Andy Burnham has been the Mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017. Previously, he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2007 to 2008, Culture Secretary from 2008 to 2009 and Health Secretary from 2009 to 2010.
This interview was conducted on 28 April 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
My role in Parliament was as a member of Parliament for what people would now call a Red Wall constituency, Leigh, a former mining area. I was the MP there for 16 years. Prior to that, I had been an adviser in the Labour government in the first term. In the middle part of the Labour government, I became a Minister – a junior minister at the Home Office and Health before becoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary, and then Health Secretary; and then in the opposition years a Shadow Cabinet member with Ed Balls and others. Eventually, I decided to come at regional policy from a different angle and put myself forward for the role of Mayor of Greater Manchester. In all of the ministerial jobs I had, I did often speak to the theme of regional inequality, it probably was the defining theme for me throughout my 16 years in Parliament, working on things like Hillsborough as well, which was a regional injustice, if you like; and the feeling that some places are heard more than others in the UK system. Then obviously, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, pursuing the same theme from a different angle.
Q: Can you tell us how, over those 16 years, your views shifted or developed on the regional question?
It was that feeling of regional unfairness that brought me into Parliament in in the first place. I’d grown up in the North West of England in the 1980s, went to Cambridge and had a feeling of: ‘Hang on a minute, this country feels like it’s a bit different, there’s one world over here, and another very different one back at home.’ And that was my political formative years. So I went into Parliament as the Member of Parliament for Leigh, the place where I grew up and was on that theme straight away, hence my maiden speech. One thing sticks in my mind: I pointed out in my maiden speech that Leigh was the largest town in England without a railway station, and I had a feeling that because I was saying that in Parliament, I was going to get a call from a Department for Transport civil servant the next day to say, ‘Well, and where exactly would you like this new train station, Mr Burnham?’ It took me a while to realise that I was basically talking into the abyss, and there was a reason why Leigh wasn’t getting its train station. I guess it goes to the way in which public funds have been allocated over many decades in the UK. That is, in effect, the Treasury Green Book, where more is given to the areas that often have most.
The business case for critical infrastructure in the less affluent parts of the country never stacks up. There’s a reason why Leigh never gets its train station. I can put this in a very direct context for you, from my time as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Gordon Brown appointed me in 2007. It was the time of the Comprehensive Spending Review and a specific job I was given by the Chancellor was to stack up the funding case for Crossrail. I was quite open to doing that because it was certainly never my mission to deny London – I’m proud of the capital city, wanted to see it improved. This was pre- the London 2012 Olympics. We did come up with plan: about a third of the money coming from the taxation, from the Treasury, but then a third from London business and a third from council taxpayers. It was a big deal, and we pulled together a funding package that held and delivered the project. At the time I said to Treasury civil servants, ‘Well, I’m not going to announce a big project in London without other railway lines up here, and the other, so could you give me a list of regional projects that we can announce as part of the spending review?’ Nothing ever came back – and I kept asking and asking and asking, and in the end, I said, ‘Why am I not getting anything here?’ And it was basically then where the penny dropped that nothing in the regions was meeting the Green Book tests as they were set out. Consequently, the country was hardwired, if you like, to give more to the areas that already had most. The only thing I announced alongside Crossrail was a feasibility study into the rebuilding of Birmingham New Street. That in the end, did come to fruition as well, but it was a big moment of learning for me in my time in Parliament that there’s a reason why we have an unequal country across the regions. It’s because policy had been supporting that.
Q: What was your experience of the North West Regional Development Agency [RDA]?
There were positives, you could certainly have a conversation with them about strategic issues and moving issues forward that mattered. The one I remember most was Metrolink: it wasn’t so much benefitting my constituency, but Alistair Darling as Transport Secretary had said the Metrolink to Oldham and Rochdale couldn’t go ahead. As Greater Manchester MPs we worked as one to get that decision changed. That sticks in my mind very definitely because we got a political decision out of Alistair when the system had said ‘No’, you know, the computer had said ‘No’. It’s very rare that the North of England gets itself organised to get that type of political decision on a regionally strategic project.
Another one was when I was Minister of State at the Department of Health. The first academic health research centres were being announced, they were a big theme for Gordon as Chancellor and David Sainsbury who was advising him as Science Minister at the time. I was to announce five of these centres. And lo and behold, when I was given the list, they were following the edges of the Golden Triangle: there were three in London, Oxford and Cambridge. I said to the Civil Servant who presented this to me, that I couldn’t accept that, and there needed to be one in Manchester or Leeds. It kicked off World War Three within the Department of Health because I was asking for the impossible – Manchester could never have a world class research base was what I was told. I remember some of those things vividly. There was a mixture of policy bias and almost an emotional bias as well, amongst some of the officials. All of that experience built the impression to me that the system just doesn’t believe that there can be a more levelled-up country or a more balanced country. They stopped believing that was possible, I think sometime in the 1970s.
