Place First: A Unifying Path for a United Kingdom
MAYOR of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has called for a “wholesale change in the architecture and culture of the British state” to unite the country and drive economic growth, in a keynote speech at the Institute for Government today (Wednesday 2 April).
Speaking on the day after Greater Manchester’s trailblazing new Integrated Settlement funding deal with the Government came into effect, the Mayor argued for "a new operating principle for the UK Government, recognising for the first time the primacy of place over single-issue policy."
He said a place-first approach can "provide the roadmap to a more streamlined and financially sustainable state," in a way that Whitehall is not set up to provide - and that with its Integrated Settlement, Greater Manchester can use new freedoms and flexibilities to deliver more joined up public services and better outcomes for residents.
Read the full text of his speech:
Today I want to reflect on the first decade of devolution in Greater Manchester.
I want to explain where we are going in the next decade, and what it means for the governance of the UK going forward.
If my eight years as Mayor have taught me one thing, it is this: if the country is to get the level of growth it needs, it will require a wholesale change in the architecture and culture of the British state recognising the primacy of place.
Encouragingly, we may now actually be on the cusp of that.
I will come to that later but first let me look back on the last ten years.
2015 to 2025
Since Greater Manchester and the UK Government signed the first devolution deal a decade ago, our city-region has been the fastest-growing in the UK, with average annual growth of 3.1% over the last 10 years and the highest productivity growth.
The jury is in: the combined authority model of English devolution, pioneered by Greater Manchester, works. The scale of the achievement is all the more significant when you consider this was a decade of Brexit, Covid and all the shocks since.
While it feels like the country has gone backwards, Greater Manchester has powered forwards.
This is a big thing.
For most of my life, the gap between North and South has widened. In the last 10 years, however, Greater Manchester has started to close it.
The main players behind the original devolution deal – George Osborne and the late Sir Howard Bernstein – deserve huge credit for that.
That said, this is more Greater Manchester’s achievement than any Government’s.
Don’t get me wrong: we have worked with some brilliant civil servants who know that devolution is the best path to a more functional and fairer state – and their number seems to be growing.
But I have had to spend far too much of my time as Mayor constantly remaking the case for devolution to Whitehall, time which could instead have been spent driving delivery or winning new investment.
I have come up against recalcitrant Ministers who simply refused to implement parts of the agreement - for instance, Chris Grayling on rail station devolution – and whole departments which, so far, have refused to play a meaningful role in the devolution journey.
Thankfully, it hasn’t hampered our success.
Today Greater Manchester is a different place than it was 10 years ago.
The skylines of Manchester and Salford have changed dramatically.
They tell a story of growth and project a message of confidence for the future.
A classic example is BNY (formerly Bank of New York) who first came to our city in 2005 and recently, in the presence of the Chancellor, inaugurated a new Manchester building as one of its global strategic locations.
100,000 people now live in the city centre in some of the modern homes built in the last decade and, while it has seen the most change, the ripples are beginning to reach our town centres, like Stockport and Rochdale.
The signature achievement is the successful introduction of a new, integrated public transport system, the Bee Network.
But just as significant, although less visible to the public, is the unique, highly-integrated model of public services built in close partnership with the private sector, our universities and the community and voluntary sector. I think we have the most integrated system of public services anywhere in the country.
This last point is the critical one when we look to the decade ahead of us.
In the mayoral combined authority model, the country has stumbled upon the game-changer that the British state has long needed.
It allows a coherent, whole-place approach and, if used properly, could provide the roadmap to a more streamlined and financially sustainable state, breaking down silos, joining the dots around people and places and, in the process, securing more value for public money. Particularly in an era when it is scarce.
2025 to 2035
It is on these foundations that we are now ready to build.
By 2035, I am confident that Greater Manchester will have risen much further up the rankings as a city-region of global standing.
To get there, our proposition to the Government’s spending review is a 10-year investment pipeline of specific projects, worth between £10-15 billion, which will advance new industry and spread prosperity to growth locations throughout all parts of Greater Manchester using the UK’s only strategic spatial plan outside of London.
Here’s the clever thing: our 10-year vision is both a growth plan and a people plan – a joined-up proposal designed to give our residents a clear line of sight to the jobs it will bring.
