The mortgage and property industries could face a significant policy shift if Keir Starmer is replaced. Here's the track record of each rumoured contender for Number 10
Keir Starmer's grip on the Labour leadership is hanging by a thread.
After the party lost around 1,500 council seats in England's local elections last week, with Nigel Farage's Reform UK making sweeping gains, dozens of Labour MPs have publicly called for the prime minister to resign or set a timetable for his departure.
Starmer has insisted he is staying, but with no formal leadership challenge yet launched, attention has turned sharply to who might succeed him – and whether it could signal a shift for housing policy.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there remains no clear frontrunner. The leading names in circulation are former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, health secretary Wes Streeting, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, and energy secretary Ed Miliband.
Angela Rayner: the architect of Labour's housing programme
Arguably no contender has more direct housing policy experience than Rayner. As deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, communities and local government from July 2024 until her resignation in September 2025, she was the driving force behind one of Labour's most ambitious planning reforms in a generation.
Presenting changes to the National Planning Policy Framework to Parliament, Rayner declared the UK was facing "the most acute housing crisis in living memory," accusing the previous Conservative government of "caving into their anti-growth backbenchers" by abandoning mandatory housebuilding targets.
She wrote to every council leader in England warning of a "moral obligation" to build more homes, threatening to use intervention powers (including taking over a local authority's plan-making directly) against those who failed to comply.
The government said its New Homes Accelerator, introduced under Rayner, had helped remove blockages to almost 100,000 homes across England, while the Planning and Infrastructure Bill aimed to streamline decision-making and the expansion of Awaab’s Law required social landlords to address emergency hazards within 24 hours from October 2025.
Still, the 1.5 million-homes target that defined her time in office drew plenty of scepticism, and Rayner admitted it “was going to be really difficult” to hit that goal in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) figures suggested the government will fall short of that target. Rayner said a figure of 1.3 million would still get close to the government’s original target – but expectations around that figure also included homes built in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, while the 1.5-million figure was specifically for England. The OBR figures expect homebuilding to fall short of that target for England by 500,000 homes.
Andy Burnham: public control and a £40bn council housing call
Of all the potential successors, Burnham has set out the most ideologically distinct housing vision, one that could represent a significant shift in direction for the mortgage and property market.
The Greater Manchester mayor, who would require a parliamentary seat before he could formally lead the party, has argued that housing cannot be fixed without restoring public control.
"If you've not got control of housing, you've not got control of the costs the country is facing," he has said. He views the sale of council homes as a root cause of the country's current crisis: "When we sold off the water, sold off the electricity, sold off the gas, sold off the council homes, sold off the buses, sold off the trains, we found ourselves in a position where ordinary people can't afford those basics anymore."
Nationally, Burnham has called on the government to borrow £40 billion to build new council housing. He has also attacked the government's freeze on local housing allowance, warning it pushes private renters into homelessness by widening the gap between rents and benefit support.
His time as mayor of Greater Manchester has produced some progress on housing: after his third mayoral re-election in 2024, he pledged 10,000 new council homes by 2028 (at least 1,000 per borough) and launched a £1 billion investment programme. He has also called for the power to suspend Right to Buy for new homes, describing the current policy as "like trying to fill a bath with the plug out."
His flagship homelessness policy – Housing First, providing rough sleepers with a permanent home immediately rather than making it conditional on other factors – has seen rough sleeping in Greater Manchester plummet since 2017.
Burnham's path to Westminster remains blocked for now. Labour's National Executive Committee voted 8–1 in January 2026 to prevent him from standing as the party's candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, a move widely seen as an attempt by Starmer allies to obstruct a potential challenge. His supporters are calling for a delayed leadership contest to give him time to return to parliament.
Wes Streeting: a blank slate on housing?
Streeting is widely regarded as one of Labour's most effective communicators and a credible centrist candidate for the leadership. As health secretary, he has staked his political reputation on NHS reform — but on housing, he has said relatively little at a national policy level.
His public record on housing is largely confined to his constituency in Ilford North, where he has cited affordable housing as a local priority. He has not, to date, set out a distinct housing policy platform of his own. For mortgage brokers and lenders, his position on the sector – including planning, housebuilding targets, and mortgage market regulation – remains largely unknown, making him something of an unknown quantity should he reach Downing Street.
Ed Miliband: housing through an energy lens
Miliband, the energy secretary and former Labour leader, has engaged with housing primarily through the prism of energy efficiency rather than supply or affordability.
His most significant housing-related policy has been the reinstatement of mandatory minimum energy efficiency standards for the private rented sector. Landlords will be required to bring properties up to an EPC rating of C or above by October 2030, with a spending cap of £10,000 per property and fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance.
Announcing the policy at the 2024 Labour conference, he said: "We all know that the poorest people in our country often live in cold, draughty homes. It is a Tory legacy. It is a Tory scandal."
In January 2026, he presented the government's £15 billion Warm Homes Plan to Parliament, allocating funding for retrofit upgrades with a particular focus on low-income households — though critics, including tenant advocacy groups, argued the final standards had been watered down from earlier proposals.
Miliband has publicly played down any desire to return to the Labour leadership, which he held until the party's 2015 election defeat.
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