Andy Burnham, the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, has had a very good year so far.
In May, he won his third successive term with 420,749 votes, almost two thirds of those available in the race. And now, for the first time in his mayoral career, the former MP for Leigh is working alongside a Labour Government in Westminster.
We meet in his red brick offices in central Manchester less than a week after Britain overwhelmingly voted to send Keir Starmer to Downing Street. Has he felt a vibe shift in the North of England since Labour’s victory?
“Oh, massively so,” he says beaming from ear to ear. “People feel lifted.”
Burnham, 54, looks elated, pauses and smiles. “We were in a dark tunnel and at times it was hard to see where things were going. Everything has felt a bit broken like we were going backwards. And now, all of a sudden, we’ve sprung out of that.”
Specifically, says Burnham, there is now a Government “taking quick decisions” and “empowering the Greater Manchester Authority to go for growth”.
He tells i that he wants a new rail line connecting Manchester to Liverpool, “change” on the Right to Buy policy and a Housing Revenue Account (HRA) which would give the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) income from housing as well as the ability to borrow to build its own housing.
“Housing is a risk to growth,” Burnham says. “If people can’t find places to rent they won’t move here because it’s too difficult to live.”
This, he says, would be a devastating “London effect” in Greater Manchester. “Nothing against London, but we don’t want people to be priced out of housing here.”
The mission in Greater Manchester – an area which spans Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan – is a simple but bold one: homes people can afford to live in, transport to get them around and jobs for them to go to.
It’s a vision that Burnham carries forward from his work with the previous Conservative government. In March 2023, he signed a landmark devolution deal worth millions with what was then the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). That deal has supported him in the creation of the Bee Network of trains and buses, a long-term funding settlement which included the right to hold onto 100 per cent of business rates, regeneration funding, money to support homeless households and devolved powers over local education.
One of Angela Rayner’s first moves as Housing Secretary was to remove the words “levelling up” from her department’s name and return it to its previous title: the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
Was he sad to see “levelling up” go given that he benefitted from it?
In short, no. “It’s a sensible move,” says Burnham, who served as chief secretary to the Treasury, culture secretary and health secretary in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet between 2007-10. He doesn’t “subscribe to putting slogans in the names of government departments” or, indeed, he adds pointedly “on government bills”.
This reference to the former government’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Act is as acerbic as Burnham can get while riding so high. “It’s like… you doth protest too much,” he continues. “You can’t claim you’re levelling up just because you’ve renamed a government department.”
Indeed, he adds that he became “very weary” of the way the phrase was “overused”. Particularly because he sees “true levelling up as strategic investment in big infrastructure which can change the potential size of [a region’s economy]… such a new railway line between Liverpool and Manchester.”
Greater Manchester was “promised this” Northern Powerhouse Rail by the previous government, says Burnham, but “not given it”.
“So, the fact that they then stuck the phrase ‘levelling up’ in the name of the government department almost rubbed our noses in it to be honest.
“We weren’t even in the room when big decisions like the cancellation of HS2 or the imposition of tier three on us during the pandemic were taken,” he says. “Hopefully, those days are gone for good.”
Labour has said they will not bring back HS2.
“This isn’t about going back to HS2. We accept that has gone,” Burnham told i. “What we do need though is an alternative to the existing West Coast Main Line, which is going to be at capacity within the next decade.”
“You can’t take away HS2 and have nothing in its place to solve that problem,” he adds.
There is already a commitment to a new Northern Powerhouse Rail line between Manchester and Liverpool but the Mayor says “we also need to fix the North-South element if we’re to have a truly modern railway network”.
It’s been a busy week. The day before we meet Burnham was in Westminster along with the other 12 regional mayors to meet with the new Prime Minister and his deputy, Ms Rayner, as part of their newly created Council of the Regions and Nations.
This is part of the uphill climb to revive Britain’s depressed economy that the UK’s new Labour Government has embarked upon. GDP may have grown by 0.4 per cent in May but the big picture is less positive: over the last 16 years (since the financial crash of 2008) to Q1 2024, GDP was up by just 4.3 per cent. Prior to that, it had grown by 46 per cent over the same period.
England’s growing army of elected mayors want desperately to be part of the solution. Can Burnham shed some light on what, exactly, that council will do? Will there be more power-sharing between Westminster and English regions?
“The important thing is that the Whitehall system has been given the clearest of instructions that devolution is the route to growth,” he says.
This is reflected in the latest productivity data which shows that productivity in the North West is rising faster than anywhere else in the country, including London.
However, in the past, Burnham says the fact that this growth is reliant on devolution is a message that “some parts of Whitehall haven’t always accepted… it was like shouting into the wilderness at times”.
