What Powers Should Burnham Give Mayors?
And what should they do with them?
Andy Burnham has outlined ‘the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall in modern times’. Britain is an absurdly centralised country. Mayors of major British cities have less powers than mayors of small towns and villages in much of the EU and the United States.
Returning powers to local government (Britain wasn’t always this centralised)makes a lot of sense. And Burnham believes, with some justification, that Manchester is a model of what local government acquiring more powers can do for the economy.
But there is still a lot of detail left to be filled in. What powers should mayors actually have? And what should mayors do with those powers? Mayors themselves have set out many of the powers they want. This is a great place to start, but Burnham should be more radical. And while ‘Manchesterism’ remains quite vague, there are concrete policies other places can copy and adapt from actually-existing Manchesterism.
Believe in mayors
When Burnham becomes Prime Minister, he will inherit a pretty grim situation in most areas of public policy. But one area where Britain has been moving in broadly the right direction is mayors.
This began in London under New Labour, spread to city regions under the Tories, and has been continued by the current government. Britain now has more mayors with more powers. The model is proving surprisingly popular. Most existing mayors were re-elected in 2024, and even those who lost often ran well ahead of their parties’ performance in other elections.
The current government has made some progress, creating a viable route for bus franchising powers achievable for any city or region that wants them. Greater Manchester has used them to create the Bee Network, bringing buses under public control without bringing them into public ownership. Liverpool is following suit.
Manchester has been the driver of much of this devolution. George Osborne was eager to hand (Labour-controlled) Manchester more powers than other places because it was the only council that came to him with good ideas. Listening to mayors on what they want is probably a good place to start when it comes to devolving powers.
One regular demand from many mayors is more power on rail. But Whitehall seems to be determined to stop mayors getting these powers. The Department for Transport is creating a formal “Right to Request” process, allowing established mayoral combined authorities to ask for control over specific rail services, stations or infrastructure in their regions. That sounds promising, but a right to request is not a right to receive. It preserves the old hierarchy: mayors may ask, but Whitehall decides.
The guidance makes clear that the Department for Transport still sees devolution as a fallback behind Great British Railways delivering services itself and undefined “partnerships” between Whitehall and mayors. The Secretary of State remains judge and jury. The most likely outcome is partnerships that are barely worth the paper they are written on.
Burnham should change the presumption. Established mayors should have a right to control local rail services, station management, fares integration and service specification unless the Department for Transport can publish a clear reason why doing so would damage the national network. GBR should have a duty to co-operate with democratically elected mayor’s ambitions.
That does not mean mayors should control every train. But mayors should have a clear route to control over the services that shape their own urban economies: stopping patterns, train paths, station upgrades, fares integration and local service priorities. Mayors should also have more power over what is built. Burnham has already suggested land value capture as a means for funding public transport. This power could be given to mayors at the same time with reforming Transport and Works Act to allow mayors to drive their own projects without constantly requiring approval from the centre. Transport devolution should not depend on whether Whitehall feels generous.
Push mayors further than they want to go
One reason mayors have been popular is that they occupy a politically useful position. They have enough money and power to enact visible change, but they have very limited tax-raising powers. That means they can take credit for delivery while blaming national government when there is not enough money. This is not a mature model of devolution.
Ultimately, mayoral power will always be constrained if Whitehall is writing the cheque. He who pays the piper calls the tune, or at least demands thousands of pages of documents explaining how the money has been spent. Britain cannot have serious devolution if mayors remain mostly grant managers.
It is not clear mayors are desperate to receive tax powers. Some seem quite happy with the current equilibrium. They get a platform, a budget, a mandate and someone else to blame. But Greater Manchester has shown that getting ahead of other mayoralties and asking for more powers works out well in the end.
Burnham should push mayors further than some of them want to go and make them responsible for raising money. The tourist tax the current government has introduced is a useful start, but it is meagre. Mayors should have more ability to raise and retain local revenues.
The most important reform would be to let mayoral authorities retain more of the tax growth they help create. If a mayor builds homes, improves transport, expands the labour market and attracts jobs, most of the resulting uplift in business rates, stamp duty, income tax and employer National Insurance should remain in the city region to fund the next round of infrastructure.
At the moment, a mayor can make brave pro-growth decisions while the Treasury captures much of the fiscal upside. That is a bad deal for local leaders and for taxpayers across the country. It encourages begging for more money from London, rather than going for growth.
Regions should be rewarded when their decisions expand the local tax base and punished when they don’t. A Burnham government should give mayoral authorities more retained revenue and more responsibility for the consequences of their choices.
That would make mayors more powerful, but also more accountable. If they want to block homes, delay infrastructure and refuse growth, they should have to live with the fiscal consequences. If they build, they should benefit. Manchester provides some ideas about how they can do that.