Q: Whitehall is often presented as this homogenous blob with a single view. Does that resonate with your experience?
I don’t want to sound as though I have a downer on the civil servants I worked with. Many are fantastic people, within all of the different departments – and the departments do vary markedly I would say. The Treasury always, was forward-thinking about productivity and growth, but quite hard to move in terms of the specifics, given the parameters. I do come back to that point, I think there are certain things about the allocation of funding across the regions, the Green Book, the Barnett formula. These are difficult things, but they are basically trapping spending in a certain way. There’d been a distrust of local government from the 1980s onwards that was carried over into the Labour Party and the Labour years. I think that had led to a downgraded local government base, which I think undermined capacity. There were many great people, I would say it was more structural rather than on an individual bias. Joel Barnett came to me as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, asking me to scrap the Barnett formula. He said he was ashamed that it was connected with his name. Now for any politician to go to a Cabinet Minister and say, ‘Scrap this thing that has my name attached to it’, is a very rare thing for anyone to do. It’s sensitive in the context of the politics of the UK. The revaluation of the council tax base hasn’t happened, the Green Book with regard to capital spending for big strategic projects, the Barnett formula: there are some fundamentals here in the system that aren’t favourable to the parts of the country that were deindustrialised in the 1980s. Parts of England, mainly.
Q: The Labour government had a big focus on delivery and delivery was quite centrally driven. As Secretary of State, was there quite a lot of pressure on you to keep a tight grip?
That’s a really profound point. Obviously everybody was focused on the here-and-now. I think that’s probably a product of a Labour government. You were worried always that the papers would come after us and things would be seen to be going the wrong way on crime, or the wrong way on health. Wrong way on schools. I think that did start to inhibit long-term thinking for the country in the middle Labour government years. We still had a mandate where we should have been putting forward a bigger vision, we just needed to show we could be trusted on running services. Maybe we didn’t put that expansive vision out, that we had when we came in, and the middle term, the second term, had become a bit of a routine, mind the shop. It’s a bit unfair, but it’d become a bit more like that. I think we had good instincts. I think the RDAs were a step forward, certainly not perfect, but they were something. But when John Prescott’s vote went down in the North East, that really chilled regional policy – in the middle term of the Labour government – and it never did find its feet. Don’t get me wrong, there were very important things done: the substantial relocation of the BBC to Salford was a big act of Levelling Up, and is still benefiting us massively from that perspective today. But they were individual acts of Levelling Up, not a strategic approach to it. I don’t think, if I’m honest, that we had enough of a focus on the former industrial areas and how significant their needs were. We talked about it quite a bit. We had things like the Coalfield Regeneration Trust. But it was small beer, it wasn’t the significant structural change that was needed to bring in innovation, higher-value employment, to some of those places that had lost the mines and manufacturing and other things.
Q: Probing a bit more into the North East referendum, the RDAs never had an underpinning local accountability. Was economic devolution possible without political devolution? Is that what’s started to happen in the last 10 years in a way that didn’t happen before?
I think if the vote had been won in the North East, that would have started to rebalance things. The Mayor of London had come in for the first time. What I find in my mayoral role is that just the simple act of putting in place somebody or a group of people to speak and advocate and work for that area has an impact. It starts to lift things up. I think it’s a journey, devolution, it’s not a single act. You start with a more representative, incomplete role as we’ve got here. But you build the powers over time, you build a profile over time, and I think the levelling up comes with that. I do raise a precept here, so I have some small tax-raising ability and I’ve used it. Other mayors haven’t. But I have. I would say on this journey we’re on, more of that is where we need to go in the longer run. But it’s really important to recognise that devolution is a journey, not an event. I don’t know to what extent other contributors to your work have referenced Bob Kerslake’s work on the UK 2070 Commission. I would very much recommend it. It makes the big argument for where political power is vested and what that does in terms of economic growth and development. He makes the point that the UK is simultaneously one of the most politically centralised countries in the world, I think he says alongside Slovakia, in terms of the vesting of political power at the national level in the Westminster, Whitehall system. So it’s simultaneously politically centralised and regionally unbalanced. He said there is a correlation between those two things. Countries that are less politically centralised are more economically balanced, and I personally believe that is true. Germany would be the obvious example, I think there are others as well.