Burnham, who launches his Good Landlord Charter across Greater Manchester this week, believes that the new Labour Government can bring about a “fundamental change” in the North West.
His charter sets out good practices and will also provide funding for landlords to retrofit their properties and improve accessibility for disabled people.
But he’d like to go even further. Before the election, he called for the Right to Buy policy, which allows council tenants to buy their homes at a discount on market value and contributed to an enormous loss of social housing stock, to be suspended.
This is not currently the Labour Government’s policy, although Rayner did tell i last autumn that she would keep it “under review” if elected.
Has Burnham brought up Right to Buy with his colleagues in Westminster?
“Our housing crisis get worse every year because we’re still losing homes for social rent through Right to Buy,” he says. “More than we’re building… we’ve got to change that.”
Reforming the Right to Buy isn’t the only policy where Burnham could find himself lobbying the Labour Government to go further than they currently are.
In 2023, he was one of three elected mayors who signed a letter calling for the power to bring in an urgent rent freeze – the others were his counterparts in London, Sadiq Khan, and Liverpool, Steve Rotheram.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has not ruled out giving local government the power to regulate rent inflation but it is not currently a Labour Government policy and, given that private rents are still rising faster than overall consumer inflation, the situation is becoming more urgent by the week.
Has Greater Manchester’s Mayor raised this?
He doesn’t believe “Greater Manchester can be everything I want it to be if we don’t free it from the grip of the housing crisis”.
Burnham, who has implemented a housing first approach in his patch (meaning that housing policy underpins everything else) wants a “strengthened” Renters’ Reform Bill in the first King’s Speech. “There does need to be reform, including to rents because rents are too high,” he adds. “There needs to be more democratic control over housing as a whole.”
One way to achieve this, says Burnham, would be for the Government to grant the GMCA its own Housing Revenue Account which would allow him to borrow to build new social housing.
“This feels to me like the moment to open up a more flexible and permissive approach to building housing of all types,” he says. “This is the sort of flexibility that needs to be discussed. Having been a bus obsessive in my second term with the Bee Network, we are now moving our attention to technical attention and to housing.”
Rose Grayston, an independent housing expert, told i that giving Combined Authorities their own HRAs “could be a great way of overcoming housing capacity constraints by sharing skills, knowledge and assets across the whole area, meaning more places will benefit from new council housing, alongside housing association homes and other tenures”.
Legislative changes would need to be made to enable Combined Authorities to form HRAs as they don’t currently have the power to do it. Grayston says this could be done through Labour’s planned Take Back Control Act which will expand devolution.
Greater Manchester’s Mayor wants to “do his bit” to build as many of the 1.5 million homes the new Labour Government has promised to deliver over the next five years. He believes the GMCA could contribute 75,000 of them.
Another of Burnham’s flagship policies is a new baccalaureate-style qualification which provides an alternative to higher education – the M-Bacc – which gives young people the chance to study subjects such as music, engineering and construction which will help them to find jobs in the local economy.
Burnham says the Tories let young people down. “What were they offering at the last election? National service.” With that, he says Rishi Sunak probably “did more to increase turnout among young people than any politician before him”.
It’s a pivotal moment for Greater Manchester. Their Mayor has big ideas which focus on growth, social mobility and infrastructure. In five years with the support of Labour in power in Westminster, he says his patch will have a London-style transport system which is joined up, where you can tap in and tap out. As well as a new, modern education system which can boost the economy. He also hopes he will have “started to make a difference” on housing.
But hidden in Labour’s victory was a warning. In 14 of the Greater Manchester area’s 27 constituencies, Reform edged into second place. The party picked up more than 190,000 votes across the region while the Tories got only 173,000.
Burnham responds by saying that Britain now has the sort of “political stability” that France and the US do not have. However, he concedes that Labour is “a bit on notice”.
“[The public] have said, ‘We’ve given you this big change but we’re keeping our eye on you and making sure you deliver. But I think the new Prime Minister and his Cabinet have already exceeded the public’s expectations. I think they’ve changed the weather.”
Burnham’s week will continue to be busy. His M-Bacc plans will be formally unveiled on Friday, and, after that, he needs to prepare for a DJ set at a local club.
If he had to pick his favourite Manchester band, who would it be?
“I’m going to answer your question as thoughtfully as I can,” he says carefully. “It changes all the time.”
He can only choose one.
“It’s New Order.”
The Mayor of Greater Manchester adds that he will be going to see New Order in Wythenshawe Park later this summer.
Stone Roses fans will be upset.