{"id":89503,"date":"2026-07-24T10:36:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/89503\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T10:36:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T10:36:11","slug":"andy-burnhams-number-10-north-changes-the-postcode-but-not-the-politics-government-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/89503\/","title":{"rendered":"Andy Burnham\u2019s Number 10 North changes the postcode, but not the politics | Government News"},"content":{"rendered":"

London, United Kingdom \u2014 On his fourth day as prime minister, Andy Burnham<\/a> did not stay at Downing Street in London. Nor did he go to Manchester, the home of Number 10 North<\/a>. He went to Glasgow.<\/p>\n

Hours before King Charles and Queen Camilla opened the 2026 Commonwealth Games, Burnham held his first in-person meetings with Scotland\u2019s First Minister John Swinney and Wales\u2019 First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth. The talks were meant to demonstrate, in Burnham\u2019s own words, that growth is needed \u201cin every postcode across the whole of the UK\u201d. A meeting with Northern Ireland\u2019s First and Deputy First Ministers, Michelle O\u2019Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, is pencilled in for a wider UK tour in August.<\/p>\n

Notably absent from the agenda, at Burnham\u2019s insistence, was any discussion of a second Scottish independence referendum.<\/p>\n

Just days after being appointed prime minister, Burnham is testing a proposition that will define his premiership. He\u2019s selling a vision that the office itself can be partly relocated out of London to Manchester, the city he governed as mayor from 2017 until his return to UK Parliament in the Makerfield by-election last month.<\/p>\n

What Number 10 North actually is<\/p>\n

Stripped of rhetoric, Number 10 North is a written ministerial statement. On July 21, Baroness Smith of Basildon, Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal, confirmed on the government\u2019s behalf that devolution and local growth policy functions are moving out of the housing ministry and the Treasury and into a new Manchester-based operation. There, civil servants will work inside a restructured Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, led by Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo.<\/p>\n

\"InNumber 10 North will be based at Manchester\u2019s Heron House in the interim and the government \u201cDigital Campus\u201d once it\u2019s completed in 2032, as the new government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham seeks to establish No 10 North as \u201cthe dominant driver of the UK\u2019s economy\u201d [Christopher Furlong\/Getty Images]<\/p>\n

The interim headquarters is Heron House, in the New Islington area of Manchester, chosen partly for its proximity to a planned Manchester Digital Campus.<\/p>\n

Caroline Simpson, the outgoing chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, has been named Burnham\u2019s deputy chief of staff, and will be in charge of day-to-day office operations. Downing Street says Burnham himself expects to work from Manchester \u201cat least one day a week\u201d, though officials caution his diary may change, and insists the arrangement carries no additional cost to taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Burnham calls it \u201cthe nerve centre of a rewired Britain\u201d and rejects suggestions it is symbolic. \u201cNot a gimmick,\u201d he told his first Cabinet meeting about Number 10 North.<\/p>\n

Plumbing, but no water<\/p>\n

Number 10 North \u201cestablishes the plumbing, but the water isn\u2019t flowing yet\u201d, said Mirte Boot of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) North. The institutional architecture is firming up, but fiscal devolution \u2013 ie, the transfer of money and tax-raising power \u2013 that would make such a policy meaningful doesn\u2019t yet exist, she added.<\/p>\n

Still, she calls it \u201ca step in the right direction\u201d after what she describes as \u201ctoo much power condensed into one postcode\u201d. Leaving Westminster isn\u2019t enough; Number 10 North will need \u201cstrong political leadership aside from the prime minister\u201d, she added.<\/p>\n

The verdict that Number 10 North contains vision and ambition but currently lacks a detailed plan and delivery mechanism is a recurring response from independent voices.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Carr-West of the Local Government Information Unit calls Burnham\u2019s devolution agenda \u201cthe most ambitious statement \u2026 from a senior politician in a generation\u201d, while warning that English councils are so financially hollowed out that the vision \u201crequires a vehicle\u201d it does not yet have.<\/p>\n

Malcolm Morgan, a transport researcher at the University of Leeds, puts it more bluntly: genuine devolution means spending, taxation and regulatory power, not just relocated functions, and \u201cdevolution does not create more funding\u201d.<\/p>\n

That funding question sits unresolved alongside the national one. The 2026 English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act expanded mayors\u2019 control over transport, planning and housing, but left fiscal devolution to a separate Treasury \u201croadmap\u201d due alongside the autumn budget. According to Centre for Cities, a UK urban policy think tank, the UK remains the most fiscally centralised country in the G7: some 95 percent of tax revenue flows straight to Whitehall.<\/p>\n

Devolution, or recentralisation?<\/p>\n

For Scotland\u2019s SNP government, the Number 10 North framing is beside the point. First Minister Swinney\u00a0responded that \u201crhetoric alone will not cut it\u201d and argued that four consecutive Holyrood elections have handed his party a mandate for Scottish self-determination, something Westminster keeps ignoring, he said. In Glasgow, Burnham declined to engage with that argument directly.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Wales\u2019 Ap Iorwerth struck a more cooperative note but still said he expected \u201cthat Number 10 North would not become Whitehall with a different postcode\u201d.<\/p>\n

He also used the meeting with Burnham to press for a new Wales Bill granting policing and justice powers, and a replacement for the Barnett Formula funding mechanism, which Westminster uses to calculate annual changes to the block grants allocated to the UK\u2019s devolved governments, so Wales would have funding parity with Scotland.<\/p>\n

Reform UK\u2019s Nigel Farage, from the opposite political direction, warned that a Number 10 in the south and one in the north would simply \u201cfight against each other\u201d.<\/p>\n

What it means in Manchester<\/p>\n

In Bury, Greater Manchester, Scottish-born Debe Conway sells children\u2019s books at markets and has lived in the area for 56 years, but remains unconvinced about the new prime minister.<\/p>\n

Her biggest concern is immigration, which she called Burnham weak on. And as for Number 10 North, she wants to know how it\u2019s being paid for, and asks how long it will last, considering that the UK has had seven prime ministers in the last 10 years.<\/p>\n

Rich Carver, who has run pizza restaurants in Manchester for 15 years and is currently \u201csoaking up the energy in the city\u201d, says he cares more about what will happen in the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also tired of the succession of governments and wants this one to last. He likes Burnham and is optimistic enough about the city\u2019s trajectory that he is opening a new restaurant in the coming weeks, something he would not have done five years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are all one country,\u201d he says, hoping the rest of the UK (and the media) give the new prime minister time and the chance to implement his vision. Whether that time produces growth, or just relocated offices, is the question Number 10 North still has to answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London, United Kingdom \u2014 On his fourth day as prime minister, Andy Burnham did not stay at Downing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[254,252,181,13629,375,18,14,5,6,38],"class_list":["post-89503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-economy","tag-europe","tag-government","tag-independence","tag-infrastructure","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wales"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116974517218636492","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}