Published: 23/07/2026 By Nick Pearce
As we all know, Sir Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister on the 22nd June. Andy Burnham, the former greater Manchester mayor, is now settling into the office to take his place. Whatever your politics, a change in number 10 always sends a ripple through the property market. Property is one of the few markets where policy uncertainty changes behaviour almost faster than policy itself.Mr Burnham hasn't published a housing manifesto. He doesn't need to have one yet for people to start asking questions, because his record on this subject is long and consistent. He has called council tax 'highly regressive' and criticised its reliance on valuations that are over three decades old. He has spoken previously about replacing stamp duty with a land value tax. His team has also reportedly looked at proposals from the campaign group fairer share, which would replace both council tax and stamp duty with a single annual charge based on a property's current value, with a higher rate for second homes and overseas owned property. There have also been reports that the threshold for the so-called mansion tax, the high value council tax surcharge due to apply to properties worth over £2 million from April 2028, could be lowered to £1.5 million under a Burnham government, bringing an estimated 150,000 more households into scope.
Let's be clear about what this means, and equally what it doesn't mean yet. None of this is confirmed government policy. A change of this scale would need treasury backing, parliamentary time and, realistically, years to implement. Commentators who understand this market well have already pointed out the risk in any proposal that ties an annual tax bill to a fluctuating valuation, and the political difficulty of a policy that could be seen as targeting a particular group of owners. This is speculation about direction of travel, not a policy anyone should plan a house move around.
What I would say, as someone with over four decades of experience through several changes of government, housing acts and financial crisis, is that the fundamentals rarely move as fast as the headlines suggest. Buyers and sellers who make good decisions in periods like this are the ones who focus on their own circumstances rather than trying to predict Westminster. If you are selling, price to today's market. If you are buying, buy a home you can afford under current rules, not one you can only justify if a future policy happens to go your way.
Circa London is an independently owned agency, which means we don't have a corporate line to toe on stories like this one. We get to say what we actually think, which is that the smart move right now is patience, not prediction.
Nick Pearce is Founder and Managing Director of Circa London.
