Whoever walks into Greater Manchester’s mayoral office on Friday evening will inherit one of the most influential jobs outside Westminster. Eight years ago, the role was still something of a post-Whitehall political experiment – today, it is regarded as the most powerful metro mayoralty in England.
It’s the office that propelled Andy Burnham from regional politics and into Downing Street.
His successor will quickly discover that the title comes with formidable expectations. The next mayor will be expected to tackle homelessness, improve public transport, unlock thousands of new homes, attract investment, reduce inequality and convince residents that prosperity is reaching every corner of the city region.
They will attempt to do all this against the backdrop of one of the closest mayoral elections Greater Manchester has yet seen, with Labour’s Bev Craig and Reform UK’s Sian Astley leading the race and a second round of counting expected for the first time under the Supplementary Vote system. Previously the election has never been close. Andy Burnham’s coalition of left-leaning Greater Manchester voters was remarkably resilient. He managed to win under both electoral systems.
Click here for the latest on Greater Manchester’s politics in our newsletter
Under Supplementary Vote, people cast both a first and second preference. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of first preferences (which Burnham always did), all but the top two candidates are eliminated before second preference votes are redistributed.
So, what exactly is the state of Greater Manchester in 2026? What sort of in-tray will the new mayor have? Has eight years of devolution narrowed the gulf between rich and poor? Have the benefits of record investment spread beyond the city centre? Has the region become fairer as well as wealthier?
The Manchester Evening News and the Reach Data Unit have examined the latest data on income, deprivation, child poverty, housing and homelessness to build the maps that tell the story of modern Greater Manchester ahead of the election on Thursday.
Greater Manchester is unquestionably more influential than when the mayoralty was created in 2017.
It has attracted billions of pounds of investment, become an increasingly important national economic centre and now occupies an unprecedented place in British politics following Burnham’s move to No 10 and the creation of a No 10 North outpost. But prosperity has not been shared evenly across the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester.
Away from the gleaming skyscrapers of the city centre, some neighbourhoods have flourished while others continue to struggle with entrenched and persistent deprivation.
House prices have soared, creating wealth for some while making home ownership more difficult for others. Child poverty remains stubbornly high, homelessness continues to place huge pressure on councils despite years of attempts to fix it.
These are the very real challenges the next mayor faces – and they represent an in-tray that could decide their success or failure, and Greater Manchester’s.
The skyline of Manchester seen from Oldham.(Image: Adam Vaughan / MEN)
One: Growth isn’t for everyone
One of the big political arguments of Burnham’s second term was whether Greater Manchester’s success had become too concentrated in and around the regional centre.
At the Manchester Evening News mayoral hustings, critics like Reform’s Sian Astley and Geraldine Coggins of the Green Party, argued that sprouting skyscrapers, luxury apartment developments and booming business districts had transformed Manchester city centre while surrounding boroughs are still waiting for the benefits to arrive.
While there is some data to support this, it’s complicated. The wealthiest neighbourhoods are certainly concentrated within four boroughs: Manchester, Salford, Stockport and Trafford.
At the top sits Salford Quays – this figure perhaps skewed by the presence of the BBC. According to the latest government figures, households there had an average disposable income of almost £68,000 in 2023, making it not only the richest neighbourhood in Greater Manchester but the 22nd wealthiest anywhere in England and Wales.
Yet perhaps the most revealing figure lies only a short walk away. Neighbouring Pendleton recorded an average household disposable income of just over £23,000.
In other words, residents separated by around 15 minutes on foot experience a gap in average disposable income of around £45,000 a year.
Greater Manchester’s inequalities increasingly exist not simply between boroughs but also within them. The same pattern emerges inside Manchester itself.
Castlefield and Deansgate recorded average disposable household incomes of just over £50,000, the highest anywhere in the city. Longsight East, by contrast, recorded just over £23,000.
The gap between two Manchester neighbourhoods amounts to roughly £27,000 every year. The debate is often framed as Manchester versus everywhere else. The data paints a much subtler picture.
The region’s biggest issue is increasingly how prosperity exists alongside persistent poverty, often within the same borough and sometimes within walking distance.
This has become one of the key debates of this election and is central to understanding Andy Burnham’s real legacy. Labour’s proposed Good Growth Fund is intended to channel investment into towns and neighbourhoods that have not shared equally in Greater Manchester’s recent success, while Reform argues the region’s growth has become too concentrated in Manchester itself. The question for the next mayor is whether more residents feel they are sharing in that growth.
Two: Communities left behind
If income tells one story about modern Greater Manchester, deprivation tells another. Official government statistics rank every neighbourhood in England into one of ten deprivation bands, with one representing the most deprived communities and ten the least. The latest figures, published last year, offer reasons for cautious optimism – but it’s not the whole picture.
