How Andy Burnham should approach governing

Jill Rutter reflects on how Andy Burnham should approach governing as he prepares to take over from Keir Starmer later this month.

Morgan McSweeney has now admitted that Labour was unprepared for power in 2024.

They had, realistically assessed, two years to plan – the period from when it was clear that Boris Johnson was vulnerable and Labour could form the next government. Keir Starmer had by then ‘changed the Labour party’.  His focus was on winning the election. Policy was refracted through the lens of not getting in the way of winning – not setting strong foundations for the governing project. When there was a trade-off between winning or governing, winning won. It did not help that Keir Starmer seems to find it easier to focus on working his way through the immediate problem in front of him, rather than setting any clear long-term vision.

Andy Burnham has weeks rather than years. He has the benefit that he may be able to avoid an election, but Keir Starmer appears to have decided to enjoy his summer break rather than let his usurper have the time he wanted to plan.

He has already made some big calls. Successive Prime Ministers have made a mess of the structure and people in No.10.  Burnham has brought in a close former cabinet colleague to head his No.10 with the appointment of James Purnell as Chief of Staff. That looks like a good start to have someone who will be able to speak authoritatively for the PM, has run organisations, knows him well enough to challenge him when he is getting things wrong and will have credibility with the Labour MPs. So far so good.

We also know, in terms of structures, that he wants to build up No.10 as a strong centre able to lead the government. That too was missing from Starmer’s passive No.10.  It also looks as though he has persuaded Jonathan Powell to stay on as his national security adviser – a guarantee of continuity and a good way of compensating for Burnham’s lack of foreign and defence experience.

The most eye-catching proposal is to base some of No.10 in Manchester – No.10 North. That could just be a gesture – but it could also make a lot of sense if Andy Burnham decides he is going to live at home and work out of Manchester a couple of days a week.  A prime ministerial presence is essential to signal that this is a real change rather than performance art.

One question will be how to decide how this will work in practice. Will it simply be the base for the No.10 team leading on economic and devolution strategy? Or will core private office and policy unit and comms teams have members permanently based in Manchester as well as London? That would offer new career options for civil servants who choose to base themselves in Manchester (not so much if you are in Darlington, Bristol or Wolverhampton), allow Burnham to bring in allies who have worked closely with him at Greater Manchester Combined Authority and have no desire to shift south, and reduce the need for people to spend their lives on Avanti West Coast.

Getting the structures right matters – but then Burnham needs to decide what to do. This is not a change of the sort we saw in 2024. Andy Burnham is taking over mid-term. The government already has Labour ministers who have been doing the job for almost a year or more. It has a legislative programme announced in the King’s Speech in May. In many areas it has announced reforms that are in train – people may not see change yet, but that is in part at least because in most cases change takes time.

The key choice for Burnham is continuity versus change.  He has made clear that there are some areas where he wants change. There he needs to make clear what the purpose of that change is, appoint people he is convinced share that view and help them drive it through.  Some of those big themes are coming through already – devolution; council housebuilding; skills policy – though in all of these he needs to be absolutely clear where devolution and local choice wins and where he wants to control centrally.

Governments are usually elected on the basis of comprehensive manifestos – which the civil service crawls through before election day. They may be picking up hints from Burnham speeches now – but a couple of policy speeches and a few sassy TikTtok videos do not make clear how Andy Burnham wants to go forward on the whole range of issues where Prime Ministers need to have views.

There are lots of other areas where change is in progress, but potentially suffering from blight as its not clear what Burnham wants. So an urgent task for the new No.10 will be to review the portfolio of current policies and programmes that the government is pursuing and decide what to do.

The first option is to proceed on the current timetable. The second is to speed up or slow down and potentially tweak where there are reservations about some aspects of the policy and make it reflect the priorities of the new government. The third, where the new government wants to do something very different, is to stop the change in its tracks and ask for new ideas.

Similar principles apply to ministerial change. There will be some eye-catching new appointments. But there is a good case for prizing continuity as far as possible – a mistake Gordon Brown made when he came in in 2007 and embarked on what looked like change for change’s sake. A mantra of change where necessary, continuity where possible would enable the Burnham government to hit the ground running and start being able to point to concrete achievements which we assume he will be able to communicate better than his predecessor.

And then he can turn to the event that will define his premiership, as it did for Keir Starmer: his government’s first Budget.

By Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government.