Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, delivered the fourth annual EG/Peter Wilson lecture at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, in February. During questions, he explained the challenges facing the UK’s new elected mayors, the opportunities and why their work matters.
Is devolution going to benefit all UK cities or just a handful that have secured deals?
“There is an onus on us as the newly elected mayors to say: ‘Here’s what we can do with these powers’. If I can show in Greater Manchester that I can not just do things differently – as we like to do in Manchester – but do things better, then surely I’m empowering every other part of the country.
“I’m perfectly happy to take on the challenge of showing everybody here and across the country that if you give more power to a place like Greater Manchester, we can actually do things better than they can be done from Whitehall. And if we can do that, then the case for more devolution will be utterly unanswerable.”
What’s different about devolved government?
“This is really a form of government that’s been created which is more about place than party, and is more pragmatic than point scoring. The mayors see no point just wasting time on that party stuff. It’s not what we were elected for.
“A lot of the civil service really get this and to be fair to George Osborne he was the first chancellor I can remember to talk seriously about rebalancing the country and then creating these new roles to do that.
“There are a lot of enlightened voices in Whitehall that actually really do get this who see that Brexit came about as a result of not governing equally for all places, and that those places bit back. And now something different is needed to help them move forward.”
With your experience as a government minister, what do you bring to the table?
“I do feel very strongly that I probably ended up in the right job at the right time. I think my cabinet experience, my Westminster experience, is helping me understand what’s needed. The first thing I knew that I must not do when I was elected was that I must not run the same old politics through these new structures. I don’t want to contaminate the new with the old.
“It’s been better to swap Whitehall for Town Hall because I have a clear understanding of all that’s wrong there and bring a new approach to this new system of administration.
“I’d also say that if this doesn’t work, what else have we got? What else is going to deliver a healthier, a better, a more engaging political culture? I don’t know. I think we’ve got to make it work and I want to be at the forefront of trying to make it work.”
