Was this a joke? Andy Burnham claimed on coming to office to be a localist. Not for the new prime minister the hotspots of the capital, of posh Downing Street and Whitehall. His were the squares of Manchester and the pavements of Wigan. The centre was the enemy of local democracy.
Yet his first week in office has been consumed by one gratuitous intervention in local government after another. He gatecrashed a Westminster rough-sleeping centre and proclaimed a policy to end homelessness. He then decided to cap local bus fares, cut local pub business rates and build more social houses. For good measure, he would create a new national care service.
I know of no other country in Europe where any of these functions are required to be performed by central government. Can we imagine Emmanuel Macron running buses, or Giorgia Meloni care homes? It is as if Burnham craves to be mayor of everywhere.
There can be no more task more truly local than dealing with rough sleepers. Many years ago, when I visited the “cardboard city” near Waterloo station in London, I found volunteers struggling with up to 100 individuals. Almost all were victims of central government, of army, prison and mental hospital releases and delayed asylum claims. There are now thought to be about 15,000-18,000 such people in the UK and I doubt if many will ever see Burnham’s 1,200 social houses or even his £340m rough-sleeper bonanza. Rough sleeping is most prevalent in London and southern England, and most of those people need personal help from local officials and volunteers, not Burnham’s bureaucrats.
Central government is not the agency to house homeless people. Most are reliant on single-property private landlords. These are the very people whom Burnham, like Keir Starmer before him, seems to want to push into selling their properties with eviction controls and a barrage of new regulations. The likely result is that tens of thousands of the cheapest city-centre flats will simply be taken off the market.
Then there’s Burnham’s promise to build new state social housing – “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. The last time Whitehall tried something similar was John Prescott’s Pathfinder regeneration scheme in 2002. It was a fiasco, demolishing houses then leaving large parts of northern cities deserted and dead. Subsidies may help but property development is not a job for central government. Burnham’s headline gesture of the week, cutting pub business rates by a trivial £1,100 each, after they had just risen by thousands of pounds, was bizarre.
The new care service is scarcely credible. The NHS is proving week after week that running personal care is not a national function. Blundering bureaucracy is simply insensitive. The care service is certainly all but bust because central government allowed it to be turned over to international racketeers. The cost is crippling. Care homes should be community institutions, locally owned, locally run and aided, if need be, by central grants.
What is extraordinary is how the bid to squash central power grips every politician when running for office, yet evaporates as soon as they get it. Tony Blair pledged a passionate localism. David Cameron promised to promote decentralisation and democratic engagement, but later took central control of housing targets. Starmer in 2024 promised to “deepen our democracy by … devolving power to communities”, and then overruled them as “blockers and nimbys”.
All pledges to decentralise Britain have proved empty. Under each prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, control of local taxes, schooling, housing and planning have been subject to ever-more central oversight. The UK is the most fiscally centralised country in the G7 – twice as much as the next most centralised country, Italy. Germany, Spain and the Nordic countries allow localities to fix their own taxes and run their own public services.
To help them do so, they receive generous tax redistribution from the centre, ensuring poor areas do not suffer or the rich benefit. The result is that Nordic countries experience the most equitable local service delivery of any countries in Europe. Local means efficient and equitable.
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Burnham clearly plans to impose his own policy priorities on local councils, with inevitably dubious financial assistance. Meanwhile, one can imagine he will leave the true fiascos of Britain’s public sector well alone. Whitehall’s grand projects – Hinkley Point, HS2 and the Palace of Westminster – will dance into the night, consuming five, 10, 20 times what similar ones cost in other countries. They are excused investigation or criticism, and for one reason. They are central. There is no sign of Burnham questioning them.
Besides, rough sleeping gets a better headline.
