Something is stirring in Britain, which bears watching on this side of the Atlantic.
On June 29th, Andy Burnham — the former mayor of Greater Manchester and soon-to-be-annointed British Prime Minister — made a remarkable speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.
With Britain suffering from persistent economic malaise and a series of deep, self- inflicted wounds — over-centralization, Brexit, and unbalanced growth, chief among them — Burnham focused not on “who governs Britain but how Britain is governed.” In a highly centralized nation, he made localism and the decentralization of power the central themes of his soon-to-be-formed Administration.
This is a bold manifesto with the clear intent of shocking a system.
“We will bring about the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen. It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.
It comes from having the power at ground level to make a real difference; from a clear shared vision that everyone can understand and investors can back.
It comes from running sound finances, as we have done in Greater Manchester, which in turn gives businesses the stability and confidence to invest, increasing their productivity and adoption of new technology.
It comes from placing our universities at the heart of local economies — as all the Mayors do — and bringing the innovation-led approach through start-ups and scale-ups.
It comes from committing to decent infrastructure in all parts of the UK and getting national investors to back the aspirations set by regions.
It comes from giving people the security of a good home and good employment so that they can be as productive as possible; from good mobility and an ability to afford the basics.
And it comes from not leaving everything to the market – but public intervention where necessary to set higher ambitions for towns, as we did in Stockport, and kickstart the process of change.”
Nine years as mayor has left an indelible imprint on Burnham’s political vision, what he calls “Manchesterism.” Britain, of course, has heard talk of devolution before, under successive Prime Ministers. As someone who has served under Blair, Brown and Corbyn, Burnham knows all too well that centralized power is rarely given up by those elected or administrative officials who hold it. And, so, he has cleverly devised a new governing mechanism — the establishment of a No 10 North in Manchester — to ensure his localist vision breaks through.
“No 10 North will be the nerve centre for a rewired Britain.
It will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK.
It will coordinate all parts of government, at national and local level, to agree a long-term economic strategy and help all places set new growth ambitions.
It will be given a mission to strive for equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain – borrowing from the German Basic Law.
It will make place-based collaboration the new operating principle for UK plc, requiring all government departments and agencies to support strategic and local authorities with staffing and resources.”
To begin, No 10 North will have three central tasks:
“On utilities, we will ensure all parts of the UK are able to take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport, learning from the model of what has transformed our bus networks here in Greater Manchester. We will set out 10-year plans to bring down the cost of these essentials — to individuals, families and businesses.
On reindustrialisation, we will support every region to set clear and credible industrial ambitions — and provide the support to achieve them, encouraging more cross-UK partnership between places with complementary industrial clusters, as Cambridge and Manchester have done on life sciences.
[On regeneration,] we will consolidate public and private investment at a place-based level and help all areas establish Good Growth Funds, as we have done here in Greater Manchester.”
Since the Manchester speech, Burnham’s ground-up vision of change has precipitated an unprecedented level of attention around issues of governance and power. Over the past several weeks, we have seen his philosophy alternatively lauded and embraced as well as dissected and dismissed. Let’s face it: the topics of “devolution” and the division of powers and responsibilities within a nation are usually reserved for specialized think tanks, research centers and government agencies. Mayors, while widely admired for their pragmatism and bias towards problem solving and action, are expected to play their roles and NOT set national agendas.
In my opinion, a few commentaries — an editorial in the Financial Times, an op-ed in the FT by Andy Haldane and a blog by Geoff White at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy — stand out for their perspicacity. Taken together, they offer five key takeaways which help frame the early days of this grand experiment in power shifting.
First, it is fascinating to watch how quickly the political zeitgeist has changed. Devolution is having an “it” moment, providing an ideological center around which subsequent policy debates will now revolve.
The Financial Times Editorial Board weighed in on June 29th, the same day as the Manchester speech. Under a header that read, “Burnham’s radical localism alone won’t fix the UK economy,” the editorial begins with an important admission.
“An ambitious devolution plan can be part of the answer to driving faster productivity growth. The UK is one of the most fiscally centralised nations in the world. This contributes to its vast regional economic inequalities and helps to explain why the country’s second cities lag so far behind their international peers. Greater regional autonomy would allow policy to be more tailored closely to local needs, while giving local authorities a strong incentive to foster economic growth.”
Andy Haldane’s contribution was aptly entitled “Rewiring the nation, Burnham-style.” Haldane is a respected voice in Britain as a contributing FT editor and a former chief economist at the Bank of England. But he, admirably, is steeped in cities. He and I, for example, have both served on South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard’s mayoral economic advisory council. In his prior role as CEO of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, he co-chaired (with then Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees) a UK Urban Futures Commission (on which I also served).
Haldane echoes the fundamental importance of shifting power.
“[Burnham’s devolution call] is an important underpinning of both economic and democratic renewal. It is no coincidence that the US has both the most centralised government in the western world and its widest local disparities too. Whether unlocking growth or repairing trust in politics, success will only come from the bottom up.”
Second, Haldane rightly positions Burnham vision as “not just a new model of government but a new model of governance —- a rewiring of the nation as well as the state. The key to this new model is collaboration.”
This is a profound, often overlooked, insight:
“The UK economy is an ecosystem of public, private and civil society sectors, pushed and pulled by multiple policy levers. For it to flourish, these need to be coordinated around a common growth goal. In other words, a flourishing economy requires just the sort of collaboration Whitehall finds impossible.
