From the Bee Network to Downing Street: What Manchester Tells Us About a Burnham Britain

Andy Burnham became Prime Minister yesterday, and he does so as the most tested mayor in the country. He ran Greater Manchester from 2017 to 2026, won three elections, each with more than 60% of the vote, and built a distinct governing brand along the way. He arrives in Downing Street having been chosen leader of the Labour Party unopposed, nominated by 379 of its 403 MPs, after a morning of royal formality at the Palace.1 That near-unanimous backing tells you something in itself: a party that had just forced out Keir Starmer decided Burnham was its best answer, and handed him an unusually free hand to prove it.

So the interesting question is not really about his personality, which has been picked over endlessly, but about his record. What did he actually do with power in Greater Manchester, and how much of it tells us anything about what he will do with the far larger, far more constrained power of Number 10?

The honest answer is that the Manchester record is genuinely instructive, but it comes with a warning label. A mayor of a city-region of nearly three million people operates in a very different world from a Prime Minister running a country of nearly seventy million. Some of what worked in Manchester points clearly to national policy. Some of it works precisely because it was regional, and may not scale at all. And the deepest tension of a Burnham premiership is baked into his own story: the man who made his name attacking the centre has, as of today, become the centre.

The record: buses, and what they cost

Start with the policy Burnham is proudest of, and the one voters actually recognise. When Centre for Cities polled residents before the 2024 mayoral election, transport was the most identifiable policy across every combined authority, and in Greater Manchester more than a quarter of people could name one of the mayor's transport policies.2 That policy is the Bee Network.

In September 2023, Greater Manchester began running its first franchised bus services in Bolton, Wigan and parts of Salford and Bury, becoming the first place in England outside London to take buses back under public control.3 Under franchising, private operators no longer set routes, fares or timetables. The combined authority does, and operators bid to run services against those specifications. Burnham paired this with a flat £2 single fare cap, introduced even before franchising began, and simpler integrated tickets across bus and tram.

The results, so far, are real. On the first franchised routes, punctuality rose from around 66% to roughly 80%, bus journeys in the first two areas were up around 14%, ridership across the network grew about 4% year on year, average ticket costs fell by around 15%, and tram use in 2024 passed its previous record.4 For a sector that had been in slow decline across most of England for forty years, that is a meaningful turnaround, and it is the clearest evidence Burnham can offer that public control of a basic service can work.

But this is where the warning label matters, and I think it would be dishonest to leave it out. The improvements have come at considerable public cost. According to figures compiled by a former government transport adviser, the annual subsidy to Greater Manchester's buses more than doubled after franchising began, from about £40 million in 2022/23 to £84 million in 2024/25, with Transport for Greater Manchester's own accounts suggesting an even higher figure, alongside set-up costs of around £134 million.5 Supporters argue this is simply what it costs to run a decent public service that the market had hollowed out. Critics argue the gains have been modest relative to the money spent. Both can be true at once, and that tension, good outcomes bought with heavy subsidy, is exactly the kind of argument that becomes much harder to win at national scale, where every pound is contested against health, defence and welfare.

The record: skills, and a quieter revolution

The Bee Network gets the attention, but the policy that may tell us most about Burnham's instincts is his education reform, the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc.

Launched in September 2024, the MBacc is a technical education route designed to sit alongside the traditional academic path, giving young people what Burnham calls two equal choices at fourteen, one academic and one technical.6 It is built around seven gateways, each tied to a sector that is actually growing in the Greater Manchester economy, and it is backed by work placements, T-Level routes and a central application system, developed in partnership with employers and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. One year in, the authority reported more than 700 new technical placements pledged by employers including the NHS and Auto Trader, and thousands of young people using its careers tools.7

The thinking behind it is revealing. Burnham's argument is blunt: the English education system, he says, has been built around the third of young people who go to university, leaving everyone else without a clear path.8 Whatever you make of that, it is a genuine diagnosis of a real problem, and it is one he was only able to act on because Greater Manchester's trailblazer devolution deal handed the region new oversight of post-16 skills.9 That is the pattern to notice. Given a lever, Burnham pulled it in the direction of vocational training, local employers and young people outside the university track.

There is a national twist here worth flagging. The EBacc, the academic measure the MBacc was designed to sit against, is itself being wound down nationally following the government's curriculum review.10 So the education landscape Burnham inherits as Prime Minister is already shifting towards his instincts, which makes technical education one of the likeliest areas where the Manchester approach goes national.