If all Whitehall departments buy in fully, I am confident we can accelerate our rate of growth in the next decade, holding out the enticing prospect of the forthcoming decade becoming the most successful for Greater Manchester than any since the Victorian period.
We are hugely encouraged by the detailed attention the Government is currently giving to the Greater Manchester proposition through the structured Task and Finish process, led by the Treasury and MHCLG, set up to inform the spending review following the English Devolution White Paper.
It is a brilliant innovation by Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves and the best engagement process we have ever experienced.
It represents a sea change in the quality of engagement between ourselves and Whitehall.
Of course, we are making significant asks of the Government.
We need to see the rewriting of the Green Book to remove the bias against the North and allow the Government and its agencies, such as the National Wealth Fund, to invest alongside us in that ten-year pipeline.
We also need a commitment to the big infrastructure the North West needs, such as: the Northern Arc, the new rail line between Manchester and Liverpool linking two airports, a sea-port and two city-centre investment zones which, the evidence suggests, will achieve even more growth than £78 billion growth of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc;
We need a replacement for HS2 between the West Midlands and the North West, given the symbolism of HS2 trains leaving bat houses, or should I say bat palaces, to trundle North up the congested West Coast Main Line is an embarrassment we should be spared; and major upgrades to the M60 to open one of the UK’s most significant development sites – Atom Valley on the Bury, Rochdale, Oldham border – as a global industrial cluster.
We want to see a fairer national spread of innovation and R&D funding, building on the success of the Innovation Accelerator, allowing all Mayors to deepen the excellent partnerships we have with our universities, businesses and investors and which will be crucial in bringing projects like Atom Valley to life.
But I want to make something clear: this is no traditional spending review shopping list. Alongside our asks, our new Group Chief Executive Caroline Simpson has challenged Greater Manchester to raise our own game.
It needs to be acknowledged that the hollowing out of councils over the last 15 years, and particularly planning and regeneration teams, is a risk to growth. We are responding by creating a new capability at the centre to support our 10 councils in delivering our major schemes.
We are looking innovatively at how we can find our £15 billion whilst minimising the call on public funds, through lining up a range of potential investors, building on the success of our Housing Investment Loans Fund and transferring to GMCA publicly-owned land for regeneration use. Based on the success of the Stockport Mayoral Development Corporation, led by the late great Bob Kerslake, we are looking at creating at least five new town-centre MDCs building new homes on Network Rail land around stations that will soon come into the Bee Network. And possibilities for those MDCs are places like Ashton, Bolton and Middleton
If our residents are to feel the real benefits of this growth, and enjoy better health and good work, we know the biggest changes of all will be needed on the public service reform opportunity our integrated model allows. And here’s the people-plan bit of that ten-year vision.
Eight years in this role has taught me that, if you can set a clear mission that everyone understands and supports - as we try to do in Greater Manchester - with public, private, community and voluntary sectors all facing and pulling in the same direction, the power is immense.
Mayors can truly reach the parts Ministers never can.
So the next Greater Manchester Strategy, to be published shortly after the spending review, will unlock that power by putting forward the clearest and most ambitious vision for prevention this country has ever seen; a simplified plan to fix five foundations of life – shelter, safety, mobility, opportunity and support – so all our residents have a platform to fulfil their potential.
- Shelter: GM Housing First
We are crystal clear: the growth of our people and places will be restricted as long as Greater Manchester remains in the grip of a housing crisis.
A good, secure home is the most important foundation of all and needs to be seen as the highest of all public priorities.
The fact that millions in the UK do not have one is a big reason why we are struggling with the rising cost of the NHS and benefits system. We are paying out billions to service the cost of the human chaos caused by the housing crisis.
We believe the UK should adopt the Finnish national philosophy of Housing First. Good homes are the best public investment any country can make.
In Greater Manchester, we have established a new, multi-agency Housing First unit in the GMCA to act on housing supply, housing standards and support.
Next month, we will introduce a new Greater Manchester Good Landlord Charter alongside a stronger enforcement capability, supported by our fire service in a clear example of public service reform, aimed at those renting out sub-standard homes who refuse to sign up. The days of receiving public money via the benefits system for homes which damage the health of our residents are coming to an end.
