Andy Burnham’s conference speech on Tuesday began its housing section with his gran.
Kitty walked three miles out of bombed-out Liverpool after the war to put a deposit down on a house without her husband’s knowledge, and it was the house where the future Prime Minister was born. “It changed the fortunes of my family,” he told the hall.
A few minutes later he turned to the young:
But I also want to get back to a Britain where young people starting out are able to buy a home like my mum and dad did. Like I did. They have had it tougher than us. Working hard, paying bills, trying to save but looking at a student loan which never gets any smaller.
I wasn’t the only member of Team Wonkhe bracing myself for a line on loans. Sadly, we got one:
Today I say to them we are bringing back the hope you can have a home of your own. Your First Home will reduce the size of the deposit you need. It will open up home ownership to those not backed by the bank of mum and dad.
The scheme itself had been trailed by MHCLG three days earlier. First-time buyers in England purchasing a new build from a participating developer will put down 2.5 per cent, with a 20 per cent government-backed equity loan covering the rest of the gap and an initial interest-free period.
The money comes from reprioritised existing spending, and we don’t yet have detail on how many buyers it is meant to reach. The Independent worked it through on a £230,000 home, where the buyer would find a £5,750 deposit, take a £46,000 equity loan from the state and borrow £178,250 from a lender.
So a passage that started with a student loan which never gets any smaller ended by offering two more loans to go with it. For a graduate it’s three, because the student loan still takes its slice of everything above the threshold, and the equity loan has to be paid back on top once the interest-free period runs out.
Ben Cooper, who heads the Fabian Housing Centre, told a fringe on Monday that he expected uptake to be slower than Help to Buy for precisely that reason. Young people are “very sceptical” of any loan from the government, he argued, because Plan 2 borrowers were sold a repayment threshold that would rise every year with earnings and have since watched it frozen again and again.
The English Housing Survey has 42 per cent of households headed by a 16 to 34 year old owning their home in 2024-25, up from 31 per cent a decade earlier, and ONS has house prices in England at 7.6 times median full-time earnings – roughly double the ratio at the turn of the century, but the most affordable reading since 2015.
The people a deposit scheme can’t reach are the ones who never get as far as being a household at all. ONS counted 7.2 million 15 to 34 year olds living with their parents in 2025, up from 6.6 million a decade earlier, with the share of 20 to 34 year olds at home rising from 25.4 per cent to 28.7 per cent and young men at 34.9 per cent.
Average private rent in England hit £1,459 a month in August, up 4.0 per cent on a year earlier, and on 31 March there were 135,580 households in temporary accommodation (a record) with 177,530 children among them.
The best guide to scale is the predecessor. Help to Buy ran for a decade from 2013 and supported 387,195 purchases, 328,346 of them by first-time buyers, using £24.7 billion of equity loans. When the National Audit Office looked at it, the department’s own research found 37 per cent of buyers couldn’t have bought anything without it, while around three-fifths could have bought a property anyway, if not necessarily the one they wanted – and at its height the scheme accounted for around 4 per cent of all purchases.
Even if Your First Home matches that at its best, it’s a few tens of thousands of additional buyers a year set against 7.2 million young adults in their childhood bedrooms. And the scheme’s own evaluation history says it helps least in the places that were already expensive, which are the places where students and young renters are most squeezed.
For me, the more interesting problem is in the other half of Burnham’s speech, because Kitty’s story didn’t end with the deposit.
When she went through the care system, her grandson told the hall, the modest savings she had built up through her life were taken to pay for it – “starting from the house where I was born? All taken to pay for it.”
The answer is a National Care Service, introduced in the next Parliament and part-funded by adjusting the triple lock from April 2030, which he described as a person-centred, high-quality care service that starts in the home, free at the point of use, and which protects people’s homes and their savings.
It was the most personal passage in the speech, and the bit addressed to care workers was the best thing in it. But by Wednesday morning, as John McLellan noted in The Scotsman, Burnham was having to clarify that residential care wasn’t included – which means care in your own home will become free while the accommodation costs of a care home stay exactly where they are.
Most people would rather stay at home, and the system already reflects that – DHSC’s November figures had 333,592 residents in older adult care homes against nearly half a million people receiving regulated home care, both counts from incomplete provider returns. But if you plonk the pledge onto the housing numbers, the incentive only points one way.
The Resolution Foundation reckons that housing every household in England exactly to the bedroom standard would need 38 million bedrooms, against the 67 million that exist, with 71 per cent of households living somewhere with a spare room.
The latest English Housing Survey has 40 per cent of households under-occupied on its stricter measure, rising to 58 per cent of those aged 65 or over, and over the past decade under-occupation among owner occupiers has climbed while overcrowding in social renting went from 6 per cent to 9 per cent and in private renting from 5 per cent to 6 per cent.
The speech did call out empty property. “Go to almost any town across Britain and you will see plenty of empty homes,” Burnham said, promising councils the power to take control of them. But the empty rooms inside occupied homes didn’t get a mention.
Savills puts the net housing wealth of over-60 owner occupiers at £3.84 trillion, 55 per cent of the UK total, with £2.92 trillion of it in their main homes. A promise to protect homes and savings from care costs is, among other things, a promise to protect inheritances – which is to say the bank of mum and dad, and gran, that Your First Home exists to compensate the young for not having.
In other words, a Prime Minister who wants more young people in homes of their own has announced, in the same speech, a loan that adds a handful of young buyers at the new-build end of the market and a care reform that makes it more rational for older owners to stay in the large existing homes where the spare rooms are.
One of the routes by which family houses currently come back onto the market runs through care home admission and the sale that funds it – and the stated aim of the care pledge is to make that route significantly rarer without building anything in its place.
The quarter of over-65s who say they’d like to downsize aren’t asking for care in the house they’re in. They’re asking for somewhere suitable to move to, and the Dutch, German, Spanish and French schemes that pair students with older people in types of halls show what that can look like.
None of this would matter as much if the demographics were standing still. The total fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.39 in 2025, the lowest on record, and the OBR’s July report has the old-age dependency ratio going from under 30 per cent now to nearly 45 per cent by the mid-2040s.
Students belong to DfE, housing to Angela Rayner’s MHCLG, and care to DHSC, but the long-term links between the three here ought at least to be on John Healey’s radar. Whatever the vibes from his boss, he’d do well to point out that spending reprioritised money on a second loan for people who already resent their first, all without freeing up a single bedroom, is just going to make things worse.