Q: Thinking internationally or historically, when you’re sat in your office in Manchester, where do you look to as exemplars for what you hope to build?
I would look at Germany – they have a model there of quite strong city and regional governments, even subregional governments. We’ve just signed a partnership, for instance, with the Ruhr – that’s Essen, Dusseldorf, other cities as well. There’s a North Rhine Westphalia region above that. They have quite a layered system of city, conurbation-led government, region and then national. I do think that that stands them in good stead. Let’s take the pandemic as a case study. If you look at countries where they did more of at a local regional level, for instance, testing and tracing would be one example or procurement of PPE etc., I would argue they probably handled the pandemic better than those which tried to run it all from the centre of government. When Steve Rotherham and I and others in the first wave of the English mayors in 2017 were invited by Michael Bloomberg to New York, as part of the Harvard City Leadership programme, It was quite something to be admitted to that club of mayors where US mayors have considerable power over what happens within their cities. I think if you think about it in the context of the 21st-century economy, where cities are going to be the drivers of change, I think they really are: when it comes to decarbonization, digitalisation, cities are going to be the first to bring on the new technology, to build the skills base, to bring on the talent. Countries that have established systems of city governance I think are set up for the 21st century. Those that are still inventing it are in a little bit of trouble on that front. I do look to the US, I do look to Germany. I think France is Paris-centric and it’s trying to correct that a bit, and it’s doing something similar to what we’re doing with more regional devolution. Those would be the examples I would point to.
Q: How did you think about different UK tiers – regions, sub-regions, cities, towns – when you were a minister?
I was very attached to the regional model when John Prescott promoted it. But I can now see why it didn’t fly, because it did just sound like a layer. You were creating a layer out from the top so I can see why people didn’t vote for it. Sitting where I am here now, Greater Manchester is an entity that people relate to, there’s an identity people relate to it. The public would say, ‘Yeah, we do want Greater Manchester to be able to do more for itself.’ I think this is working because the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is built from its building blocks, which are the councils. It’s quite a lean system and quite a symmetrical system. Unlike London, where the GLA isn’t the councils it’s an additional layer. So our model starts with where people are. It starts with the existing building blocks and it builds up. I think that’s a good thing. A good model. We’ve convened a voluntary organisation called the Convention of the North, which could overlay in a more statutory sense. We have Transport for the North, which is a statutory body. From these city region building blocks, you would think there’ll be more rural combined authorities in the end – or county deals. I think you can create super regional structures to bring it together on big stuff like transport.
Q: How do you ensure that Wigan or Leigh’s voices are properly heard within the Greater Manchester conversation?
This is really important for me coming from one of those towns. When I ran to be Mayor the argument against me was ‘Oh, he’ll be anti-Manchester’, which isn’t the case. I think the flawed premise is that you’ve got to choose town or city. We’ve got to get ourselves into thinking that it’s town and city, that both can rise together. That’s what a functional economy or a functional geography should be doing. The town isn’t the competitive employment centre anymore, because employment will increasingly go to clusters in the modern economy. So Media City here in Greater Manchester or the City of London in London. The town has got to change and become more residential, to be honest. I think you’ve got to reshape a region with spatial planning and with a strong connectivity linking town and city. I would argue we’re the first part of England that is starting to show that town and city can prosper together. I’ve established, again under Lord Kerslake, a Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation. Stockport here is, I would say, the first town to show that it can prosper alongside the strong city. So if you go back to the 1990s, it was considered crazy the idea of anybody living in Manchester city centre, people just couldn’t imagine that. But you look at Manchester the city today, it’s completely unrecognisable. Now the property costs in city centre Manchester are such that younger people in their 20s say, ‘Well, I can’t afford to live there, but I could just go a little bit outside where there’s good connectivity/’ Stockport, we argue, is our prime candidate that demonstrates that town and city can actually have their joint interests served by a model of regional development where the interests of both are bound up together.
Q: Do you face some scepticism within the Greater Manchester councils? How do you ensure that everybody has a voice and is being listened to?
Our ten authorities are the ten members of the combined authority. So you know, my Cabinet is the ten leaders, and each of the boroughs has its place at that table, and we’ve got to work at that. I am working with them on priorities. I say to the leaders, ‘What is your priority?’ For my last manifesto, I said to all the leaders, ‘If you had one big priority for your borough, what is it? So I can take it forward as part of our manifesto.’ Then there are big things that knit everybody together. So I’m bringing through what I keep calling a London style public transport system, it’s going under the banner, ‘The Bee Network’. I have brought in somebody from TfL to oversee this change, a transport system that knits together bus and tram in a single ‘tap in, tap out’ system where there’s capped fares that will benefit Wigan and Bolton possibly more than it will benefit city centre of Manchester, where there’s already better public transport.