But what is impossible nationally can, however, be achieved locally. Greater Manchester has shown this over the past three decades, building its success around a well-defined local growth strategy that coordinates not only government but all local institutions — businesses, education and training providers, civic groups and investors.
The importance of devolution, then, is not an end in itself, but in providing the culture and structure that enables such coordination. The radical rewiring that Burnham offers is not (or not just) from Whitehall to city hall, but from city hall to city square.” (Emphasis added)
Haldane goes further and, smartly, extends his views on collaboration across places.
“In the 20th century, “supercities” propelled growth. In the 21st it is the world’s super-regions — connected clusters of cities — that will do so. Given our compact geography, the UK is a perfectly sized super-region. But it can only become one through far closer cooperation, and improved transport links, across the country. Cross-regional initiatives are paving the way, but far greater muscularity is needed.”
Haldane, in short, rejects the conventional notion in the UK that devolution is merely a shift in power and decision-making authority between the central government and local and metropolitan governments. It rather embraces the broader U.S. understanding of localism, where cities and metro areas are practically “governed” not just by mayors, county leaders and local legislators but by networks of private and civic institutions and associations.
Third, the FT Editorial Board and Haldane both couple their praise for Burnham’s localist vision with a fair demand for more specificity.
As the Editorial Board opines,
But how decentralisation is delivered matters, too. If local authorities are to drive growth they will need the resources, personnel and, above all, the right tax and spending tools. National levies will also need reforming. … Burnham will need to set out more detail beyond his gimmicky proposal for a “No 10 North” coordinating body — his plan to move part of the Downing Street operation to Manchester.
Haldane, for his part, goes deeper.
“The biggest barrier to this new model’s success is a lack of local capacity and capability. Take people: fewer than 10,000 work in the English mayoral combined authorities, compared with a civil service of over 500,000. As for financial capacity, the combined budget of the MCAs is less than £10bn, a mere 0.3 percent of UK GDP.
To jumpstart change, these gaps need to be filled — and fast — through upfront investment. One way of doing so, at no added fiscal cost, would be to make use of the more than £100bn already committed to the UK’s so-called public financial institutions (PuFins) — Homes England, the National Wealth Fund, the British Business Bank and so on.
Top-slicing 10 percent of their committed capital would give each Municipal Combined Authority a £1bn endowment. That would enable them to build a Good Growth Fund — the model recently pioneered in Greater Manchester and championed by Burnham.”
Fourth, Geoff White offers an interesting perspective on how a devolved system offers up new opportunities for continuous policy learning.
He sets the stage well:
“Over the last four decades the UK has become one of the most centralised large economies in the developed world. It has been described as an “incoherent state” — all “hub no spokes” — with highly centralised policy design and fragmented delivery. Constrained to the “shadow of hierarchy“, UK governments have shown limited capacity or willingness to pivot to other forms of learning — from delivery agencies, local authorities, independent experts, stakeholders and citizens.”
Devolution offers a path to developing new ways of designing policy.
“Moving beyond a top-down model of governance requires devolving policy learning and strengthening local levels of government. … Increased resources and capacity are required but also strengthening of incentives to motivate local government to pursue evidence-based policy.”
Devolution also offers a way to move beyond the silos and stovepipes of central governments. The origins of spatial inequalities span disciplines and departments, and so should solutions.
“Horizontal structures and cultures for learning are needed so sub-national agencies can learn from each other rather than lessons being mediated, often inadequately, through the centre (Mulgan (2026)). The Test, Learn and Grow programme is exploring this with local agencies at relatively small scale and the What Works Centres doing so within some policy areas. But a more radical initiative is required.”
Finally, the FT editorial calls for a true growth strategy that includes but goes beyond devolution. This is, by far, the most important critique of Burnham’s agenda and mirrors the volatile environment of heightened geo-political tensions and fast-accelerating technological disruptions.
“Burnham must define more clearly what he means by backing “re-industrialisation” or it risks turning into yet another wasteful and poorly targeted growth strategy, spanning everything from the steel sector to town centre retailers and life sciences. Indeed, his speech made little mention of how he would strengthen Britain’s existing comparative advantages in financial services and technology and align the country to future growth sectors. AI was notably absent.
Burnham’s emphasis on devolution speaks to a genuine structural problem in the UK economy. But it is no panacea for the country’s long-running struggle to raise productivity. What the country needs is a forward-looking growth model, centred on the private sector, rather than the statist and industrial nostalgia that coloured large parts of his foundational speech.”
So, what should Americans make of these doings in Britain? Power in our federal republic is already highly distributed across layers of government and sectors of society. To that end, we already have many of the advantages that Britain seeks.
Yet, as I have argued before, the serious business of governance and the real solving of problems is devolving further in the U.S. because of the chaos and general unreliability of the federal government. As in prior periods of our history, we should expect a burst of innovation — in institution building, in intermediary creation, in project design and delivery, in financial instruments and capital stacks — but this time from cities and metropolitan areas, the places that concentrate our population and drive our economy.
In Britain, devolution will occur de jure; in the U.S. it will happen de facto. Differences aside, there will be much to learn and share as our two systems fundamentally alter the way they are governed and embrace, define and further radical localism.
Bruce Katz is Founder of New Localism Associates and a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics.