
• Recognise a single state, ‘from the river to the sea’, with the right of return for all Palestinian refugees.

The small steps away from Starmer’s Tory policies are welcome, but activists in the unions, the campaigns and the Labour Party must go on the attack for real substantive changes and be ready to meet the counterattack from the billionaires and bond markets. Otherwise Burnham’s promises will end in disappointment and disillusion once again.