Andy Burnham’s promise to cap single bus fares at £2 across England faced immediate questions on Wednesday, as a minister admitted the £450m needed to fund the policy had “not worked out yet” — just a day after the prime minister told his new cabinet that every policy must be properly costed.
The admission, reported by the Daily Mail, undermined Burnham’s effort to project competence in his first week as prime minister. He had announced the fare cap on 22 July as part of a “cost of living government” drive, saying it would save passengers a third on bus travel from January 2027. The previous £2 cap, introduced under Sir Keir Starmer, was linked to 30 million extra bus journeys in 10 months, according to government figures.
“Burnham's £2 bus fare pledge hits funding snag as minister admits cost not yet worked out.”
But the funding gap quickly drew fire. Chancellor John Healey, appointed just days earlier, said he was “right behind” Burnham’s cost-of-living focus, but the Office for Budget Responsibility had already warned that the Digital ID scheme — whose scrapping was meant to fund a separate VAT cut on electricity — was itself “unfunded”. Conservative shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride accused Labour of “playing fast and loose with the public finances”.
Burnham had told his first cabinet meeting on 21 July that he wanted to give people a “sense that help is coming”. He scrapped VAT on household electricity from October, costing an estimated £850m this financial year, and pledged to end rough sleeping with £340m for 1,200 homes and support for 3,000 long-term rough sleepers. He also created a powerful new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, led by ally Louise Haigh, to drive devolution and local growth from a new No 10 North in Manchester.
Yet questions over funding persisted. The £2 bus cap was meant to be partly paid by switching international climate grants to repayable loans, but the minister’s admission that the money was not yet identified left the policy’s timeline uncertain. Burnham had previously said his government would be “a cost of living government”, but the early wobble gave ammunition to a resurgent Reform UK, which polling showed five points ahead of Labour.
Meanwhile, Burnham’s shift to the centre on Brexit — he said this year that re-entering the EU was “a battle he wouldn’t fight” — and his attacks on the “London-centric” civil service were seen as deliberate overtures to Nigel Farage’s voters, according to Politico. But critics warned he risked forgetting the 47 million people living outside metropolitan areas. Debbie Porter, a business director in Bakewell, welcomed the bus cap but said rural communities needed “actual bus routes” to benefit.
Burnham’s promise to adopt a national “Housing First” philosophy, championed by the New Statesman, and his creation of No 10 North, were intended to signal a break with the past. But with Russia’s Vladimir Putin “closely watching” the new PM, according to analyst Mark Galeotti in the i newspaper, and the Ukraine war still spiralling, Burnham’s early focus on domestic costs may soon collide with external pressures — and with the hard maths of Treasury arithmetic.