The record: candour, and the campaign behind the Hillsborough Law

The third thread is the one that best captures who Burnham is, and it runs directly from Manchester and Merseyside into Parliament itself.

Burnham has campaigned for years on a Hillsborough Law, a legal duty of candour that would force public officials to tell the truth to inquiries and inquests, and give bereaved families the same standard of legal representation as the state. He first introduced a version of it as a backbench MP back in March 2017, though it did not survive that year's election.11 Nearly a decade later, in September 2025, Starmer's government introduced the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, widely known as the Hillsborough Law, which would create that duty of candour and back it with criminal sanctions.12

But the story of that bill is also a lesson in how hard this is to actually deliver. Its progress through Parliament has repeatedly stalled, delayed in January 2026 so the government could rework how the duty applies to the intelligence services, in an attempt to balance transparency against national security. Campaigners, including the Hillsborough Law Now group, argued the compromises went too far, and only a carry-over motion in April 2026 kept the bill alive at all.13 It is a reminder that the causes Burnham champions from the outside look very different once you are the one holding the pen, weighing competing interests and drafting the exemptions. That bill now sits on his own desk.

The record: health, and the biggest test of all

There is one more part of the Manchester story that matters more than any other for a Prime Minister, because it touches the thing that so often decides British elections: the NHS.

In April 2016, Greater Manchester became the first English region to take control of its own health and social care budget, a sum of more than £6 billion a year, run through a single partnership that brought together the NHS and the region's ten councils.14 The idea, styled DevoManc, was to integrate health and social care, shift money towards prevention, and tackle the region's stubborn health inequalities. It is worth being precise here, because it is easy to get wrong: this deal was struck in 2015 and went live in 2016, before Burnham became mayor in 2017, so he did not create it. What he did was inherit it, defend it and build on it, and as a former Health Secretary he was unusually well placed to.

The evidence on whether it worked is cautiously positive. A University of Manchester study published in 2024, which compared Greater Manchester with the rest of England from 2016 to 2020 across 98 measures of performance, found that devolution was associated with broad improvements in health services and outcomes, including life expectancy, though it was careful to note that the gains were not universal and were achieved despite fairly limited formal control over resources.15

For a Burnham premiership this is the most tantalising thread, and also the most dangerous. Tantalising, because it hints that integrating services and pushing money upstream towards prevention can actually move the dial, which is close to what every government wants from the NHS and rarely gets. Dangerous, because a £6 billion experiment in one city-region is a different universe from a national health service many times its size, and because the clearest lesson the researchers drew was how hard it is to say precisely what caused the improvement. Scaling a result you cannot fully explain is one of the hardest things in government, and the NHS is where that gap between a promising local story and a deliverable national policy would be exposed fastest.

Manchesterism, and what actually scales

Burnham has a name for the philosophy under all of this. He calls it Manchesterism, and describes it as business-friendly socialism and the end of neoliberalism, an attempt to channel the proceeds of growth back into communities rather than trusting them to trickle down.16 Stripped of the branding, it amounts to a fairly consistent worldview: push power and money out of the Treasury and towards regions and cities, take key services back into public or public-guided control, and judge success by whether ordinary people's lives measurably improve.

So what can we actually expect nationally, as opposed to regionally? I would separate it into three buckets.

The first is what scales well. Devolution is the obvious one. A Prime Minister who spent nine years arguing that Britain is too centralised is likely to accelerate the shift of power to mayors and regional authorities, building on the direction the last government had already set. Technical education is a second, both because it reflects his instincts and because the national ground has already moved his way. And the duty of candour is a third, since it is already a live bill he has every reason to finish.

The second bucket is what scales, but only with money and difficulty. Bus franchising is the test case. Legislation already lets every English authority franchise its buses if it chooses, so the Manchester model is, in principle, going national. But Manchester's version leaned on heavy subsidy and years of set-up, and a government cannot quietly subsidise the whole country the way a mayor could subsidise one city-region. What was a bold regional choice becomes, nationally, a very expensive fiscal commitment competing against everything else.

The third bucket is what does not transfer at all, and this is the part that gets least attention. A mayor never has to hold a position on immigration, defence, the bond markets, or Britain's relationship with the United States and Europe. A Prime Minister lives on exactly that terrain. Burnham's Manchester record tells us almost nothing about how he will handle a sterling crisis, a war, or a small-boats week, because those questions simply never crossed his desk. Tellingly, in the run-up to the leadership he had already softened earlier positions on immigration, the fiscal rules and Brexit, an early sign that national leadership narrows the room he enjoyed as a regional insurgent.

