ANDY Burnham has lambasted the Government over its failure on housing and said ministers and MPs need to “wake up to the full scale” of the housing crisis.

Speaking to GB News, the Mayor of Greater Manchester said: “My big message will be that Westminster has to wake up to the full scale of the housing crisis. It’s only scratching the surface at the moment.

“When it puts forward policies, it tends to be about homeownership and that kind of thing, around first-time buyers. Important as those things are, they do not solve the housing crisis so that the time has come to wake up.

“We’ve got to raise standards in existing homes and build truly affordable new ones.”

In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he continued: “We are introducing a Greater Manchester good landlord charter for the first time. We need an actual way of holding landlords to account.

“We are proposing a new system of property checks so that residents can say ‘look, my home isn’t isn’t fit for habitation, this landlord’s not treating me properly’. We will then get a team to go in and check that out and if necessary, take enforcement action, all the way to taking ownership of the home.

“We’ve got a plan to build 30,000 truly affordable net zero homes in our region, homes for social rent. And these are all the actions that we’re putting forward.”

He added: “I don’t think it gets us to where we need to go. We do have to build more homes. But to be honest, I would meet some of the campaigners halfway, saying don’t just do that all on green belt land.

“Actually, what you need to do is clean up brownfield sites in some parts of the north or parts of the Midlands and then build homes for social rent on those places. That actually is a proper solution to the to the housing crisis.”