Blitzed by Burnham – UK in a changing Europe

Jill Rutter takes stock of Andy Burnham’s first few days in government.

After a couple of weeks when Andy Burnham went underground with few sightings in public, this week he has shown what he meant by hitting the ground running.

He appointed a Cabinet – with a heavy Manchester representation (5 members represent seats in Greater Manchester, and there are seven from the North West when two Liverpudlians are added in). London’s representation in the full Cabinet is down to two.

He rewarded those who backed him early and helped usher Keir Starmer out of the door. He dispensed with the services of those who had been some of the most frequent spokespeople for the Starmer regime –Darren Jones and Peter Kyle.  Expect to hear far more Northern accents as close allies like Louise Haigh, Jonny Reynolds (back at his old business department) and Lucy Powell become the preferred voices of the government.

There is a huge amount of churn at Cabinet level. But one good decision Burnham has made is to eschew much change at junior ministerial level with a lot of people continuing in post, and others, like Dan Jarvis, who was briefly Defence Secretary after John Healey quit, returning to his old Security Minister beat.

He has moved quickly to reorganise government. The most eye-catching move is the creation of so-called No.10 North, a Manchester base that the new PM will work from (an interesting question is whether his successors with seats well away from Greater Manchester will find that so appealing) but the most important moves are the rebadging and beefing up of the policy secretariats in the Cabinet Office as a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the other, less central tasks hived off into a ‘Onegov’ agency.  That starts to address a longstanding weakness in the UK government – that we expect the Prime Minister to drive a programme for government, then refuse to give him or her adequate resources to do it and then wonder why the well resourced permanent Treasury expands to fill the vacuum.

The Prime Minister is also transferring lead responsibility for the central planks of his reform programme to his new Manchester operation. They will lead on devolution strategy (taken over from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) – though it is not clear how far that stretches into local government reorganisation – and take over local economic growth from the Treasury. It will be interesting to see how that works with the Treasury’s interest in economic growth, Reynolds reassuming control of the modern industrial strategy he developed in his first outing as Business Secretary and Angela Rayner back to press on with the completion of the devolution map.

Burnham has followed the example of previous Prime Ministers and employed a loyal enforcer at the centre. But Louise Haigh is quite inexperienced compared to some of the earlier occupants of the role – she spent very little time as a minister before being forced to step down by Keir Starmer and the success of a lot of the changes will depend on her, and her ability to work well with the Cabinet Secretary.

The more surprising machinery of government changes are the dismemberment of Rishi Sunak’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. Science and innovation go to the ever changing business department, which gets renamed again; digital goes back to DCMS whence it came; and AI goes to the centre. This may, or may not, be a more sensible division of responsibilities than bundling these issues together. What is indubitable is that this sort of change creates distraction and disturbance, as the carve-up and reintegration take up the time and effort of senior leaders and usually end up with a price tag attached. The hope is that this change was much debated beforehand and the pros and cons were properly assessed before the changes were made.

Before taking office, Burnham promised a policy blitz. What has been notable is the nature of the policy announcements seen to date: Unpopular digital ID cards binned before even taking office on Sunday night; Tuesday morning, the decision to temporarily remove VAT (at 5%) from household electricity bills in England, Scotland and Wales; followed on Wednesday morning by taking the bus fares cap in England back to £2 in 2027.

The VAT cut (pending longer-term measures to create a ‘breathing space’ in cost of living pressures) was to be paid for by cancelling plans for digital ID cards: the problem for the government is that their predecessors had never identified how to pay for ID cards which were announced after the spending review was concluded. It’s not huge money in the scheme of things but it is a black mark against the civil service that they failed to stop the government falling into the trap of saying it would be paid for by the money saved by cancelling digital ID. This is a government – as the Prime Minister emphasised to the Cabinet – that needs to be seen to be reining in its potentially spendthrift inclinations.

The bus fare cap is also being funded out of a switch from international climate finance grants to loans. That against a backdrop where the UK aid budget is a fraction of what it once was, and presumably the money that now becomes repayable goes to poor countries saddled with a big climate adaptation or transition challenge.

Expect to see more of this, as what Burnham termed a “cost of living” government looks to subsidise household bills through “reprioritisation”. The rationale seems to be to reverse the experience of the Starmer government – which managed to squander any goodwill in a mess of badly landed policies, minor ethical transgressions and political tone deafness – by buying ‘breathing space’ to develop longer term plans with more promising paybacks. Reeves and Starmer seemed to think they needed to get the economics right, and the politics would follow (it didn’t help that they got the economics quite badly wrong at the Budget); Burnham will be hoping more attractive short-term politics will give time for the economics to come good.

The problem is that he, like Starmer and Reeves before him, faces a double bind of manifesto red lines at home and Trump-induced chaos abroad.  He has already pulled off one amazing transition – from barred by-election candidate to unopposed PM in less than six months: escaping that straitjacket would be a stunning second act.

By Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow, Institute for Government.