Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and candidate in the Labour leadership race, has set out plans to give regional mayors across England much more authority over their areas. He framed this shift in a speech on 29 June as a way to unlock economic growth.

Burnham has been mayor since 2017 and already controls significant powers over transport, housing, and parts of the NHS in Greater Manchester. His ten-year plan would extend that model across England, transferring more decisions and budgets from Westminster to the mayors elected in each region. Though he used language about "every nation and region," the actual proposals focused on English governance — a reminder that devolution (the transfer of power from central to local government) in England works quite differently from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, which have their own fully-fledged parliaments and governments: Holyrood in Edinburgh, the Senedd in Cardiff, and Stormont in Belfast.

BBC News reported that Burnham outlined plans to extend mayoral powers across English regions. This is a natural continuation of the work he has already done in Greater Manchester.

The timing and audience for this speech matter. A Labour leadership race is now formally under way, and any serious policy pitch at this stage is aimed at several groups at once: the journalists and MPs watching the contest, and the party members and union affiliates who will eventually vote on the next leader. By choosing devolution as his first big campaign theme, Burnham is positioning himself in a line stretching back to Labour's creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly in 1999, and beyond.

Burnham is also clearly reaching beyond the metropolitan left that elected him twice as mayor. David Miliband — a former Foreign Secretary and influential voice among moderate Labour figures — said on 26 June that Burnham shows "openness and energy" he finds "attractive and positive." This is a signal Westminster correspondents read carefully. It suggests Burnham is building a broader coalition of support.

What Burnham's speech does accomplish is positioning himself as the candidate with hands-on experience of making devolution work. He has spent the past decade making the case for stronger regional government from an office, not from the backbenches. His argument, essentially, is that what he has built in Greater Manchester should be expanded across the country. Whether Labour members and unions find that case persuasive against other candidates' pitches is what the coming months will show.

The harder obstacles sit below the surface. The thorniest question in English devolution is always money. Right now, mayors like Burnham control budgets that have been handed down from London — they spend money that comes from central government. The real test would be whether they gain the power to raise their own money through borrowing or taxes. The Treasury has historically resisted devolving that kind of fiscal control, and any prime minister would face the same barrier.

There is also a fundamental difference between how devolution works in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — which were created by Acts of Parliament and have permanent institutions — and how it works in England. English devolution has so far relied on individual deals negotiated between Westminster and particular regions, approved by secondary legislation (a lower level of law), and dependent on central government agreement for each new power transfer. Whether Burnham's language about "every nation and region" hints at a more federal system for the whole UK, or is mainly about English regions, remains unclear.

The broader question is whether voters and party members will see this as the practical, proven answer to regional inequality that Burnham is presenting, or as something less immediate when a Labour government faces more pressing demands on its time and the Treasury's money.