Your editorial (22 July) rightly identifies the structural paradox at the heart of Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda – that it takes a confident assertion of central power to give real power away. But one institutional mechanism that goes some way to resolving this paradox operationally deserves mention: the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista), which has sat jointly between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office since April 2025.
Inherited from Keir Starmer’s government, Nista (with about 250 civil servants) merges what were the National Infrastructure Commission and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority into a single body reporting simultaneously to both departments. Under Starmer, the Cabinet Office side of that dual accountability was relatively weak. Under Louise Haigh’s new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet – explicitly endorsed by the Institute for Government as implementing long-called-for structural reforms – that balance may shift.
Nista becomes, potentially, the operational expression of the relationship between Haigh and John Healey, the new chancellor, that your editorial identifies as central to whether Burnham’s ambitions survive contact with Treasury orthodoxy.
Whether it works will depend significantly on Healey. Your editorial frames him as “not a big beast of the species likely to build a power base to rival Mr Burnham”, which may be accurate. But it understates the more interesting question of his formation. Before entering parliament, Healey spent years in disability rights and trade union work – at Mind and the Trades Union Congress, where he helped design the national minimum wage.
That pre-parliamentary biography suggests a chancellor whose instincts may align more naturally with the “preventive state” agenda than his Brown-era Treasury service implies. His predecessor Denis Healey’s capitulation to Treasury orthodoxy in 1976 shaped British politics for 50 years – the stakes of getting this relationship right are that high.
The paradox that your editorial identifies is real. Nista, under a genuinely strengthened Cabinet Office, is at least an attempt to resolve it institutionally rather than just rhetorically.
Rabbi Jeff Newman
Finchley, London
Andy Burnham’s determination to make regional devolution a reality rather than a catchphrase (remember the “northern powerhouse”?) is laudable and potentially gamechanging, but it depends so much on the ability, altruism, efficiency and drive of the regional mayors and civic leaders whose job it will be to deliver it. How many of them have the capability that Andy Burnham has shown in Manchester?
I suspect the truth is that we don’t really know. How many of us even know the names of these people, never mind what their particular strengths and proclivities are? And if that is true of those in our own region, how much more so of those we entrust to deliver in their part of the country, within the context of the national interest? Who are they, what is their motivation and what got them into the positions they occupy?
If Burnham’s policy is to be carried out properly, our expectations of these representatives have now become much wider. They are potentially champions of us all. I for one would be interested in a Guardian profile of these key regional ambassadors.
Having been in regional development in a past role myself, I have seen both good and bad, and I recognise how crucial these roles can, and must, be if they are to be the engineers of growth for us all.
David Williams
Hexham, Northumberland
It is certainly refreshing to hear that our new prime minister is trying to decentralise our London-centric government by opening a No 10 North in Manchester. However, reading his comments, it appears that he identifies Manchester as “the north”. He must realise that the north of England is much more than just the Manchester conurbation, and that replacing a single-centre approach with a double-centre one will not in itself achieve his aims of improving every postcode in the country.
Tom Carr
Newcastle upon Tyne
