Back in February, American media giant Bloomberg ran a deep-dive report with a headline declaring: “Andy Burnham’s Manchester is Booming”.
It was one of several glowing write-ups hailing the city’s recent economic performance and Burnham’s role as mayor in achieving it.
Perfect timing, some might say, as Sir Keir Starmer’s stock has fallen and the Labour party now finds itself desperately searching for a new direction in the wake of catastrophic local election results.
Many MPs believe Burnham – who earned the nickname ‘King of the North’ for his fightback against Tory government restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic – is the answer.
Towering skyscrapers and an expanding tram network are visible signs of Manchester’s economic gains (Photo: Getty Images)
There is no doubt that Manchester city centre – with its skyline transformed by gleaming tower blocks – is unrecognisable from the place it once was.
But how true is Burnham’s story of his role in it? And will this matter as he seeks to win a by-election in Makerfield, a constituency on the edge of the wider city-region where even the current Labour MP Josh Simons says there has been decades of “managed decline”?
One Greater Manchester political insider told The i Paper Burnham’s claims of ‘Manchesterism’ as an economic policy are “confected nonsense”.
“Frankly George Osborne can claim more credit for funding the tram extensions and supporting property development,” they said.
IRA bomb in 1996 paved the way for regeneration
Certainly, most observers – including Burnham himself – would acknowledge that Manchester’s revival began long before he arrived as mayor in 2017.
On 15 June, it will be exactly 30 years since the IRA detonated a 1,500kg bomb hidden in a lorry in Manchester.
Miraculously, although hundreds of people were injured, no one was killed, and some argue the 1996 attack was the catalyst for a spectacular regeneration.
At the time, less than a thousand people lived in what was a largely unloved and unpopulated city centre.
But the extensive damage spurred efforts to rebuild public spaces and coincided with the decision to award Manchester the Commonwealth Games in 2002.
The Etihad Stadium was originally built to host the Commonwealth Games and has become the centerpiece of a regenerated east Manchester (Photo: Getty Images)
Over the following decades, the city also benefited from the stable and strong leadership of Sir Richard Leese as leader of the council and Sir Howard Bernstein as chief executive.
Among the partnerships they built with the private sector was a crucial deal with Abu Dhabi United Group – the Middle Eastern equity company that bought Manchester City football club in 2008 – to found the property company Manchester Life.
The city council has sold land to Manchester Life in order to build luxury apartments in parts of east and north Manchester that were largely derelict, although how much of the profits have been recycled into the public coffers has been a bone of contention.
With Manchester’s universities attracting one of the largest student populations in Europe, the city was always well-placed for a property boom.
Today it is estimated around 100,000 people will soon live in the forest of skyscrapers that has sprung up in and around the city centre.
Andy Burnham seen leaving his home as he makes his way to Wembley to watch the FA Cup Final. (Photo by Gary Oakley/Getty Images)
Burnham ‘built on legacy of Leese and Bernstein’
In his recent speeches talking up ‘Manchesterism’, Burnham has cited figures that show the city-region grew at 3.1 per cent per year between 2015 and 2023, more than twice the UK average of 1.5 per cent.
2015 was the year Greater Manchester gained a mayor – first former MP Tony Lloyd on an interim basis and then Burnham when he saw off his rival for the job two years later.
But Greater Manchester was growing even faster at 3.4 per cent, above the UK average of 2.6 per cent, between 2004 to 2007, long before the mayoralty existed.
In fact, Leese and Bernstein were never particularly excited by the prospect of a mayor. They only accepted having one as part of a deal with former Chancellor George Osborne to gain greater devolution powers, most notably control of the bus network.
It is said that Leese would often remind Burnham “the whole reason you exist is to do the buses” and it is an achievement he can now point to with Manchester’s yellow buses and wider Bee Network of public transport well-known to residents.
Residents in Makerfield, on the fringes of Greater Manchester, will shape Burnham’s political destiny in a forthcoming by-election (Photo: Steve Morgan/The i Paper)
Henri Murison is chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, the lobby group set up by Osborne to pursue his vision of how to unlock the northern economy.
“Manchester’s economic success is a result of two decades of sustained policy and Andy has been a major part of the later phases of that,” he told The i Paper.
“He’s moved the idea on. The tide was rising before Andy was around, but Andy has seen and engaged with the reality of what’s going on.
“The Greater Manchester project is the story of public sector and industry engaging the private sector and being proactive.
“And that is building a better future for places like Wigan.”
Reform in the march in Manchester’s outer boroughs
Makerfield, the constituency where Burnham has convinced MP Josh Simons to stand down, has a lot of benefits for the mayor and his leadership ambitions.
He is well-known in the area having grown up in nearby Culcheth and lived in Golborne.
Several voters in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the town where Burnham’s children went to school, told of seeing him on his early morning jogs on a frequent basis.
But Wigan, like many other parts of the North, is a post-industrial town with pockets of entrenched poverty that have existed for decades.
Burnham is seen as a front-runners in any future Labour leadership race to succeed Sir Keir Starmer (Photo: Justin Tallis/AFP)
The Index of Multiple Deprivation published last year shows some parts of Makerfield are more deprived than 97 per cent of England.
There are some critics who feel Manchester’s economic success, and the trajectory of devolution, has focused too much on the city centre to the detriment of its satellite towns.
A 2017 report from academics at Manchester Business School said Manchester’s transformation had been driven by local government allowing private property developers to build “a new town of office blocks and adjacent flats in Manchester City and Salford, in which a young in-migrant workforce lives”.
This economic “exclusive growth” had not delivered for deprived districts elsewhere in Manchester or poorer surrounding boroughs.
“The Brexit result is a warning to Greater Manchester politicians who need to reconnect with their voters by renewing the civic offer,” they wrote somewhat prophetically.
“Instead of relying on property development as the accelerator in the centre, they need to rely on the foundational economy as the stabiliser in all ten boroughs.”
With rival Wes Streeting having brought up calls for Britain to rejoin the EU, Brexit is likely to become difficult for Burnham.
Reform strategists are buoyed by local elections in which Farage’s party won more than 50 per cent of the vote in Makerfield (Photo: Gary Oakley/Getty)
Makerfield was a strong Leave-voting area in 2016 and Reform won 24 of the 25 council seats up for grabs in last week’s local elections.
Laura Evans, a Conservative who has twice stood against Burnham in mayoral elections, said she hopes the contest opens up further scrutiny of his record.
“I think Burnham sees himself as a legend in his own mind,” she told The i Paper.
“There’s never been the opportunity to scrutinise him, that’s the frustrating part.
“He did inherit a good policy but what he could have done with it he didn’t.”
Evans believes there are questions to be asked about Burnham’s record on standards of early years education, health inequalities and street homelessness in Greater Manchester.
She feels he has avoided tackling difficult policies in favour of those that are more likely to popular with the public, such as bus franchising.
“He likes to be liked by people and he goes out of his way to make sure they do,” she added.
“But how is that going to play out on the national stage?”