Prime Minister Andy Burnham kicked off his speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool this week not with pensions, Brexit or tax, but with a story about his grandmother, Kitty, in post-war Liverpool.
'She walked three miles out of the bombed-out city after the war to put a deposit down on a house,' he said.
'She put a deposit down on a house. The house where I was born. It changed the fortunes of my family...
'That home on Keble Drive unlocked the aspiration in my mum and dad for a better life for us all and has taken us to places we could never have imagined.
'With a good home, everything is possible. Without one, it feels like nothing is.'
Labour's journey to the next general election will also start with housing: the creation of a national council house building programme, the partial scrapping of right to buy, an end to rough sleeping and the relaunch of the Help to Buy equity loan scheme. Burnham's aim is clear: to help other people experience the same uplift in their lives that his family had in post-war Liverpool.
The sentiment and rhetoric are one thing, but what does Burnham's speech really tell us about his plan for mending Britain's broken housing market?
Helping first time buyers — or throwing them under the bus?
Help to Buy has been rebranded as 'Your First Home'. First time buyers who have already saved a 2.5 per cent deposit will be able to borrow a loan worth 20 per cent of the property's value to amass a total deposit of 22 per cent to buy a new build home. Other tweaks to the new version expected in the Budget will include an income cap.
'This is certainly a move in the right direction,' says Marcus Dixon, head of residential research for JLL. 'But as usual, the devil is in the detail.'
One concern Dixon has is that the Treasury will not regionalise the scheme. Will they cap incomes in London at the same level as in Manchester, for example? Will the price of the property that is eligible vary by region? 'If they get this wrong it will become a scheme that only works [at best] in travel zone six and beyond. It will become a drawbridge for talent exiting the capital where housing need is greatest,' says Dixon.
Help to Buy works in a rising market and apartment prices have been falling since May 2025, Zoopla reports. This is not just a London problem where the price of a flat fell 2.6% in the year to August. Prices slid 1.3% across the UK and 2.9% in the East Midlands. Flats in Liverpool city centre are slow to sell too, one estate agent admits to Country Life.
Economist James Gerrard describes Help to Buy as 'throwing young Londoners under the bus.' It is, after all, a tool to get developers building homes for both private sale and as council houses, to help Labour get anywhere close to its wild target of getting 1.5 million new homes built.
There are strong headwinds, though. The leasehold scandal, the premium on a new build, and fear of cladding following Grenfell have deterred young buyers from purchasing a flat. Many skip this rung of the ladder now and jump straight to buying a family-sized home. Help to Buy does not necessarily address these issues and trends. In fact, it could encourage developers to throw up yet more apartments in a flooded and falling market.
At the end of five years these Help to Buy flat owners might not have accrued any equity to propel them up the ladder and will owe the Government a fifth of the value of their home. 'This could gum up the market further,' says Dixon.
As ever with the health of the wider housing market, pulling just one lever in isolation can be more hindrance than help.
Flats in cities such as Liverpool — where Andy Burnham was born — have been losing value recently.
'We're taxing geography, not wealth' as the Mansion Tax looms
There was red flag in Burnham's speech for those who want less property taxation, with Burnham describing Britain as a 'country run for vested interests and not the public interest'. It seems unlikely we will see any property tax relief for wealthy homeowners, second homeowners or landlords in the Budget.
The danger comes if the Government leaves Stamp Duty in place and adds the Mansion Tax on top. The family homes market is one of the few tranches of the market that is showing signs of life. The Zoopla numbers show this: in the north west, for example. flat prices have fallen 0.6% in the same period that the price of a house has risen 3.6%.
The Mansion Tax could quash sales family homes and mobility up the ladder. In the last autumn budget, the then Chancellor Rachel Reeves proposed that the tax would come in to force for properties valued at £2 million and above, but Rob Fanshawe of Property Vision fears that this value threshold could be lowered to £1.5 million.
Becky Fatemi, of UK Sotheby's International Realty agrees. 'We have to stop pretending the same property value means the same thing everywhere,' she says. 'I would look seriously at regional weighting, otherwise we are taxing geography and not wealth.'
Dominic Agace of Winkworth made the same point when the Mansion Tax was announced last year: 'In London, this is a terrace tax, not a mansion tax,' he told Country Life.
Ignore the countryside at your peril
Burnham promised 'good growth in every postcode' but there has been little mention of the countryside in his first 10 weeks in power, where there is both considerable wealth and considerable poverty. Fanshawe describes it as 'a speech that ignores the countryside and has no regard but for anyone but the urban mob.'
A new report by Savills — due to be published next week — shows that the rural and village property market is sluggish, with country house values falling by 1.4% over the past three months, following on from a fall of 2.8% in the second quarter of the year. A Mansion Tax in high value parts of the countryside such as the Cotswolds, Cornwall or Surrey will surely slow sales further to the detriment of the wider economy and housebuilding efforts — a problem, since households relocating from urban to rural areas is important for the dissemination of wealth across regions, as well as for mobility and lifestyle.
Nick Leeming of Jackson Stops sums it all up: 'Helping people move into homeownership is an ambition we should all support and increasing the supply of new homes gives first-time buyers more routes onto the ladder.
'But getting people onto that first rung is only part of the equation. Those buyers will eventually become second-steppers themselves, and they need a healthy fluid market to move into as their circumstances change.
'Any further taxation of higher value homes therefore needs to be considered in the context of the overall tax burden on property and, importantly, on housing mobility.'