Andy Burnham’s £39billion plan for the biggest council house building push since World War 2 has been torn to shreds amid claims only 15,000 homes would be built per year. Mr Burnham, who could become prime minister on July 20 if he is the only contender to replace Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader, said in June that he wanted to oversee “the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period”.

A new report published by thinktank, Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), on Monday (July 6) has blown apart the Labour MP’s spending splurge. It says Mr Burnham’s £39bn spending commitment may only deliver between 14,335 and 15,494 homes per year over a decade. CPS Head of Housing and Infrastructure Ben Hopkinson said: “Many Brits rightly value our social housing stock, but few people understand the economics underpinning it. It seems our next prime minister isn’t one of them.”

The report says the building costs for an average-sized, three-bed semi-detached house are around £251,700. From £3.9bn per year, this would see the construction of 15,494 homes – just 5% of the Government’s annual housing target for England, according to the CPS.

Britain has the fourth highest share of social homes in the OECD group of developed countries and housing subsidies in England total £79bn per year, the thinktank says.

It adds that social rent homes would not pay off the sums taxpayers spend on them either, with the average annual rent costing £5,942 and the cost of maintaining and managing them per year at £6,280.

The right-leaning thinktank also found that in 2024/25, the UK spent £36bn on housing benefit and the Universal Credit Housing Element.

It says England accounted for £32bn of this housing subsidy while the UK already spends the highest percentage of GDP on housing allowances of any OECD country.

Mr Burnham previously called for the Government to increase the Local Housing Allowance. The CPS says if he pursues this policy in No.10, it would drive the record-high subsidy figures even higher.

The CPS report also states that the average social home is let out for £10,250 less than the average privately rented property.

Across England’s roughly 4.2 million social homes, this amounted to an implicit subsidy of £43bn a year in 2025, according to the CPS.

Adding together the explicit and implicit subsidies for public housing, it costs the country a staggering £79bn a year in England alone.

Mr Hopkinson said the cost of building social housing, as with all housing, has been driven up by red tape, construction costs and an “unruly” planning system.

He added: “Subsidising rents for some on the taxpayer’s dime while refusing to tackle the broader lack of housing for all tenures suggests Andy Burnham is going to be yet another Prime Minister driven by ideology, not what actually works.

“The only way to get housing costs down across the board is to build more homes – we are 6.5 million short of where we should be and Burnham’s plans are at best a distraction and at worst a barrier to achieving the level of housebuilding we need.”

Mr Burnham’s representatives have been contacted for comment.