Across Greater Manchester, almost three in ten neighbourhoods – 29 per cent – became less deprived than they had been when the previous figures were published in 2019. Only 14 per cent became more deprived. The remaining 56 per cent showed little meaningful change.
On the face of it, that suggests progress, but those averages don’t tell the whole story.
The improvements have not been shared equally across the city region. Stockport recorded one of the strongest performances. Just four per cent of its neighbourhoods became more deprived between 2019 and the latest figures, while 46 per cent became less deprived.
Manchester also moved in a positive direction, with 36 per cent of neighbourhoods becoming less deprived compared with just nine per cent becoming more deprived. Tameside showed a similarly encouraging pattern, with 39 per cent of neighbourhoods improving against only eight per cent worsening.
Oldham, however, stands apart for very different reasons. Almost one in three neighbourhoods there – 31 per cent – became more deprived than they had been in 2019. Only 13 per cent became less deprived.
No other borough in Greater Manchester recorded such a negative trend. This may in part reflect the ongoing political turmoil in the borough, but it also indicates that those in Oldham have not seen much, or indeed any, of the boom that Manchester has. This suggests that some communities continue to move in the wrong direction.
Three: A generation in poverty
For all the attention paid to cranes on the skyline and the billions of pounds flowing into regeneration projects, perhaps no statistic poses a more uncomfortable question for Greater Manchester’s political leaders than this: more than one in four children across the city region are still growing up in poverty.
It is a figure that sits awkwardly alongside the narrative of economic success nurtured by Andy Burnham’s mayorship. The latest government figures show almost 168,000 children under the age of 16 were living in poverty across Greater Manchester in the year ending April 2025, before housing costs are taken into account.
That represents 28 per cent of all children in the city region – more than one in every four.
There has been modest progress. The total is slightly lower than the previous year, when just under 169,000 children were living below the breadline. But the proportion remains unchanged – and it’s too much.
In Coldhurst, Oldham, child poverty is not simply high by Greater Manchester standards, it is among the highest anywhere in Britain.
A total of 2,550 children in the ward were living in poverty during the 2024/25 financial year – around four in every seven children, or 57 per cent. Although that represented a slight improvement from 59 per cent the previous year, it remains the highest rate anywhere in Greater Manchester and the joint 18th highest in Great Britain. Coldhurst is far from an isolated case.
Milkstone and Deeplish in Rochdale, Werneth in Oldham and Rumworth in Bolton all recorded child poverty rates of 54 per cent. Queens Park and Central in Bolton and St Mary’s in Oldham both stood at 53 per cent.
Central Rochdale and Chadderton Central each recorded 52 per cent, while Cheetham in Manchester, Halliwell in Bolton and Alexandra in Oldham all recorded 51 per cent. Some of the highest rates of poverty are concentrated in parts of Oldham, Rochdale and Bolton, but the problem is by no means confined to any single borough. It stretches across the city region, crossing council boundaries and political control.
Strictly speaking, child poverty is not something the mayor can solve alone. The biggest levers – welfare policy, benefits and taxation – remain firmly in Westminster’s hands. Yet mayors increasingly shape many of the factors that influence family poverty: transport costs, housing, employment opportunities, skills, regeneration and access to affordable childcare through wider economic policy. Under Burnham’s plans for a more devolved Britain, some of those levers are likely to be placed in the hands of an incoming mayor.
But that will take time.
The next mayor will inherit a difficult, some would say impossible, balancing act. Greater Manchester’s economy continues to expand, attracting investment and creating jobs. But for tens of thousands of families, those successes remain distant abstractions.
Four: Success prices people out
One of the paradoxes of Greater Manchester’s recent success is that one of its greatest achievements has also become one of its biggest political headaches.
Civic leaders have sought to attract investment, regenerate neglected neighbourhoods and convince people to live and work in Greater Manchester rather than London or the South East.
By almost any measure, they have succeeded. The consequence, however, has been rapidly rising house prices that increasingly threaten affordability for many of the people the region hopes to retain. Few places illustrate that transformation more dramatically than Salford’s M7 postcode.
Between 2005 and 2025, average house prices there rose from £113,000 to £317,000.
That represents an increase of almost 180 per cent in just two decades – one of the biggest rises recorded anywhere in England and Wales.
Elsewhere, the story is remarkably similar.
In the M40 postcode area, average prices climbed from £73,000 to £204,000 over the same period, an increase of 179 per cent. In M6, prices rose from £86,000 to £232,000 – a rise of 168 per cent.
For first-time buyers and many renters, every sharp increase in house prices raises the deposit required to get onto the housing ladder and places additional pressure on rents as demand outstrips supply.
