Andy Burnham: What London can learn from Manchester
The mayor of Greater Manchester tells London Centric readers how he's getting the powers Sadiq Khan wants, why he fears for the capital's young people, and where to get the best chips in London.
“The London I moved to in the 90s is not the London of today,” the mayor of Greater Manchester is telling me. We’re sitting in Andy Burnham’s office in the centre of his city. I’ve come to ask what a man who warned the Covid inquiry about “London-centricity in decision making” has to say to London Centric readers.
Burnham is the politician who famously shunned the capital, the two-time Labour leadership hopeful who walked away from Westminster politics and asked the voters of Greater Manchester to believe that he had always wanted to be outside of the UK’s traditional centre of power. Now, as the modern office of the mayor of London turns 25, people in the know have started to feel that Greater Manchester’s directly-elected mayor – a post created two decades later – has gained certain powers that leave London trailing in its wake.
When Londoners elected Ken Livingstone to run the newly-created Greater London Authority in 2000, it was the first — and for the next 15 years, only — regional mayor arrangement of its type in the UK. But does Sadiq Khan have the power his job title deserves in 2025? And why is Greater Manchester being trusted with extra powers before the UK’s one truly global city?
If you’re a Londoner who wants to understand where the capital is heading then it’s time to look north. The new Labour government is currently reviewing what powers should be devolved to London — and Sadiq Khan wants what Andy Burnham already has.

“The phenomenon of young people coming here from London is a real one.”
While Sadiq Khan now runs City Hall from a building on a windswept dock near the Excel Centre in east London, Burnham’s office is in the heart of Manchester. Visitors are met with a giant poster of the private residential skyscrapers that are springing up all around the city centre.
Burnham, who has been mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017, has a simple pitch: “We can move more quickly than London. There’s a good headline for you.” When he talks to Londoners on trips to the capital for Everton football matches, he encounters a sense that the capital lacks “a bit of the dynamism” it used to have.
Much of Burnham’s origin story is based around his unhappiness on having to move to London for work in 1991: “My generation of people from the North West, if you wanted to get on in life, had to go south. The difference between then and now is you don't have to do that”
Despite his mixed relationship with the capital, Burnham says he has fond memories of living there, first during his 20s in west London near Fulham Palace Road, then subsequently on Regent Road in south London’s Herne Hill. He would drink in The Commercial pub (“a real old school boozer, it's all gastro now and everything”) and says his favourite place in London is Brockwell Park: “I used to love the lido in the summer and running around the park. And Olley’s chippy.”
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Burnham says stopping — and reversing — the brain drain of graduates from Manchester to the capital is one of his main priorities, and it is already underway: “The phenomenon of young people coming here from London is a real one. You can live in the city and you might not have quite the same salary as London but that actually won't matter a great deal because the rent will be a fraction. It's a different night time offer, for sure, but I don't think it's a worse one.”
Anyone who hasn’t visited Manchester for a few years maybe be shocked by the sheer amount of construction in the city, although not all locals are delighted by deals with a handful of local property developers that have helped the city centre to change — and the sense that some of the outer towns of Greater Manchester have been neglected in this plate-glass-city-centre boom.
Andrew Carter, the boss of the Centre for Cities think tank, said London had been hit by “resistance to development” in many boroughs, limiting the supply of new housing and the ability of businesses to expand. By comparison, in Manchester, he finds politicians who are “are hungry for development and growth”: “They want Manchester to be bigger and more important and more prosperous and they’re willing to do things to make it happen. There’s an attitude to it. And sometimes there’s a bit of complacency in London that ‘we’ve got enough’."

“We’ve got 10% of the power and 10% of the money.”
To understand why Manchester’s appetite for development can feel lacking in parts of London, you need to look at the complex way the capital city is governed. At the ground level are the 32 London boroughs, each with their own elected council, plus the democratic curio of the City of London. Although the boroughs’ budgets are increasingly swallowed up with temporary housing and social care bills, they remain responsible for frontline issues such as housing, recycling, and — crucially — deciding what can be built in an area.