Put customers back on the high street
Manchester city centre is thriving. But this is a pretty unusual success story.
The rise of the supermarket, then the retail park, and finally internet shopping has delivered enormous benefits for consumers. Overall, these have been hugely positive developments. But many high streets are struggling to cope. In places such as Newport, Blackpool and Bradford, vacancy rates can be double what they are in London, Cambridge or Manchester.
The surest way to improve a high street is for the surrounding area to become richer. But that is easier said than done. The other option, which can also help with the getting richer bit, is to put more people within walking distance of the town centre.
Manchester city centre works because lots of people live there and nearby. Density in the centre of urban areas means any business has a much larger pool of regular customers within walking distance. That daily custom keeps the cafes, pubs, grocers, pharmacies, restaurants and shops alive. Once they are there, they are there for everyone, including those who live further away who now actually want to visit. Greater Manchester has built dozens of skyscrapers and added more than 120,000 people within a 15-minute walk of the city centre between 2001 and 2023. Most places obviously cannot copy that exactly. Blackpool Tower will probably remain Blackpool’s tallest building for some time yet. But the principle scales down.
A couple of thousand extra residents in and around a town centre can make a real difference. Flats above shops, four storey apartment blocks, mansion blocks, redeveloped surface car parks and housing on underused brownfield sites would all help create the stable customer base that high streets need.
This is a much better high-street policy than tax breaks for specific kinds of business where much of the benefit will likely flow to landlords. Building homes near high streets increases the number of customers, improves local services, brings in more council tax, and is likely to be fiscally positive in the long run.
Keir Starmer talked a big game about a ‘brownfield passport’ that would have made all of this much easier. He did not deliver, though policies that would achieve that were consulted on. Burnham needs to deliver where Starmer did not.
Crossrail Britain’s big cities
Crossrail in London has proved to be an enormous success. The basic idea was simple: two existing commuter railway lines that terminated on opposite sides of the city centre were joined together by a new railway in the middle. Instead of ending at the edge of the centre, trains now pass through it. This enables people using the commuter railways to get into the centre proper and more importantly allows more trains to run, as they are not bottlenecked by needing platform space to stop and turn round in a built up city centre.
The famous version is in London. But Manchester did a smaller and cheaper version first.
Manchester’s rail network is centred on two main stations: Victoria to the north of the city centre, and Piccadilly to the south. Until 2017 there was no rail link between them and even now part of the link between them is so crowded it creates a capacity problem. Many trains terminated at these stations (and lots still do at Picadilly), which meant there was not room for all the commuter lines into them to run regular services.
Metrolink alleviated this problem. The Bury line into Victoria and the Altrincham line into Piccadilly were joined together by tram track through Manchester city centre. This enabled more frequent service on those lines and freed up capacity into Piccadilly and Victoria for other trains.
As Metrolink expanded, it also added the South Manchester line, built on the remains of an old railway that had been shut in part because there was no room for a regular service into Piccadilly. The lesson is not just “trams are good”, though trams are often good. Throughrunning and crossrailing in particular can provide huge amounts of additional capacity on existing railways for much smaller investments than are required for totally brand new systems.
Many British cities have rail networks that have city centre bottlenecks. In some, lines run into terminal stations, passengers have to change awkwardly, and capacity is limited because trains have nowhere useful to go once they reach the centre. Crossrailing solves this by turning disconnected commuter railways into metro-style networks. Glasgow, Manchester and London present the most obvious opportunities here. In others, several lines converge onto short stretches of city-centre track, creating severe congestion.. Relief tunnels or city centre street running trams could massively increase capacity in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and many other cities.
This can be achieved through short city centre tram routes as in Manchester, or through tunnels like in London. Creating a rolling programme of cheap Crossrails is something that all cities could benefit from, but will initially need national co-ordination.
Manchester can be a model
Manchester is not perfect. Growth has been uneven. The city centre has done far better than many outer boroughs. The average person still earns less than the national average. Planning remains far too restrictive in many affluent commuter areas.
But Manchester is still one of the only serious growth stories Britain has produced in recent decades. A hollowed-out post-industrial city centre with only a few hundred residents became a place of flats, bars, offices, hotels, cranes, students, visitors, employers and people. That did not happen by accident.
A Burnham government is right to focus on giving power back to local government and should pursue a radical version of this, giving them both real power and the real responsibility that comes with tax raising powers. If national government allows local government to keep the upside of good decisions (and suffer the consequences of bad ones) this could be a major change in how British politics functions. If local government uses that power to put people back on the high street, crossrail Britain’s big cities and take back control of transport, this is an agenda that could actually drive growth.
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