Q: Would it be easier for you if there was more decisions being made at the combined authority, mayoral level? Is it a struggle having to always get everybody to agree?
On some things, but not on others. Richard Leese is fond of telling people that the only reason we have a Mayor of Greater Manchester is because he said he wouldn’t accept one unless Greater Manchester got the power to re-regulate the buses. That was effectively the deal that he did with George Osborne. They shook hands on that: Osborne wanted his mayor; Richard wanted re-regulation of buses. He was quite frequently in the position of reminding me that whenever I was getting, in his view, above myself, that I only had one role in life, which was to re-regulate buses, and I should shut up about everything else. That kind of united us all and no one disagrees, and everyone is on a mission with that. There are other issues. But our combined authority works, because, yes we debate things, and when we agree on a common direction of travel, the whole of the GM system then moves in that direction. There’s a power in that. I think we’ve got a degree of alignment in our public administration that you will not find anywhere else in England. In London the councils are not the GLA, whereas here the councils are the GMCA, and I think that brings a power with it. When you can agree, you really can all push in the same direction. I’m conscious that we need more ability to raise finance, more fiscal devolution. But that won’t be me. There will be a different Mayor of Greater Manchester who will be able to do all of that. I’ve got the embryonic sort of early stage of this, but I am absolutely determined that it won’t go down the pan like the regional assemblies. This thing has to be here to stay, for the good of the country.
Q: The government‘s approach has been voluntarist about which areas choose to go down this road and places like Burnley or Blackburn, which in economic terms are part of the Greater Manchester economy, are currently on the outside. They would have been part of the North West RDA umbrella and the RDA would have been brokering them in. Can you make this model work everywhere or is it Greater Manchester or West Yorkshire exceptionalism?
I think they still have to grow in a slightly iterative, evolutionary way, because if it doesn’t it will collapse. I think the answer is for everywhere to have a combined authority. That would include Lancashire. The logic for the combined authority, I think, is what you would call the functional economy. So Liverpool City region does have a functional economy that unites the six boroughs that are part of that. Greater Manchester does have a functional economy with the ten. I’m not saying people don’t come from outside of those boroughs to work here but that is the glue of the functional economy. Lancashire has a slightly different centre of gravity to us. So I would say, fix those combined authorities everywhere, and then those entities can collaborate. They can work as two together on a certain issue, or three together on a certain issue, or all together. That’s where I think this goes in the future. You’ve got a set of building blocks then that can scale up depending on the issue. If we chose to then create a North West body that would work for all of us on a certain thing, then we could do that. So I would see it that way. The geography of the UK is complex. Imposing structures from top down probably hasn’t worked. If we look back in the past, build up from the bottom to where people are and then empower those entities to collaborate where they need to. I think that could work for everyone.
Q: You don’t have any two-tier authorities. If you were dealing with a county or part of a county under you, as well as individual district councils, would that be much more complicated? Michael Heseltine told us the mistake was to duck the local government reorganisation in the early 1970s and that we ought to have city-region mets. Would that be more functional, because you do deal with quite a lot of complexity when it comes to spatial issues?
It is a complex machine to drive the one I’m in. But it’s fine-tuning all the time and I think we’re getting there. We did have the Greater Manchester Council, going back to the 80s, and there was a Greater London Council. There’s been a long, chequered history of all of this. I feel the thing that I’m doing now is working. I know there are different views about mayors and the mayoral model, but if you go around the world, mayors are very common and they are the currency of international discussion. They recognise mayors. English cities suffer for the lack of them. Ireland are about to have the first elected mayor in Limerick and I think it’s coming to Dublin. So it’s very much the direction of travel. I would argue that, in Scotland where the SNP have taken a decision to kind of take power up from local, there were police forces and they’ve created one police force, one fire service. I don’t think that’s a 21st-century move to be honest with you, I think that’s the idea of all social change coming top-down through legislation is a 20th-century notion. But the 21st century will be more bottom-up driven change, where empowered local entities collaborate with businesses, universities, civil society, and create powerful movements for change that come from the bottom-up. Obviously, the national government always holding the tiller and managing the finances, etc. That’s where I think it needs to go.