Success has made Greater Manchester a more attractive place to invest, but if housing costs continue rising faster than wages for many residents, that same success risks excluding people.
Can the people who helped build the new found prosperity still afford to live in it?
The debate over how many homes should be built, where they should go and who they should be built for is likely to define the next mayor’s term every bit as much as transport did Burnham’s first.
Five: The unfinished promise
When Andy Burnham first stood to become Greater Manchester’s inaugural mayor in 2017, no issue became more closely associated with his campaign than rough sleeping.
His pledge to end it helped define not only his first election campaign but the early years of the mayoralty itself. The launch of the A Bed Every Night scheme became one of the signature policies of his administration and, for a time, appeared to demonstrate what a devolved government could achieve.
The numbers tell a story of both progress and unfinished business and are worth scrutinising again in the face of Mr Burnham’s new stated aim, as Prime Minister, that he wants to end rough sleeping.
There were just 41 people estimated to be sleeping rough across Greater Manchester in 2010. By the time Burnham was elected in 2017, that figure had climbed to 268 as homelessness rose sharply across England.
Four years later, the picture had changed dramatically.
By 2021, the estimated number of rough sleepers had fallen to just 90, suggesting that interventions by councils, charities and the Combined Authority had made a real difference during Covid.
That improvement proved difficult to sustain.
The number has subsequently risen each year since, leaving Burnham’s successor facing a problem that is once again moving in the wrong direction. This does reflect a situation seen nationally rather than solely in Greater Manchester. Rising housing costs, pressure on local authority budgets and increasing demand for homelessness services have combined to reverse many of the gains made during and immediately after the pandemic.
Metro mayors can coordinate services, bring together councils and lobby Westminster, but many of the underlying drivers of homelessness – welfare policy, housing supply, mental health provision and public spending – remain outside their direct control. That does not lessen public expectations for the incoming mayor.
If anything, Burnham’s success in making homelessness a defining issue of the mayoralty, and now putting it on the national agenda, has ensured that voters will continue to judge his successor on progress, whether or not every lever sits in Manchester.
Six: A hidden housing emergency
If rough sleeping is the most visible face of homelessness, then temporary accommodation is its quieter counterpart. Across Greater Manchester, more than 6,000 households were living in temporary accommodation at the end of 2025.
Within those households, shockingly, were more than 9,100 children. Manchester accounts for by far the largest share of the problem. The city had almost 2,900 households in temporary accommodation, containing around 4,900 children.
Across Greater Manchester, 486 homeless households were living in bed and breakfast accommodation and a further 550 in hotels. The largest group – around 2,600 households – were housed in privately rented temporary accommodation.
The human cost is massive, so too is the financial one.
Councils across Greater Manchester are spending ever greater sums responding to homelessness. Manchester’s net expenditure on homelessness more than doubled in just three years, rising from £23.3 million in 2021/22 to £58.9 million by 2024/25.
That was almost five times the amount spent by the borough with the next highest bill, Salford, where net expenditure stood at £12.6 million. These are costs that leave councils with less money to spend elsewhere while illustrating the wider pressures facing the housing system. Building enough genuinely affordable homes while reducing the number of families in temporary accommodation may prove the defining housing challenge of the next four years.
The next mayor’s in-tray
Taken together, these maps describe the state of Greater Manchester at an unprecedented political moment.
Andy Burnham leaves behind a city region that is wealthier, more influential and more politically powerful than the one he inherited in 2017. The mayoralty has changed. What began as a constitutional experiment is now one of the most important elected offices outside Westminster.
But prosperity in the region is unequal and can vary dramatically within the space of a few streets. Where deprivation has fallen in many communities it has deepened in others. Where there are soaring property values, there is rising homelessness and where there is record investment, it coexists with disturbingly high levels of child poverty.
Many of these problems cannot be solved by the mayor alone and many depend on decisions taken in Whitehall over welfare, local government finance, planning and housing policy.
Yet the office has become the public face of Greater Manchester’s ambitions. Now that Andy Burnham is in Downing Street his pledge to devolve power away from Whitehall could make the next mayor even more powerful than Mr Burnham was. Using that power to spread the wealth from the centre is the task awaiting whoever emerges victorious on Thursday.
This has been a low key campaign. Overshadowed, ironically, by the previous mayor getting a new job in Westminster. Turnout has never been high in mayoral elections in Greater Manchester.
Should it dip below 30% it will raise questions over how much of a mandate the new mayor has. Whoever it is, they will inherit a Greater Manchester that has undoubtedly grown stronger over the past eight years. The main issue now is ensuring more of its people feel the benefit of that growth.