Westminster is not Manchester

Westminster is obsessed with everyman Andy Burnham as the heir apparent to Downing Street. He has now pitched himself as the anti-Thatcherite candidate — a proper Northerner who has managed to lead plucky Manchester to prosperity with interventionist economics. Just one of those claims withstands scrutiny: he really is from the North.

His successes stand in stark contrast to the image he now projects ­­­­­­­ —­­ and rest on conditions that simply won’t exist in Westminster.

When Burnham left Parliament in 2017, he became Mayor of the largest city-region economy outside of London, generating some £58bn a year. This growth was the result of a decades-long project led by Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein, who focussed relentlessly on encouraging private and public investment.

What is usually overlooked is the pliable political environment that he inherited in Manchester. Until the 2026 local elections, Labour led nine of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs and held 87 of the 96 on Manchester City Council, a political dominance that would have made the old Soviet Politburo blush.

The Combined Authority, which must approve his major spending, comprises the Mayor and the ten Borough Leaders, meaning his agenda has faced little in the way of political friction. Leading a fractious and fragmenting Labour party in Westminster, seemingly opposed to any controversial reforms — will be a world away from his enviable position in Manchester.

His reform agenda is clearly popular with Mancunians — as evidenced by his landslide in 2024. It is far easier for any politician to enact a programme in a political silo. The sole exception to the Labour bloc, Liberal Democrat-led Stockport, tellingly sits outside of Greater Manchester’s joint spatial plan, Places for Everyone — having voted to withdraw over Green Belt developments.

Burnham has recently been styling himself as an anti-Thatcherite, but in his leadership of Manchester he proved to be surprisingly comfortable with private business. His combined authority has lent around £800m through its housing investment fund to help finance the towers that now define Manchester’s skyline – much of it to a single developer. This arrangement has drawn legal challenges and questions over the lack of affordable housing in some of the flagship, taxpayer-backed schemes.

Where Sadiq Khan has obliged developers in London to fund affordable homes and infrastructure, Manchester waived much of it: with minimal developer contributions, public loans and a liberal planning regime. Not many would describe this as traditional municipal socialism.

The gap between the Dubai-esque centre of Manchester and the surrounding boroughs is sobering. For all the gleaming towers, half of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs rank among the thirty most deprived places in England; Manchester itself is judged the second-most destitute local authority in the country by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The voting public gave their verdict in May: Labour was routed by Reform across the deprived outer boroughs. In Wigan Labour lost every one of the twenty-two seats it was defending, while in Tameside, the party lost its majority for the first time in forty-seven years. Meanwhile in the booming city core, it lost two dozen seats to the Greens. Perhaps Burnham recognises the winds of change in Manchester itself; don’t be surprised if Reform wins the vacant mayoralty if he is successful in Makerfield.

Burnham’s centrepiece on the campaign trail has been his programme of transport investment and integration in Manchester — the Bee Network. The integrated, contactless, capped-fare “London-style” system was delivered under a transport commissioner, Vernon Everitt. He was recruited directly from Transport for London, where he had spent fifteen years and been tipped to run the network. The project is undoubtedly successful and popular, but it would be wrong to say it is Burnham’s original creation.

Moreover, there has been scant appraisal of how the programme has been funded. The capital backing was the £1.07bn City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement — the largest awarded to any English city region — of which £438m was earmarked for the famous yellow buses. This was Treasury money, signed off in April 2022 by Grant Shapps, the Conservative Transport Secretary, addressed personally to “Dear Andy”.

The yellow paintjob that launched the scheme cost over half a million pounds for fewer than a hundred buses. A minority of the fleet is genuinely new; the rest are newer operator vehicles and existing buses repainted. Burnham’s relationship with industry paid more dividends as Manchester Airport hosted hundreds of the new buses free of charge, ahead of the rollout.

Burnham’s record as Mayor was underwritten by a set of conditions that won’t be waiting for him in Number 10

None of this is to suggest that the long-term turn-around in Manchester is somehow fraudulent. Having lived there for five years, I can attest it is a genuinely thriving city, with a growing service-based economy, further transport infrastructure investment on the horizon and a top-class international airport.

But Burnham’s record as Mayor was underwritten by a set of conditions that won’t be waiting for him in Number 10. Perhaps he would do better to bring Westminster the pragmatism that actually built modern Manchester — rather than refighting a war with Thatcher that ended nearly forty years ago.