24/06/2026
Andy Burnham could collapse the property market before he's even unpacked at Number 10.
That's not hyperbole. It's mechanics.
Gilt yields drive swap rates. Swap rates drive the cost of fixed-rate mortgages and development finance. 30-year gilts are already within touching distance of 6%.
Political uncertainty doesn't just make the papers. It makes your next refinance more expensive. It changes the maths on every deal you're trying to underwrite right now.
And Burnham is the man who already told us Britain is too "in hock to the bond markets."
He's since rowed back. Markets have taken a "show me first" attitude. But a leadership transition has a price, and that price gets paid by anyone with a mortgage, a development loan, or a deal in the pipeline.
Before a single policy is announced.
Now look at what's actually being proposed.
NI on rental income raises landlord costs. Those costs either get passed to the tenant or the landlord exits. The OBR already said successive erosion of landlord returns will likely reduce rental supply and push rents up. That wasn't a property lobby press release.
That was the government's own fiscal watchdog.
Nobody listened.
CGT equalisation ignores inflation entirely. Buy at £200,000, sell ten years later at £300,000, with 30% inflation over that period. Your real gain is zero. Taxing the nominal gain at income tax rates means taxing something that never existed.
The land value tax argument is more nuanced.
The theory says landlords can't pass it on because rents are set by what tenants can afford, not by landlord costs. In a market with genuine supply that might hold.
But in Britain's chronically undersupplied rental market, landlords have pricing power. The theory is elegant. The market it assumes doesn't exist.
The one part of the package I'll defend is stamp duty abolition. It taxes movement, not ownership. Removing it genuinely helps developers. Better acquisition economics, faster transactions, improved viability on conversions.
That's real.
But stamp duty removal doesn't offset what everything else does to the PRS.
290,000 rental homes have left the market since 2021.
Rents have risen in every major city.
Add another layer of cost and tax uncertainty on top of a market already contracting, and you don't get redistribution.
You get fewer homes, higher rents, and more families in emergency accommodation at £4,500 a month.
Burnham is thinking about housing through a redistribution lens. The diagnosis is right. Ordinary people can't afford to live. But you can't redistribute your way out of a supply crisis. You just change who loses.
The answer is more homes. Faster planning. Guaranteed leases that keep small landlords in the market. Conversions fast-tracked above dying high streets. A land value tax targeted at people sitting on brownfield land doing nothing, not at people already providing homes.
Before any new regulation becomes law, ask one question: does this increase supply or reduce it?
No chancellor of any party has ever actually done that. The debate is always about redistribution. The supply crisis keeps getting worse.
Britain's seventh Prime Minister in a decade is about to inherit that failure. The signals so far suggest he'll compound it.
This is what Point 10 of the Build Don't Blame manifesto exists to prevent.