Q: Do you think it would be a forward step or a retrograde step for there to be the equivalent of a GLA tier, within Greater Manchester – would it give you more legitimacy?
Possibly. But I don’t think it’s needed. I think that we would be putting in layers that would struggle for legitimacy. I think what might be needed is a North West entity or a North of England entity, which the combined authorities could nominate to, as we have with Transport for the North. I think keep this evolutionary. It’s heading in the right direction. I’m really clear that this building block that we’ve got here is quite important. You mess with it at your peril. I think London needs to change more towards our model. I’m not saying that from an arrogant point of view. I just think if the GLA was the councils of London, and the Mayor, I think it would probably work more cohesively than it being set up in the way that it is.
Q: Manchester is at the vanguard of health and social care devolution. How is that playing out and where are the other areas where you would like to see a change in the national local dynamic – transport or universities or skills?
Post-pandemic, we have to change our thinking about health because what we saw in the pandemic, we kind of knew it before, is that there are many thousands of people who work in jobs where they can’t go home if they’re ill or go home to homes that are beneath the decent homes standard in the private rented sector. So communities here are not supporting health. We’ve been on a journey of integrating health and social care, but we would say that has to go much deeper. Local government and health have to almost come together and merge. Richard Leese is chairing our Integrated Care Board. I think we’re at a really important moment here where the health service has come back together from the institutional focus of our years in government. It’s operating more as a system and that system now needs to integrate more with local government. We need to start thinking much more about building health and homes in workplaces and communities. That’s where our thinking is going.
On the broader point, I’m about to enter a conversation with Michael Gove. They’ve offered us a fast-track negotiation with the West Midlands on deepening Greater Manchester’s devolution powers. Transport, more control over rail to add to our integrated trams and buses definitely, housing, more regulatory ability to intervene in that private rented sector where 40 percent of our homes are beneath a decent homes standard. But the one I’m going to pull out most, as your area of work is regional growth and productivity, is skills. It has to be skills. Because what we’ve had in this country is a national system that kind of works on the university route, because everyone is focused on that and has delivered clarity about, you know, GCSEs, A Levels, UCAS, University; but really does not work at all on the technical route, because the jobs differ from one part of the country to another. For the reasons we’ve all spoken about, they’re very different in one part of the country to another. I think the thing that UK PLC desperately needs now is post-16 skills devolution, so that we can work with our employers to build a talent pipeline into the places where there are real jobs in the Greater Manchester economy. The risk to our growth at the moment is that we can’t fuel that, we can’t feed the talent requirements of our digital and tech sector or our green economy. We are the fastest growing digital and tech hub in Europe at the moment, and I’m worried that at some point we’re going to falter because the skills system will not be feeding through young people with the right skills.
Q: What is it about the UK which has made it so hard to get post-16, technical, non-university education to be more locally and regionally shaped?
Germany is the gold standard on technical education, and that’s where we need to look. I do think it does go back to the Education department and some of the attitudes within there. There is a sense of ‘We know this better than anybody.’
Q: The Treasury or the Education Department?
The Department for Education are the hardest department to work with when it comes to devolution, they’re probably the least well-disposed Whitehall department to devolution from my experience of dealing with them. Many others are good, actually, DWP are really good. Transport are increasingly okay, but DfE is a tough nut to crack. The argument I’m going to be putting to the government, as part of our negotiation, is if you were doing it well, how could I come knocking and say ‘Well, we want it.’ But this country has never done technical education well, and there are two reasons: it’s always been treated as the poor relation, distinctly second class in the mindsets of many people in that department; and second, they don’t understand it. It has to be locally and regionally driven, because the demands of different places are different and you have to build locally. If you’re going to follow the logic of a local industrial strategy, which is what the Theresa May government put forward, and was right, in my view, it follows that you need a local skills strategy or plan to feed a local industrial strategy and that bit has never been followed through.
Q: Are you asking for schools as well?
In an ideal world I would ask for more influence over schools, over the curriculum. I think it’s a nonsense that ICT is so absent, when it comes to the English Baccalaureate. So I would want more influence. But I recognise I’m unlikely to get it. 0-4, we do have a lot of work going on in the school readiness space so we could do more there. I think one thing that we might get, and this is a more practical, pragmatic conclusion, we could potentially persuade Michael Gove that post-16 should be devolved. We need to unite FE and HE in creating clusters of excellence linked to the growth industries of Greater Manchester. To be honest, go back to the Tomlinson reform of our time in government, and create 14-to-19 pathways. That’s where my thinking is.
ENDS