On housing supply, we will set a date to return Greater Manchester to a net annual surplus of social homes overall – and are seeking the powers, funding and land from the spending review to get us there as early as possible.
In each of the last 15 years, we have lost more social homes than we have built, like many other places around England. Only in the last year have two of our councils recorded a small surplus for the first time. By the end of the spending review period and no later, we must have started to loosen the grip of the housing crisis on Greater Manchester.
- Safety: Operation Vulcan
After a good home, the next basic human need is to feel safe when you are in it and when you leave it.
Greater Manchester Police is a very different police force today than it was a few years ago. Under the oversight of Deputy Mayor Kate Green, it has delivered a named neighbourhood team in every ward and in Operation Vulcan, it has pioneered a new approach to proactive policing which forms the basis of the clear, hold and build policy.
Piloted in the Cheetham Hill area, it has led to entrenched criminality being ripped out at the root and is paving the way for a major regeneration led jointly by Manchester and Salford City councils which could involve the relocation of Strangeways prison.
The Operation Vulcan approach is now being used in Piccadilly Gardens, the Trafford Centre and Derker in Oldham. It is seeing impressive results and will be extended to all boroughs.
- Mobility: The Bee Network
After a good home and a safe community, people need good mobility to connect to opportunity. Whitehall underestimates just how much poor transport outside of London, and high fares, are a barrier to work.
It sticks in my mind how, in 2021, it was straight after the mayoral election and I was delivering the acceptance speech, when I complained how unfair it was that a single bus journey in Harpurhey, Greater Manchester could cost three times the amount of one in Haringey, London, Transport for Greater Manchester got a call shortly after from 10 Downing Street asking if the claim was true.
It was – and it revealed just how little thought the centre had given to this. Ministers delivered speech after speech promising to get more people into work but never turned to the issue of bus fares until Greater Manchester did. That fare can be the difference between someone being able to hold down a training place or get to work.
We are proud that Greater Manchester has completed Phase 1 of the Bee Network, uniting bus and tram in a low-fare, integrated system, but we need to take a failing rail service out of its silo and add it into this successful system.
In the spending review, we are asking for eight commuter lines to come into the Bee Network by 2028, with the first two entering the capped payment system by the end of next year. Overnight, the towns which have 64 stations on the lines will become more attractive places for people to live and for businesses to invest.
This is a perfect case study of how Greater Manchester devolution can help Whitehall square the circle of improving public services whilst spending less.
We expect passenger numbers on the lines to increase as people will get much better value for money from being in the Bee Network cap rather than buying a rail ticket that runs out at Piccadilly or Victoria at the end of the journey. And, because more people are using the services, because of the more attractive nature of them, the public subsidy going into the eight lines could be frozen or even slightly reduced.
To be clear: the alternative of keeping rail outside of London in its silo, cutting the subsidy and allowing services to be reduced, or ticket prices to rise even further, is an anti-growth policy.
- Opportunity: The MBacc
After physical mobility, we need better systems of social mobility.
As the number of young people not in education, employment or training rises close to the one million mark, it surprises me there isn’t a louder call for reform of an education system overly focused on the university route.
Two thirds of young people in Greater Manchester don’t take that route.
Schools in England are still judged against performance on the English Baccalaureate or EBacc – a collection of GCSEs, according to gov.uk, considered “essential to many degrees”. The system isn’t designed for a majority of young people in Greater Manchester looking for technical paths – and, unsurprisingly, many feel it disinvests from them in their later school years. The latest Bee Well survey, which Greater Manchester instigated to gain insights into the thoughts and feelings of our teenagers, shows 67% of students reporting a sense of belonging to school in Year 7 dropping to 51% by Year 10.
This speaks to the issues raised by the Centre for Social Justice’s hugely impactful report The Lost Boys.
As a response to them, we have developed the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate or MBacc. It is intended to provide young people with structured paths towards technical qualifications, high-quality work placements and good jobs in seven priority sectors in the Greater Manchester economy.
By the end of the decade, we will have an open application system for those placements, as an alternative to UCAS, with enough for every young person who wants one.
The MBacc is gaining huge traction with our employers. We are confident it will help more young people into work and reduce the number of NEETs. It will only work as an employer-led system and that means a high degree of devolution in technical education is essential.