Sitting above those boroughs is the Greater London Authority, which has both its own civil service and politicians. It is led by the elected mayor, Sadiq Khan, who oversees Transport for London and the fire service, has some responsibility for the Metropolitan Police, and is able to overrule the local councils on planning issues. This tier also contains the London Assembly, a group of 25 elected politicians whose job is to hold the mayor and his officials to account.
One of Khan’s strengths and weaknesses is the public perception that the mayor of London has far more power than they actually do. It enables Khan to claim more credit than is due on some matters, while also receiving unfair kickings on things that are outside his control. Howard Dawber, Khan’s deputy mayor for business and growth, told an event at last year’s Labour Party conference how little Westminster has actually devolved to the mayor of London: “Compared with the mayor of New York we’ve got 10% of the power and 10% of the money. Imagine if we doubled that what we would be able to do.”

“If we decide we're going in a certain direction, this whole system moves in that direction.”
Which is where Burnham has stolen a march on the capital. Greater Manchester has agreed two things with central government that London doesn’t yet have. The first is that, from April, Greater Manchester will have a deal with Westminster that gives Burnham far more discretion than Sadiq Khan over how to spend money received from central government.
The deal, known as an integrated settlement, means that rather than being given lots of different pots of money for specific projects, each with strings attached, Burnham will have access to a single slug of cash that he can then allocate as he sees fit in order hit certain agreed performance targets.
He says that his team put an “exam question” to Treasury officials when negotiating the deal: If it turned out that the thing holding back young people in a part of Greater Manchester was the lack of a reliable bus service to the local college, could Burnham take money earmarked for education services and put it into subsidising that missing bus service? The answer from central government, he says, was “yes”.
Sadiq Khan has entered early discussions over whether London could get something similar but such a deal for the capital is only being “explored” and won’t be implemented until 2026 at the earliest. As a result it is Greater Manchester (and the West Midlands) that will get there first.
Burnham says that a flexible approach to budgets enables a city’s leaders to be “much more productive” and not be locked in “grinding conversations” with central government over every penny. Londoners saw the downsides of the existing approach first hand when the former Conservative government agreed short-term funding deals with TfL during the Covid pandemic and imposed extensive conditions on the money.
Greater Manchester’s second big advantage over London, according to Burnham, is a "far superior" model of devolution that puts the leaders of the 10 local councils that constitute Greater Manchester in the room with the mayor and removes the need for a London Assembly-type organisation.
Burnham, always a fan of a football analogy, says: “The way I describe it is I'm like the captain of eleven, if I could put it that way. So 10 council leaders and myself, if we decide we're going in a certain direction, this whole system moves in that direction.”
By contrast, the relationship between the 32 London councils and Sadiq Khan’s office is messier. Claire Holland, chair of the organisation London Councils which speaks on behalf of all the boroughs, last year called on the government to implement something similar to the Manchester model. She argued the existing “voluntary arrangements” between London’s boroughs and the mayor’s office pose a “risk to long-term stability” and undermine efforts to build housing and grow the economy.
The downside to a consensus-based model is that plans are halted if there is no agreement, meaning a masterplan to build 180,000 extra homes across Greater Manchester collapsed over the objections of one council.
“The gap between London and Manchester has narrowed”
Greater Manchester has a far smaller population (three million people to London’s nine million) and has an economy around a sixth of the size of the capital’s. Yet its productivity growth — a measure of economic performance — is outpacing Greater London, according to the latest official data.
Duncan Weldon, the author of a history of the British economy said: “The top line summary is London is still far ahead of the rest of the UK in terms of economic output and productivity — but that gap has narrowed since 2019 as a result of the pandemic and the Brexit shock.
Weldon said it’s possible this is as much due to sluggish growth in the capital: “The gap between London and Manchester has narrowed but that is just as much to do with London slowing down as Manchester speeding up.”
Burnham says Manchester has a pro-growth mentality and that their local government system means it’s easier to pull levers to make things happen: “Where we've been given power, we've proven we can use it. That's, I think, the difference. And this is no criticism of Sadiq or anyone in London or the mayors that have gone before. I just think it's harder.”
The mayor also claims that unity of local government extends beyond economic growth. Asked if he’d welcome Donald Trump to Manchester to talk about investment in the city, he pauses: “I would have to think about it. I would ring political leaders. I would ring business leaders, I would ring faith leaders, I would get a sense of what the place feels, because it's not a straightforward question, it could have real implications for life here. We’re always pro-investment and we are pragmatic… What we've got here that is truly precious and beyond what other English cities have, which is a level of cohesion and unity that is quite rare.”
