Andy Burnham Backs a Ten-Year Plan to Give Local Leaders More Power
Andy Burnham Backs a Ten-Year Plan to Give Local Leaders More Power
Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, has set out a ten-year plan to hand more power to elected mayors across England. He's framing this as the way to restart growth and opportunity.
Burnham gave the speech on 29 June, as part of his campaign to become Labour leader. In it, he promised to drive economic expansion "across every nation and region of the UK." That phrasing matters: it signals that he's thinking about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too, not just England. But the actual detail of what he's proposing focuses on English regions — giving more authority to the metro mayors (the elected leaders of city areas like Greater Manchester, West Midlands and the West Yorkshire combined authority).
BBC News reported that Burnham laid out plans to extend mayoral powers. It's a natural follow-on from what he's already been doing in Greater Manchester since 2017: gaining control over transport, housing, and health and care services. The speech is his first major pitch to voters and party members beyond his own city region. It's a signal of what he wants to focus on if he becomes prime minister.
The timing is deliberate. A Labour leadership race is now formally under way. That means party members, MPs and trade unions will all be weighing up the candidates. When a frontrunner announces a new policy, the whole Westminster machine pays attention. Burnham's choice of devolution — giving power to local areas — fits with a long tradition in Labour politics. It echoes the creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly in 1999, and Gordon Brown's attempt to push devolution in English regions too.
David Miliband, a former foreign secretary and respected figure in the Labour centrist wing, said on 26 June that Burnham has "this openness and energy that I think is very attractive and positive." He didn't formally endorse him, but praise from someone of Miliband's standing sends a signal. It suggests Burnham could appeal beyond the party left.
There are real complications lurking beneath the headline. The biggest is money: whether mayors would actually gain control over new sources of tax revenue, or just be given new responsibilities to spend money the Treasury sends them. The Treasury has historically been reluctant to hand over real revenue-raising powers to local leaders. That resistance would face any prime minister who tried to change it. Burnham's ten-year timeframe gives him room to avoid specifying exactly how he'd overcome that obstacle.
There's also a constitutional question worth understanding. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments or assemblies — Holyrood, the Senedd, and Stormont respectively — set up by primary legislation (that is, laws passed specifically to create them). English devolution through mayors is different. It's created case-by-case, through agreements with central government, and depends on Westminster agreeing each time you want to transfer a new power. Whether Burnham's language about "every nation and region" suggests he'd eventually create a more genuinely federal system — where each part of the UK had roughly equal say and powers — or whether it's mainly symbolic, isn't yet clear from what he's said.
What the speech does do is position him as the candidate with the most practical experience of making devolution work. He's spent eight years arguing for it from the mayor's office, not from the backbenches. His message is straightforward: the experiment works, and it should be rolled out nationally. Whether Labour members and trade unionists find that convincing will become clear over the coming months.
