Andy Burnham’s devolution delusions

This week, Andy Burnham set out plans for “the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall in modern times”, promising to hand regional mayors billions of pounds and control over a raft of policy areas.

I’m no great fan of Whitehall. But local doesn’t always mean better. 

Mayors like Burnham and Boris Johnson before him succeed as salesmen for their regions. They schmoozed investors, created cultural capital, and gave their people a voice in the national debate. When mayors become administrators, it’s a different story. 

Although he sorted out the buses (you’d be forgiven for thinking the “Bee Network” had taken humanity to Mars such is the media furore), Burnham’s record elsewhere is, at best, mixed. Manchester’s cycle hire network had to be scaled back after a spate of vandalism left all but 200 of the scheme’s 1,000 bikes off the road. 

Over 1,300 signs and almost 500 ANPR cameras were installed to police a clean air zone, only for Burnham to abandon the idea after protests against exorbitant charges. The cost of the scheme? Over £100 million. The revenue raised? £0.

Then there’s the small matter of Greater Manchester Police. In 2020, it fell into special measures on Burnham’s watch, having failed to record 80,000 crimes over the course of a year. Local MPs and councillors called for his resignation, but Burnham threw GMP’s Chief Constable Ian Hopkins under the bus and sought to absolve himself of any responsibility.

These failings haven’t tarnished his image as one of Britain’s better mayors. Take a look around the country and you’ll see why: the bar has been set incredibly low.

Bristol’s first elected mayor, George Ferguson, provides a cautionary tale. In 2015, he established Bristol Energy to supply local households and businesses with an “environmentally conscious energy supply”. A project that should have been a non-starter lasted only five years, yet cost taxpayers at least £39.7 million and racked up nearly £50 million in losses. Local anger was so great that Bristolians voted to abolish their directly elected mayor in 2022. 

Boris Johnson splurged £43 million on a “Garden Bridge” that never got off the ground. Sadiq Khan has consistently missed his own housebuilding targets. The expansion of the West Midlands metro has been beset by long delays. Even the much-feted Ben Houchen has faced criticism for his handling of the Teesworks development. 

It’s fanciful to think the results will be any different if Mayors control social housing, welfare, education or taxation as per Burnham’s blueprint. The problem is not necessarily mayors themselves, but the quality of administrators around them. 

Every time I talk to an ex-civil service colleague who’s moved into local government, I hear the same thing: “Come to a council, we do even less work.” When this sort of attitude is prevalent, it’s no wonder Mayors’ pie-in-the-sky ideas are indulged and basic administrative competence is lacking. 

Even more frightening are Burnham’s proposals to devolve more powers to local authorities

No amount of devolution will alter this fact. If the country’s brightest and best don’t want to work on Whitehall, with all the power it holds, they won’t be queuing up for jobs with the Mayor of South Yorkshire.

Even more frightening are Burnham’s proposals to devolve more powers to local authorities. We cannot forget that town halls, not Whitehall, were primarily responsible for covering up one of the gravest failings the British state has seen — the grooming gangs scandal. Across Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and Oldham, whistleblowers were silenced, victims were blamed, and unimaginable abuse went unpunished for decades in the name of community cohesion.

Sectarianism has hung over our politics like the sword of Damocles for years. Burnham’s plans would cut the thread and bring it crashing down. An Islamist politician, akin to Birmingham’s Akhmed Yakoob, could take control of a local authority and prioritise certain ethnic or national groups for welfare or social housing. A depleted Whitehall would be powerless to prevent them from reshaping the education and taxation systems in a religious mould. 

Yakoob received nearly 70,000 votes in the 2024 West Midlands mayoral contest. And despite making stomach-turning jokes about domestic violence, he gave Shabana Mahmood an almighty scare in Birmingham Ladywood a couple of months later. These are the kinds of men — and they will all be men — that Burnham wants to empower. 

At precisely the moment our country needs to be united around shared values and a common identity, his plans will pull us further apart. As we’ve seen in Scotland and Wales, once they’ve been given ground, local leaders will ask for more and Westminster will capitulate. 

The pandemic showed how divisive this politics of place can become. I spent lockdown in the border county of Herefordshire, where Welsh and English identities have coalesced for centuries. Nonetheless, stirred by their government’s nationalist rhetoric, Welsh communities turned against their neighbours with remarkable intensity.

A footpath that traversed the border was blocked with stones, branches and a sign that read, “KEEP ENGLISH COVID OUT OF WALES”. Different rules and regulations — driven by Cardiff’s pathological need to outdo Westminster — made it nigh on impossible to cross the border to shop or see friends. Although lockdowns are long gone, this sense of separateness has remained. 

Regrettably, this kind of politics mythologises local leaders

This latest incarnation of Burnham was also born out of the pandemic, where he cast every disagreement with Whitehall as a betrayal of the North. For all he talks about change, optimism and hope, his politics are rooted in division. 

Regrettably, this kind of politics mythologises local leaders. But our next Prime Minister is naive to think he can emerge from it as a popular national leader. No matter how many powers they possess, regional politicians will blame Westminster for their own failings and enough of their people will believe them.

Burnham would do well to remember the prophet Hosea’s warning: “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”