For all the mayor’s self-styled dynamism, there is one policy on which Sadiq Khan has been far bolder. When Khan pressed on with expanding London’s Ultra Low Emissions (ULEZ) scheme he took a major political hit but also gained personal credit from clean air campaigners. By contrast, immediately after his interview with London Centric, Burnham went into a meeting where he formally killed an equivalent scheme in Greater Manchester. In a chain of events detailed by the Manchester Evening News, Burnham attempted to shift the blame on to successive Westminster governments for not investing enough in his city’s public transport.
“We are like where London was in the 90s.”
In this fashion, Burnham will oppose the expansion of London’s Heathrow airport, arguing that most of the route of the now-cancelled High Speed 2 railway to Manchester should be built instead. In the future, he hopes, Londoners wanting to fly long haul will get a fast train from Euston and pop up 90 minutes later at a railway station underneath Manchester airport, which has spare capacity on its runways.
(In a comment that might be of interest to any London Centric readers who support Manchester United, Burnham also strongly hinted that the football club will choose to knock down their existing Old Trafford ground and build a new stadium, as part of a Mayoral Development Corporation masterplan: “The logic points more in that direction but they've got to make their decision. The heart says refurbish Old Trafford, the head might point them in a different direction.”)
Asked for his message to Londoners, Burnham says: “It's not an antagonistic message. It's saying that London needs to be more liveable, for young people particularly…. We are like where London was in the 90s. We're going through that change at the moment. And we've got to be careful that we don't lose some of what I think London lost in that period.”
He says the focus on London’s economic growth by officials in the Treasury risked “overheating” the city and “takes the soul of it to some degree”. His son lives in the capital and he worries about how unaffordable London is becoming, especially with foreign money flowing into the property market: “It was common that four or five people from my old college would be in Greenwich in a house together. I just don't think they could do that now, could they?”
Despite this, he says the two cities’ interests are bound together: “London will always be London. London will always be the capital city. I'm patriotic, believe it not. I'm proud of London. However, it helps the South Pole to have a North Pole.”
He says at the very least he wants Greater Manchester’s residents to have the infrastructure and opportunities that the capital’s residents take for granted: "Let me dispel this myth in London Centric: I've never been anti-London. I've noticed in London there's a bit of tetchiness about this. It's not anti-London to say we want the same as London.”
The irony, as Burnham knows, is that many of the people running London are now looking enviously at Manchester.
Burnham in brief:
Would you accept a knighthood like Sadiq Khan? “I severely doubt it would ever, ever be offered. And it's not something I've ever given any thought to.”
Are you going to come off Twitter/X? “Not immediately, because I think you just still have to talk to people, don't you? If politicians all come off, then you really make these things proper echo chambers and that's not healthy.”
Would you return to national politics? “I wouldn't rule it out … but if this is my last job in politics, I'm absolutely happy with that and I'm not in any way sort of hankering or plotting a return. I think what we've established here is of more lasting national significance than a short stint back in a position in Westminster.”
What’s it like to demand more money from Westminster when it’s your own party in government? “I remember when we were in government [in the 2000s] Welsh Labour was always quite fiery and independent while Scottish Labour got branded the ‘branch office’ and it almost got killed… The party [Labour] has a centralising instinct. Devolution has to be place-first, otherwise it doesn't work… It's more difficult with your own side in government, but it absolutely has to still apply.”
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I suggest you stick to London as your Manchester piece was not as well thought out as your London pieces
Manchester’s success has little or nothing to do with their Mayor . Howard Bernstein as Chief Exec from 1998 to 2017 worked with Richard Leece Leader of the Council from 1996 to 2021 to deliver the major changes and make Manchester No 2 city putting Birmingham into third place. The Bernstein / Leece partnership would do business with whichever party was in power .
As to London and it’s Mayor unfortunately he is not well served by his deputy Mayors compared with either Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson. Boris was very fortunate to have Simon Milton as his No2
Perhaps an article comparing the London Mayors would be interesting