The insider who ran against Westminster

Which brings us back to the central irony. Burnham built his national profile in October 2020, standing on the steps of a town hall arguing with a Conservative government over furlough funding for the North, and being crowned, half admiringly and half mockingly, King of the North. That image, the mayor who fights the centre on behalf of forgotten places, is the foundation of his appeal.

The problem is that a Prime Minister is the centre, and as of today that is exactly what Burnham is. There is no Westminster left to blame, no Treasury to shake your fist at, because he now runs it. Every constraint he spent a decade attacking, tight budgets, cautious officials, the slow grind of national institutions, is now his to own. The very thing that made him compelling as a mayor, that he was on the outside looking in, evaporated the moment he walked through the black door.

The collision has, in fact, already started. Within hours of taking office Burnham was reshaping the top of government, moving Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office and John Healey to the Treasury while keeping Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office, and he was reportedly facing friction over those very choices before he had governed for a single day.17 It is a small thing in itself, but it is a sharp early illustration of the difference between commanding a city-region and holding together a national party in power.

None of this is a prediction that he will fail. It is a reason to watch one thing above all others. The real test of a Burnham government is not whether he can talk like an outsider, he plainly can, but whether the outsider's instincts, devolve power, control key services, back the two-thirds who don't go to university, tell the truth after disasters, survive the collision with the Treasury, the markets and the sheer weight of governing a country. Manchester suggests those instincts are real and, given the right levers, deliverable. It cannot tell us whether they hold up when the levers are national, the money is tighter, and the person being challenged from the outside is finally him.

That is the story worth following over the coming years. Not the personality, which we already know, but whether the Manchester model was a genuine blueprint for the country, or a set of good regional answers to problems that look very different from the top.

This article was written for The London Review and is non-partisan: it sets out Burnham's record and the arguments around it rather than endorsing any side.

Footnotes

  1. ABC News, Andy Burnham is declared leader of UK's Labour Party, pledges to restore hope (opens in a new tab), 17th July 2026CNN, Andy Burnham will be Britain's seventh leader in a decade. Can he buck the trend? (opens in a new tab), 17th July 2026. ↩

  2. Centre for Cities, Public transport shows devolution is delivering for Greater Manchester (opens in a new tab), 14th April 2025. ↩

  3. Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Bus franchising (opens in a new tab), September 2023. ↩

  4. Centre for Cities, Public transport shows devolution is delivering for Greater Manchester (opens in a new tab), 14th April 2025Confederation of Passenger Transport, Beneath the yellow paint: how successful are Manchester's Bee Network buses? (opens in a new tab), 2026. ↩

  5. The Spectator, Burnham's buses show why he will probably fail as prime minister (opens in a new tab), 22nd May 2026. Figures are from a critic of the scheme and are presented here as the counter-case. ↩

  6. Public Sector Executive, New Greater Manchester education path launches this year (opens in a new tab), September 2024. ↩

  7. Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Greater Manchester marks one year delivering the UK's first integrated technical education system (opens in a new tab), August 2025. ↩

  8. Insider Media, Burnham to unveil plans for Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (opens in a new tab). ↩

  9. Bolton Council, Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc) for technical education (opens in a new tab). ↩

  10. The Productivity Institute, Now is the right time for a Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (opens in a new tab). ↩

  11. Full Fact, Is the government on track to introduce a 'Hillsborough Law'? (opens in a new tab). ↩

  12. GOV.UK, Hillsborough Law Bill (opens in a new tab), 16th September 2025. ↩

  13. House of Commons Library, Public Office (Accountability) Bill 2024-26: Progress of the bill (opens in a new tab), 2026. ↩

  14. Public Finance, Greater Manchester given NHS budget as historic devo deal goes live (opens in a new tab), April 2016. ↩

  15. University of Manchester, Devo Manc led to significant improvements across health system, study finds (opens in a new tab), 25th March 2024. ↩

  16. CNN, Andy Burnham: the charismatic mayor who's likely to be Britain's next prime minister (opens in a new tab), 20th June 2026. ↩

  17. ITV News, John Healey made Chancellor and Ed Miliband Foreign Secretary in Burnham cabinet (opens in a new tab), 20th July 2026. ↩