With grand vision and little detail, Andy Burnham last week made his pitch for prime minister. Daniel Gayne picks through his Manchester speech for clues about what the Makerfield MP will actually do when he gets the keys to Number 10
Andy Burnham is not the prime minister. It is important to remind oneself of that fact, given the tone of coverage that has surrounded the new MP for Makerfield as he rumbles towards a coronation as leader of the Labour Party.
Last week, Burnham made a speech that was distinctly prime ministerial in tone, a sweeping state of the nation address which veered away from the candidate’s “I would” and into the statesman’s “I will”.
The speech set out a new, ambitious and interventionist vision for the British government, promising good growth in every postcode, the biggest council housebuilding programme since the Second World War, and greater public control of utilities.
The lack of detail on how this was all to be achieved was noted by many, but is perhaps unsurprising. Burnham has been swept to the edge of power with astonishing speed and the timetable set out by Keir Starmer, the outgoing prime minister, has given him a matter of weeks in which to prepare a workable agenda. In such circumstances, one can hardly blame Burnham for keeping his powder dry and his options open.
Nevertheless, his speech left many people asking the big questions around how he planned to deliver his goals and how he might fund them – particularly in light of the billions of pounds of capital spending cuts now required to cover the extra cost of the defence investment plan.
In the absence of clear policy statements, Burnham’s precise choice of words in speeches like the one last week take on an outsized significance. With his likely ascendance to Number 10 still weeks away, and more specific plans unlikely to materialise before then, Building picked through his speech for clues about what a Burnham government might look like.
No 10 North: A prime ministerial counterweight to Treasury orthodoxy?
What he said: “Change will be driven through the prime minister’s office in an extended operation based here in Manchester […] No 10 North will support the regions on three clear tasks: reform of essential utilities; reindustrialisation; and the regeneration of places.”
What it could mean: Burnham would not be the first PM to hack off chunks of the British state and ship them up north. The ONS relocated to Newport in 2006, HMRC has consolidated its workforce into regional centres, while under Boris Johnson the housing ministry established a second HQ in Wolverhampton and the Treasury began working on plans for a campus in Darlington.
Generally, it has been done either for practical reasons or as a sop to the notion of levelling up and rebalancing the country away from London. But No10 North could be a little more than this – and not just because it concerns the country’s highest office.
Take a look at that list of three tasks. These would all be major – and perhaps more significantly, expensive – policy initiatives. All are the kind of things that the Treasury would normally have a fairly definitive say over.
The soft left of the Labour party has long been critical of Treasury orthodoxy and its perceived short-sightedness, with Labour mayors including Burnham himself criticising the supposed regional biases of the “green book” which provides the framework for evaluating public spending decisions. Louise Haigh, the ex-transport secretary turned Burnham aide-de-camp, in the wake of Burnham’s speech last week, published an essay which mooted the possibility of breaking up the “imperial” Treasury – an idea long discussed by heterodox economists.
Could Burnham’s Ancoats office be more than just a trendy Northern retreat? Could it be a way of breaking up the Treasury by stealth, hiving off major responsibilities through the creation of a prime ministerial counterweight away from Whitehall?
Time will tell, but we can certainly expect Burnham to encourage whoever ends up in No11 to push the Treasury beyond its traditionally cautious mindset.
Public development corporations and regional bank to push housing-led regeneration of towns
What he said: “[It comes from] public intervention where necessary to set higher ambitions for towns, as we did in Stockport, and kickstart the process of change […] we will bring higher density residential development to our towns, and No 10 North will be able to support all places to turn around towns, high streets and local centres, increasing footfall on the high street and protecting more green spaces from development.”
What it could mean: So far, Labour’s housebuilding policy has included changes to streamline planning, a minor encroachment into the green belt through the “grey belt” policy, extra grants to get housing associations building, and a series of new towns in areas with promising economic prospects.
Burnham’s comments on protecting green spaces and bringing residential density to towns suggest there will be no big green belt grab, while seeming to hint towards more robust and active regeneration of “left-behind” towns, rather than focusing on already thriving areas.
He references Stockport, where his Greater Manchester Combined Authority worked with the council to assemble land, provide funding, coordinate public agencies and attract private investment. It created the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) in 2019, with its £1bn investment programme leading to more than 1,200 homes being built, with a further 1,300 expected to start construction in 2026.
The MDC is also working on extending the Metrolink tramline to the town on the south-east edge of Greater Manchester.
Such development corporations might be the mechanism through which Burnham seeks to deliver his council housebuilding revolution. This regional approach would chime with one idea his team is reportedly considering to fund this building bonanza.
According to the Financial Times, the National Wealth Fund could give £20m of core capital to a dozen regional housing banks, which themselves might be classified as non-public sector by the statistics watchdog. This could help them to bring in hundreds of millions – or billions – of pounds without breaching the fiscal rules.
If you don’t know, now you know
Burnham’s speech made quite a number of off-hand references to concepts, case studies and policy initiatives which might have gone over the average listener’s head. Here’s our explainer of his references:
“It will be given a mission to strive for equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain – borrowing from the German Basic Law”
The Basic Law, which is essentially the constitution of Germany adopted in 1949, includes as its section 107 a commitment to financial equalisation among states. This means that states with weaker tax bases receive financial compensation from financially stronger states to prevent disparities.