Different regions of England have different economies and therefore need to develop their own solutions to an issue this country has never prioritised and never fixed. For these reasons, the Department for Education’s long-running resistance to devolution is unjustifiable and becoming a significant barrier to growth. When I speak to potential business investors in Greater Manchester, the most important ask they have is whether we can guarantee access to the talent they need. We need to be able to give them better answers.
I believe it is Greater Manchester who should be commissioning our colleges with a single consolidated skills budget to provide the precise BTECs, T Levels and Apprenticeships our employers need in the right numbers.
As a minimum from the spending review, we are seeking DfE’s support to test the MBacc properly as a national pilot, giving our schools permission to participate. I am of course prepared to change our proposals where the DfE have any reasonable concerns. So, my offer to them is to sit down with us and let’s together work out a plan for a pilot.
- Support: GM Live Well
If people have these first four foundations in their lives – shelter, safety, mobility and opportunity – then they have the chance to live well and thrive and this brings me to the last and possibly most transformational of our ideas for the way the state works.
Running the country from a series of policy silos - as we’ve tried to do for most of the lives of people gathered in this room - inevitably creates a top-down reactive state which sees people through the lens of single issues. So it can spend thousands of pounds on someone’s healthcare only to discharge them to a home full of damp and mould or even back to the street to sleep rough. By contrast, bottom-up, place-based integration allows meaningful partnership between integrated public service teams and local community and voluntary groups providing personalised, preventative everyday support in a names-not-numbers approach.
This is GM Live Well: Greater Manchester’s movement for community-led health and wellbeing.
Over the last 15 years, we have seen the emergence across England of a voluntary welfare state: local networks of not-for-profit organisations picking up the pieces for people who have fallen between the ever-wider cracks left by the state.
They cannot continue to be taken for granted. GM Live Well moves this support system from the margins to the mainstream, puts the local state at its back, providing core funding to increase the reach and effectiveness of what they do.
This is a structured system of everyday support, from the early years to later life, and we are building the infrastructure to deliver it through a £20 million fund created the DWP through the Inactivity Trailblazer and the Greater Manchester NHS as a funding partner. If done right, it will help people remove the barriers holding them back. It would make public services more effective by providing the whole person support around their more narrow interventions. For instance, work coaches provided by DWP are more likely to succeed if someone else is helping the debt issue and the housing.
It is not so much about new money but re-routing some of the billions the country already spends on employment support, and putting it through the community and voluntary sector, rather than large corporates, and achieving a multiplier effect as result of that.
It is about creating GM Live Well centres in every locality that offer positive, empowering support through organisations they trust in place of the fear they have of interacting with the DWP system. GM Live Well will link employment support to the adult education budget and pursue an all-age approach to technical education, for people for whom school didn’t work, who are in the wrong job in their 20s and 30s, will be able to pivot back into the economy, based on the same sectors as the MBacc. It will work to support people into good jobs, not just any job.
If it is properly structured and hard-wired into our integrated system of public services, GM Live Well can lift pressure off the NHS. It is estimated that about a third of people ringing the surgery at 8am have a social need rather than medical need. If they could be offered same-day Live Well appointments, it could free up a lot of GP capacity.
People might remember I was a Health Secretary in the last Labour government. And just over 20 years ago, Derek Wanless did a major report for the then Labour Government on NHS funding and said that, for the NHS to be sustainable into the future, we would have to enter a fully-engaged scenario where people and whole communities take responsibility for their health. I believe GM Live Well is the closest anyone, or anywhere, has come to implementing that recommendation.
The opportunity for the Government
When you take our five priorities together, and link them to our 10-year investment pipeline, it all coalesces into a people-centred growth programme and a different, more enabling and more efficient state founded on place-based integration.
Yesterday we took a huge stride into this new future with the commencement of our integrated settlement – a new block financial arrangement with Whitehall similar to Scotland and Wales.
Given we now have some flexibility over £630 million of public funding, and the ability to move it more towards prevention, it is essential now that we articulate our own simple and clear plan so that the whole Greater Manchester system can understand and own it.
It is a truly exciting moment.
Going forward, we believe the more public spending that is consolidated within the integrated settlement, the more compelling sense it will make, the more the jigsaw will be complete, and the more positive change it will achieve.
