The devolution revolution: why Manchesterism is Burnham’s strongest card

Andy Burnham condemned 40 years of neoliberalism, but some question whether he will deliver, given his commitment to Reeves’ fiscal rules and his expected appointments. Whatever one thinks of his broader programme, what is most likely to survive the inevitable pressures of governing – and where his record, his appointments and his political identity all point in the same direction – is devolution.

In his first major speech since winning Makerfield, delivered at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, Burnham described an economy that has not worked for ordinary people. He promised to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by devolving power away from Westminster towards the regions, mayors and local authorities, rewiring Britain through a “No 10 North” based in Manchester.

Why devolution is necessary

The UK is one of the most regionally unequal economies in the developed world. That did not happen by accident nor overnight. It has historical roots that go back to the political choices of the 1980s.

Though global deindustrialisation was happening across the Western world, Margaret Thatcher accelerated that transition in a regionally unequal and politically brutal way. She neglected the state’s role in managing it, refused to cushion the communities affected, and made explicit political choices about where the replacement economy would be built.

1.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost between 1979 and 1983 – a collapse concentrated almost entirely in the industrial heartlands of the North, Midlands, Scotland and Wales. In those communities, the effect was not a gradual economic adjustment, but the sudden removal of the reason the place existed.

The replacement economy was spread unequally. Despite more help being needed, regional policy spending fell from an average of £1.8bn per year in the 1970s to £242m by the latter half of the 1980s. The 1986 Big Bang, meanwhile, deregulated the financial services sector and opened London up as a global financial centre, producing a boom concentrated almost entirely in London and the South East.

The cumulative effect was a geography of inequality that has proved remarkably persistent. Research has shown most places struggling with low wages and employment rates 20 years ago are still struggling today.

In places where mainstream politics has failed to repair the damage of deindustrialisation, Reform has been able to present itself as an outlet for accumulated grievance. The May 2026 local election results showed the pattern: Reform won heavily in Hartlepool, Chorley, Tameside and Newcastle-under-Lyme, while London and larger cities resisted. That maps almost exactly onto the communities that bore the sharpest costs of the transition from industrial to financial capitalism and received the least in return.

A short history of devolution

Successive governments have recognised the problem of regional inequality, but pulled back from solving it.

Blair began the devolution project with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, Northern Irish Assembly and the London mayoralty, but left England largely untouched. The result was a settlement that still relied heavily on Whitehall to correct England’s regional imbalances through robust national policy rather than through powerful regional institutions, which Whitehall ultimately failed to do.

Cameron and Osborne deserve credit for giving the mayoral combined authority model its decisive push. Without Osborne, there would be no Greater Manchester mayoralty, so no third act for Burnham. Their government, however, simultaneously cut funding to local governments.

By 2019, core government funding to councils had fallen by more than £15 billion since 2010, so what was presented as devolution often became the delegation of austerity: councils were handed responsibility for managing decline while Whitehall retained control over the fiscal choices that produced it.

Johnson’s levelling up agenda promised in a 300-page White Paper – the biggest rebalancing of the British economy in a generation. In practice, ‘Levelling Up’ centered around a fragmented landscape of short-term, competitive funding pots that councils had to bid for, described as a “begging bowl” model that inhibited local growth, instead of devolving fiscal powers.

Johnson’s government also struggled to administer the funding properly. In 2024, the Public Accounts Committee reported that councils had spent only £1.24bn of the promised £10.47bn, with delivery of the funds delayed by Whitehall process. ‘Levelling Up’ was then constantly levelled down: from a promise of national renewal to a queue of delayed funding pots. It became shorthand for the lip-service that Whitehall pays to the principle of regional equality before proceeding to ignore it.

The pattern across all three governments is the same: recognition of the problem followed by institutional timidity and a return to the centralising default.

How devolution is a solution

Greater Manchester under Burnham has been the closest thing England has produced to a proof of concept.

Devolved health and social care meant the ability to join things up: mental health support, employment advice and debt counselling offered together at neighbourhood level because the same institution was responsible for all of them. A Whitehall department, siloed by function and accountable upward to ministers rather than outward to communities, cannot do that.

The results are measurable. Greater Manchester recorded the fastest recent growth and the sharpest increase in labour productivity of any major English metropolitan area between 2015 and 2023.

The Bee Network runs buses a third cheaper per kilometre than their privatised predecessors.

A Health Foundation study found measurable improvements in life expectancy and wellbeing since health and social care devolution in 2016.

New IFS research confirms that the only urban areas outside London where investment risk pricing has begun to converge toward London levels are Greater Manchester and the West Midlands – the two largest mayoral combined authorities with the greatest devolved powers.

Devolution also matters because it is how the most progressive policy experimentation has happened. Scotland’s baby box, which gives every newborn a package of essential items, represents policy innovation that emerged from devolved government. In his Manchester speech, Burnham announced his intention to take Greater Manchester’s Housing First model, which provides permanent housing and wraparound support to rough sleepers without requiring sobriety as a precondition, and expand it nationally. That policy was designed at regional level to fit local conditions.

The fact that it is now considered ready to scale is exactly how devolution is supposed to work: regions as laboratories, proving what is possible before the rest of the country follows.

Why Burnham could do it, and time will tell

Burnham will enter Downing Street as a proven beneficiary of devolution, with nine years of hands-on experience building devolved institutions that actually work. He witnessed the Treasury’s centralising instincts as a minister in 2007, when regional rail investment for the north was blocked because it failed a Green Book test designed around London’s existing productivity levels.

With previous governments recognising regional inequality as a problem, but failing to tackle it, the test for Burnham is whether he is willing to genuinely transfer fiscal power, protect what he builds from being reversed, and change the relationship between Whitehall and the regions in ways that last. Good growth in every postcode is the right ambition, and No 10 North is a start, but it better not be the end.

Featured image via the Canary