“We will consolidate public and private investment at a place-based level and help all areas establish good growth funds, as we have done here in Greater Manchester”
Greater Manchester launched its good growth fund in November 2025 with £400m committed to 17 schemes promising to deliver 3,000 homes and 22,000 jobs. The fund has since grown to almost £2bn, with investment from central government and the National Wealth Fund, with its second phase including £314m.
Recipients of cash are required to create new apprenticeships, commit to certain employment standards, include local suppliers, and build to high environmental standards. At the time, Andy Haldane, president of the British Chambers of Commerce, who Burnham is reportedly consulting as an economic adviser, described it as an innovative “new piece of financial plumbing” that could help to “crowd in” investment.
“On utilities, we will ensure all parts of the UK are able to take greater public control of essential services […] learning from the model that has transformed our bus networks here in Greater Manchester”
While Burnham has indicated that he would like to see Thames Water nationalised, he has stopped short of advocating widespread utilities nationalisation. His allusion to Manchester’s bus networks refers to the franchising model which he introduced to a previously deregulated sector.
Services in the city were rebranded as the Bee Network, with GMCA determining routes, timetables and fares, while private companies operate the buses under contract. Revenue goes to the public body rather than the operators, so the state bears the risk but has greater control. This, it seems, is the model Burnham would like to extend to water, housing and energy.
“Adopting a national Housing First philosophy as has been pioneered so successfully in Finland”
Introduced nationally in Finland in 2008, Housing First is based on the principle that people experiencing homelessness should be given a permanent home immediately, rather than having to prove they are “housing ready” by addressing issues such as addiction or mental illness first. Widely regarded as a success, it has helped to cut long-term homelessness while reducing reliance on costly emergency services.
A shifting role for registered providers
What he said: “Working with local areas, No 10 North will oversee the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period. We will use public land, vacant public land to reduce costs […]
“We will answer the call from mayors […] for devolution of employment support and changing the way we support and sustain people in employment, working much more through our community and voluntary sector at a grassroots level. Working with organisations people trust to help them – rather than going to places they fear.”
What it could mean: It is often difficult to tell with Labour politicians whether “council housing” actually means council-built and council-run, or whether they are eliding the difference between such housing and that built and managed by housing associations.
In Burnham’s case, the impression is that he really does see the development and provision of housing as an important part of the state’s responsibility. There have been rumours of a shift of the Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) decisively towards social rent tenures, and Burnham has also said in the past that he would like to see local authorities represented on housing association boards.
The first of these would likely go down poorly in the sector if it meant disruption to the current rounds of funding, but a longer-term shift of responsibility for building homes to the public sector could be better tolerated. Housing associations have long carried the burden of building sub-market rent homes with little to no supplement from the public sector. That has been difficult to sustain.
The second of the above quotes pitches greater third-sector engagement as a way of helping people to stay in employment (and as a result to cut the benefit bill). Given their extensive engagement with often vulnerable tenants, perhaps Burnham might have housing associations in mind as one of those organisations that “people trust to help them”.
This could suggest an expectation on registered providers (RPs) to play an even more proactive and comprehensive social role in the lives of their tenants.
Though the pair of quotes come from different parts of the speech and ostensibly relate to different topics, taken together they seem to paint a picture of a different relationship between the state and the RP sector.
A more hands-on approach to public-private partnership
What he said: “The Greater Manchester way is based on strong partnerships between all sectors […] “When we realised the last Conservative government had done something significant by introducing 45-day work placements for young people linked to T Levels, we set ourselves the mission of finding one for every young person who wanted one.
“Over the course of last year, we rang round our businesses in the city region and, with the help of hundreds of companies, delivered our goal of a thousand extra work placements […] Those same principles need to be applied now to how we run the country.”
What it could mean: Businesses might also expect to have a different relationship with the public sector. Public-private partnerships have generally been associated with the right of the Labour Party, and have often taken the form of highly bureaucratic contractual arrangements for the provision of services on behalf of the national government.
Burnham seems to have something different in mind when he talks about partnership between sectors. The “convening” powers of combined authority mayors is sometimes mocked slightly – its invocation seen as highlighting how little actual powers the mayors have. But here Burnham seems to be stressing its effectiveness in utilising local connections and knowledge, in contrast to Whitehall-led approaches.
If power and money is set to flow down to combined authorities and councils, that will mean plenty more local civil servants hitting the phones looking for regional businesses keen to help achieve policy goals.
Specific new powers for London mayor to fund and build new homes
What he said: “More powers for London too, over education and housing, so that London can do more for itself and remain the world’s greatest capital city.”
What it could mean: Under the current devolution settlement, the capital is unusual in having control of its portion of spending on the Social and Affordable Homes Programme – worth £11.7bn. One wonders, therefore, what extra housing powers Burnham has in mind for the capital.
There are plenty of options here: greater borrowing powers for City Hall, more freedom to retain and use property-related taxes or stronger compulsory purchasing powers. There have been few reports of such plans but, with a general focus on rebalancing investment to other parts of the country, Burnham may be keen to give affluent London some powers to chart its own course.
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