The rail analogy applies here. Taking subsidy out of its current siloed budget line and routing it through an integrated system multiplies the value it achieves.
Over the next two spending reviews from 2025 to 2030, we have suggested to the government that Greater Manchester is designated as the UK’s Prevention Demonstrator - where our approach, and cumulative impact of our five ideas, could be fully assessed and our successful ideas shared.
To stand most chance of success, it would mean all Whitehall departments fully leaning in.
Imagine that for one moment.
The whole-place approach of Greater Manchester with whole-government backing from the centre.
That could seriously move the dial.
With it, we are confident we would simultaneously improve the health of our residents, help more people into work and grow our economy, as we’ve done in the last decade.
As we move towards an all-combined-authority England, it could provide a blueprint for the country.
The route map to a more successful, sustainable and streamlined British state.
It will generate savings for national government above us and local government below us.
In the next phase of English devolution, combined authorities need to focus more on how we can make a meaningful contribution to the funding crisis in local government and help our member councils with financial sustainability.
Take the example of the cost of temporary accommodation.
One thing that has surprised me in this role is the extent to which national government takes decisions which it presents to Parliament as cost savings but which in fact transfer unfunded pressures to local government.
The repeated freezing of Local Housing Allowance is a case in point.
Because local authorities have a statutory duty to house homeless families, the gap between rents and benefits has led to an annual temporary accommodation bill of £75 million on the 10 Greater Manchester councils.
Bad for them – but much, much worse for the 6,500 children in Greater Manchester who are in temporary accommodation, who suffer the permanent scarring effect of being uprooted from their homes and communities.
It is both immoral and entirely preventable.
Why would the Spending Review not set up Greater Manchester to build new council homes and social homes under local democratic control for the specific purpose of ending families in temporary accommodation? Everyone would win.
This is the type of coherent spending decision that becomes possible in a combined authority model.
My ask of the Government is to fully embrace it – to move now to that future rather than double-running with national bodies which can act as rivals or at least another body for Mayors and combined authorities to persuade.
If there is no longer a case for NHS England, what about Homes England and Skills England?
While I have today made the case for Greater Manchester, I would argue for all Mayors and combined authorities being set on a similar path.
That means establishing a new operating principle for the UK Government – recognising for the first time the primacy of place over single issue policy.
Combined authorities are the UK’s growth agencies.
We are the ones out there around the world trying to win new investment for the UK.
We should be able to feel the Whitehall departments at our back, responding to our asks and empowering us with what we need, rather than fighting us or seeing us as rivals. We should be one team.
As a former Minister, I have great respect for Whitehall and many people working within it. It does some things well – but can’t do everything as it sometimes tries to do.
Look at the deep inequalities across England. Whitehall is clearly not wired to support the growth of our people and our places.
Growth cannot be ordered from the top down by individual silos. Instead, it has to be nurtured and watered from the bottom up by people in those places, linking education to transport, housing and planning. That is the magic where growth happens, and it can’t be done in any other way.
The opportunity for the country
For a growth-orientated government, place-first needs to become a new operating principle.
My concluding point is that this doesn’t just present a technical opportunity to improve the structures and the running of the state.
Recognising the primacy of place in the way the country is run opens up an opportunity to create a better politics.
Combined authorities work best when they operate on the principle of place-first rather than party-first.
Unlike the divisions of party, place is a unifying force. However people vote, they are united by a desire to see the place where they live move forward.
These days, we are lacking things which unite us in common cause. If places have more agency, and a sense of forward direction, and those places are likely to be more cohesive and less divided.
A place-first approach also creates the right conditions for businesses to invest. It creates a long-term stability in direction that Westminster is simply not set up to provide.
It is this last point that has underpinned Greater Manchester’s success since the 1990s.
A pragmatic, pro-business, positive culture based on partnership which is unapologetically put to the service of our people and our political commitment to a fairer society.
This approach has always stood us in good stead, and it will not change.
Because of it, Greater Manchester is today the UK’s growth opportunity.
We are ready for our best decade yet – and to support our neighbours and others on the same path.
How do we turn this country around?
A decade of fully-engaged English devolution – and a whole-place approach with whole-government backing – would be a good start.
Article Published: 02/04/2025 15:00 PM