Andy Burnham ended his first week as Prime Minister working from a new base in Manchester city centre. The operation, known as "No 10 North", is located at Heron House and will host up to 300 civil servants by the end of next year, Downing Street said. BBC News

Burnham said No 10 North would serve as the "situation room for making Britain better" and is expected to work from the base each week, the BBC reported. The UK government separately said the base was "open for business", using the same phrase. Two senior cabinet members — Education Secretary Lucy Powell and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Louise Haigh — are also expected to work from Manchester regularly.

Downing Street said the arrangement will cost taxpayers no additional money. Burnham's spokesman told reporters that running costs will be absorbed by existing Cabinet Office budgets.

The Manchester base completes a rapid changeover. Burnham served as Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 until 2026. Keir Starmer resigned on the Monday of Burnham's first week as Prime Minister, Sky News reported. The Greater Manchester mayoral election to replace Burnham is scheduled for Thursday 30 July 2026, with polling stations open from 7am to 10pm. The vacancy was formally notified on 19 June; the deadline for proxy vote applications passed on 22 July.

Rough sleeping featured prominently in Burnham's first speech as Prime Minister, the BBC reported, with a pledge to end it. The commitment echoes his mayoral years. As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham pledged to eradicate rough sleeping by 2020. On his first day in office he launched the Mayor of Greater Manchester's Homelessness Fund, contributing 15% of his own salary. Within five weeks the fund had raised over £50,000 and attracted pledges from all 27 housing providers operating across Greater Manchester. It was set up as a Community Interest Company — a type of business that uses its profits for social good — with awards managed by a board of trustees led by the mayor, supported by Ivan Lewis MP, Councillor Beth Knowles, and people with lived experience of homelessness. The fund was announced at The Brick, a Wigan-based homelessness charity. A charity book of Tony Walsh's poem "This is the Place" was also produced to benefit both the Manchester emergency fund and the homelessness fund.

The BBC's Verify unit, in an analysis by Ben Chu and Tom Edgington, examined the cost of Burnham's first-week pledges under the headline "Andy Burnham's first week pledges — how much do they add up to?" The piece was published on 24 July.

Kemi Badenoch offered the sharpest opposition response. She said Burnham was "acting like he's still a mayor" and described his early promises as a "spending spree", the BBC reported on 23 July. The criticism targets both substance and style: a suggestion that mayoral instincts, honed in a devolved combined-authority context, are being transplanted to Whitehall without sufficient adjustment to the financial and constitutional limits of national government.

The charge has some structural logic. Combined-authority mayors — directly elected leaders who oversee transport, housing and economic policy across a group of councils — work within devolved budgets and powers that differ markedly from the Treasury-led machinery of UK government. Policies on homelessness, education and infrastructure that fell within mayoral competence in Greater Manchester may sit alongside reserved or differently funded responsibilities at Westminster. For officials working across the four nations, a relevant consideration is that Burnham's rough sleeping pledge, as a UK-wide commitment, will interact with devolved housing and homelessness policy in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where competence is held by Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament), the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament) and Stormont (the Northern Ireland Assembly) respectively.

The No 10 North operation adds a further layer. A working prime ministerial presence in Manchester, staffed by hundreds of civil servants and senior cabinet ministers, is an operational novelty without recent precedent. Whether existing Cabinet Office budgets can absorb the cost at scale, as the spokesman asserted, will be a line of scrutiny when departmental allocations are published. The choice of Heron House, a civic building in Manchester city centre rather than a Whitehall satellite, places the operation at a physical distance from the Treasury, HMRC and the bulk of the senior civil service. That distance may be the point. It may equally become the problem.

For now, Burnham is governing from two cities. The Greater Manchester mayoral contest on 30 July will determine who succeeds him in the role he held for nearly a decade. The result will be read, inevitably, as an early verdict on the party he led at local level even as he begins at national level.