Andy Burnham finished his first week as Prime Minister working from a new base in Manchester. It is called "No 10 North" and is based at Heron House in the city centre. Downing Street said up to 300 civil servants will work there by the end of next year. BBC News

Burnham said No 10 North would be the "situation room for making Britain better", the BBC reported. He is expected to work there each week. The government also said the base was "open for business". Two senior ministers — Education Secretary Lucy Powell and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Louise Haigh — are expected to work from Manchester too.

Downing Street said the arrangement will not cost taxpayers extra money. Burnham's spokesman said running costs will come out of existing government budgets.

The Manchester base marks a quick changeover. Burnham was Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 until 2026. Keir Starmer resigned on the Monday of Burnham's first week, Sky News reported. The election to replace Burnham as mayor is set for Thursday 30 July 2026, with polling stations open from 7am to 10pm. The vacancy was formally announced on 19 June. The deadline for proxy vote applications, where someone votes on your behalf, passed on 22 July.

Rough sleeping — meaning people sleeping on the streets — featured heavily in Burnham's first speech as Prime Minister, the BBC reported. He pledged to end it. This echoes his time as mayor. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020. On his first day in office he set up a homelessness fund and gave 15% of his own salary to it. Within five weeks it had raised over £50,000. All 27 housing providers in Greater Manchester pledged support. The fund was run as a Community Interest Company, which is a business that uses its profits to help the community. Awards were managed by a board led by the mayor, with support from Ivan Lewis MP, Councillor Beth Knowles, and people who had experienced homelessness themselves. The fund was launched at The Brick, a homelessness charity in Wigan. A charity book of Tony Walsh's poem "This is the Place" was also produced to raise money for both the Manchester emergency fund and the homelessness fund.

The BBC's Verify team, which checks the facts behind the news, looked at how much Burnham's first-week pledges would cost. The analysis, by Ben Chu and Tom Edgington, was published on 24 July under the headline "Andy Burnham's first week pledges — how much do they add up to?"

Kemi Badenoch, the opposition leader, gave the strongest critical response. She said Burnham was "acting like he's still a mayor" and called his early promises a "spending spree", the BBC reported on 23 July. Her criticism is about both what Burnham is doing and how he is doing it. The suggestion is that his instincts as a local mayor do not fit the rules and limits of running the whole country.

There is some logic to that argument. As mayor, Burnham had powers and budgets for Greater Manchester that are different from those at national level. Policies on homelessness, education and transport that he could pursue as mayor may not work the same way under the UK government, which is run from Whitehall in London and controlled by the Treasury. There is also a four-nations issue. Burnham's pledge to end rough sleeping is a UK-wide promise, but housing and homelessness are handled separately in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That means Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament), the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament) and Stormont (the Northern Ireland Assembly) each have their own policies in this area.

The No 10 North base raises further questions. A prime minister working regularly from Manchester, with hundreds of civil servants and senior ministers, is something new. Whether existing budgets can cover the cost, as the spokesman said, will be checked when departmental spending details are published. Heron House is in Manchester city centre, far from the Treasury, HMRC (the tax authority) and most senior civil servants in London. That distance may be the point. It may also become a problem.

For now, Burnham is running the country from two cities. The Greater Manchester mayoral election on 30 July will decide who replaces him in the job he held for nearly ten years. The result will be read as an early sign of how his party is doing locally, even as he starts nationally.