Andy Burnham has promised to open a Downing Street team in Manchester and deliver “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen” in his first speech since launching his bid to be the next prime minister.
Addressing an audience that included his former mayoral colleagues Steve Rotheram, Tracy Brabin and Oliver Coppard at the People’s History Museum, Burnham outlined a vision of devolving power away from Whitehall, which he said had “blocked” progress in Manchester.
“Andy Burnham pledges 'No 10 North' in Manchester to deliver biggest devolution of power, as aligned thinktank calls for mayors to control social care and skills.”
“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,” he said. He also promised the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period, a “complete rethink” of education and cuts to welfare, though he provided no detailed plan and took no questions at the end.
The new ‘No 10 North’ unit, he said, would make “power flow” across the country and support regions in reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration. Burnham added: “The days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over, for good.”
Burnham, who last Monday announced he would stand to replace Sir Keir Starmer, is the only Labour MP to do so. If he remains the sole candidate, he could become prime minister as early as 20 July.
The speech came as a paper by JP Spencer, head of devolution policy at the ThinkLabour thinktank and one of the policy experts feeding ideas to Burnham, called for mayors to be given sweeping new powers over social care, childcare and skills. Spencer argued that “national command and control systems have proved insufficient to tackling our more complex problems”, and proposed a “radical reshaping of the state around local democratic boundaries”.
Under his plans, mayors would appoint health and education commissioners to oversee local schools, GPs and childcare providers, taking direct control of sixth-form colleges and the government’s skills agenda – potentially receiving more than £4bn from the growth and skills levy. Health commissioners would have oversight of public health and primary care. On policing, Spencer endorsed Shabana Mahmood’s plans to reduce the number of police forces and align them with mayoral areas, though Burnham is reportedly sceptical about merging 43 forces into 12 to 20 larger regional constabularies.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch dismissed Burnham’s devolution agenda, saying he backed it because he “doesn’t know what to do so he wants to pass the problem to someone else”.
Burnham argued that distributing power across the country would “give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs”. He also suggested “greater public control of essential services” such as water, energy and transport, and proposed extending devolution deeper into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, noting that “the people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster.”
England has some of the worst regional inequality in the western world, with seven of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe – a disparity many experts blame on the country’s highly centralised politics.