Andy Burnham bounded up to the lectern at the People’s History Museum in Manchester on Monday, a big smile on his face as a supportive crowd roared approval. In his first major policy speech since being elected MP for Makerfield last week, the presumptive next prime minister promised the “biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen” – a radical devolution agenda centred on a new Downing Street team based in Manchester, dubbed ‘No 10 North’.
“We will never get growth up to the level Britain needs unless every single postcode in the land is set up to contribute to it,” Burnham told the audience, which included his former mayoral colleagues Steve Rotheram, Tracy Brabin and Oliver Coppard. He proposed redistributing power away from Whitehall to all parts of the UK, including extending devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – though he gave few details. “The people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster,” he said.
“Andy Burnham promises 'biggest rebalancing of power' with No 10 North, but critics question growth evidence.”
But the speech, unusually, ended without a single question from the media; Burnham stepped down from the stage and headed to London to meet more MPs. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was quick to criticise, saying Burnham “doesn’t know what to do so he wants to pass the problem to someone else”.
BBC Verify has examined the economic track record of existing devolution. Scotland, with extensive powers over health, education and income tax, has a GDP per capita at around 93% of the UK average – virtually unchanged from 1998. Northern Ireland stands at 83%, Wales at 74%. Most economists have found no significant boost to overall growth rates from a quarter-century of devolution. “It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down – it can only be nurtured from the bottom up,” Burnham countered.
Harriet Harman, the former Labour deputy leader, waded into the emerging cabinet speculation, saying Ed Miliband should become Burnham’s chancellor. The new No 10 North unit, Burnham said, would be the “nerve centre of a rewired Britain”, focusing on reform of utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration – and he also promised the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period.
Burnham is currently the only Labour MP to have declared for the leadership, meaning he could become prime minister as early as 20 July. But the New Statesman dismissed his vision as a “devolution delusion”, arguing that decentralising power is not a solution to Britain’s problems. With a critical press, a sceptical opposition and the weight of economic data against him, Burnham now faces a battle to convince the country that his answer to stagnation lies in handing power away from Westminster.