Andy Burnham has promised action on the cost of living, with more detail expected on a "breathing space" for hard-pressed families to be set out the day after his speech. The Greater Manchester mayor also said he would explain how the measures would be paid for, according to the BBC.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, former head of the New Economics Foundation — a group that researches economic policy — has spent the weeks before the announcement working on cost-of-living options for Burnham. The NEF has pushed for bigger changes than central government has tried so far, including controls on how much landlords can charge in rent and free bus travel for under-25s. Whether Burnham takes up all of those ideas is not yet clear, but Fahnbulleh's involvement points to the direction he is heading.

A look at bus fares shows the gap between what the mayor wants and what the national government is doing. Greater Manchester has a £2 cap on bus fares, which Burnham controls because transport in his region is his responsibility — a system called devolution. The Labour government in Westminster, under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, has set a £3 cap for the rest of England. The £1 difference may sound small, but for someone who takes the bus every day, it adds up over a working week.

Burnham has said he will follow Reeves's fiscal rules, which are limits on how much the government can borrow and how much debt it can hold. That promise narrows what he can do. He has said taxes on income are too high and taxes on wealth are too low, the BBC reported. But the rules he has agreed to follow leave little room for the kind of wealth-tax measures those words suggest. The key question is whether his funding plan works within those rules or depends on powers a city-region mayor does not fully hold.

The broader context here is a mayor testing how far his local powers can stretch under a Labour government that controls the national budget. Burnham has promised a new economic model, leaving behind what he calls an era of "centralisation, privatisation, and de-industrialisation." That puts him as someone willing to challenge the Treasury's usual thinking from inside the Labour Party, not from outside it.

Burnham uses the issue of rough sleeping to send a message to Labour party members. The choice of topic is deliberate: rough sleeping is visible, can be counted, and matters to the party's activists. It also falls partly within what a city-region mayor can tackle through housing and homelessness funding, even though the deeper causes, such as welfare policy, are decided in Westminster.

For those who follow Labour politics closely, the situation is clear. Burnham is putting together a set of policies that draws on left-leaning think-tank ideas, casts himself as a champion of local solutions, and sticks to the Chancellor's spending rules. The tension between those three goals is where the risk lies. A cost-of-living plan that is too small will disappoint the members he is trying to win over. One that is too big will clash with the rules he has promised to keep. The detail expected after the speech will show which way that balance goes.

What makes this different from a usual opposition politician speaking out is that Burnham holds real power in Greater Manchester. He is not just criticising from the sidelines. The £2 bus fare cap is already in place, not just a promise. When he talks about a "breathing space" for families, he is building on things he has already delivered. Whether that track record can grow into the bigger economic model he is proposing is what the coming policy detail will need to answer.