Nationalisation, buses and homes for rough sleepers: This is what Andy Burnham's Britain would look like

Andy Burnham has claimed resounding victory in the Makerfield by-election, priming him for a possible leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The former Mayor of Manchester won the contest with 55% of the votes, eclipsing Reform UK candidate Robert Kenyon’s 35% vote share.

In his victory speech, Burnham said that the result revealed an appetite for change.

People have “voted for change, they have voted for more power for the north and everywhere forgotten by Westminster”, he told supporters.

Starmer’s popularity continues to plummet – but the embattled PM has pledged to stand in any Labour leadership contest.

Read more:

• Andy Burnham: ‘Right to Buy scheme means homelessness will get worse before it gets better’
• Inside the plan to give free cash to homeless people in Manchester: ‘It’s time to try something new’
• How is Keir Starmer doing as prime minister?

There are no certainties in politics. Nonetheless, it looks increasingly likely that Andy Burnham could very well be the next prime minister. So what would his Britain look like?

Over the last few weeks, he has backtracked on certain pledges. Having previously called for asylum seekers to be given easier access to public funds, he is now backing Shabana Mahmood’s controversial changes to the immigration system. He also backtracked on previous calls for the UK to rejoin the EU.

But other key policies – on homelessness, housing, and renationalisation – are unchanged. Here are some of the key policies he’s implemented in Manchester. We at Big Issue asked experts how they could be rolled out elsewhere.

Housing First

Burnham’s flagship homelessness policy in Manchester was Housing First: giving rough sleepers a permanent home immediately, with wraparound support, rather than making housing conditional on sobriety or other criteria.

Since Greater Manchester’s pilot launched in 2019, more than 450 people have been housed, with an 88% tenancy sustainment rate. Rough sleeping in the city has fallen by more than 57% since 2017, bucking the national trend.

“I started using the phrase housing is a human right, when I’d come back from Finland,” Burnham told Big Issue in a 2023 interview.

“People kept talking about Housing First and I kind of thought it was a project. But it actually came over to me when I was there that housing first is a national philosophy in Finland.”

“If people talk about prevention, if you want a true prevention policy for the country, you give everybody a good, secure home. So, it’s not an unrealistic policy, I think it’s a very realistic policy and I’m really committed to it.”

Gideon Salutin of the Social Market Foundation says the numbers back Burnham up.

“It’s one of the rare homelessness interventions with a very strong evidence base,” he tells Big Issue. “Internationally, tenancy sustainment rates are consistently above 80%, and Greater Manchester’s results match that. The costs of providing housing and support are outweighed by savings to health services, criminal justice and emergency accommodation.”

But a national rollout would be a major undertaking. In 2021, the Centre for Social Justice estimated that there were 1,995 Housing First places available in England, with between 16,450 and 29,700 places required.

“If Burnham were prime minister and made Housing First a national philosophy, as Finland has, we could dramatically reduce rough sleeping within a decade,” Salutin says.

“But it would take serious long-term investment and a coordinated building programme – without that, the model can’t work at scale.”

It’s also true that rough sleeping in Manchester has actually gone up in recent years, though it is still lower than it was in 2017 when Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020.

On housing more broadly, Burnham has called on the government to borrow £40 billion to build new council housing.

 “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he said.

Nationalise water and utilities

Andy Burnham has argued that essential services like water and energy should be publicly owned rather than run for profit.

During the Makerfield campaign, he outlined a potential 10-year strategy to bring the water industry back into public ownership.

“It’s not an industry that’s run in the public interest, and you know these are, as I say, industries run with the private vested interest, but the public have no choice but to use them, and therefore they’re trapped, and it’s just not fair,” he said.

“That’s why we need substantial reform and it is about a 10-year plan of more public control, more public ownership.

“I don’t think you nationalise the whole thing necessarily straight off, because that’s complicated and probably expensive, but you look at the different situations in different parts of the country.”

Since 1989 – when water companies were privatised – £85bn has been extracted from the water sector in dividends and other payouts to shareholders. Meanwhile, bills and incidents of pollution have soared.

Steve Reed, when he was environment secretary, claimed that water cannot be put into public ownership because it would cost £100bn. Campaigners dispute this figure.

“Parliament can decide on appropriate compensation for nationalisation, weighing up public interest versus shareholder interest,” said Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It. “And the government itself creates the regulatory framework for water which decides its market value. If it gets super tough on sewage and bills, the value of these water companies will plummet.”

Burnham also expressed support for renationalising energy. That would involve nationalising infrastructure and restructuring the grid.

Transport

Andy Burnham has pointed to his local success with transport to make the case for public ownership.

“I put them back under public control with the £2 fares, so you take that principle and apply it to energy and apply to the water – that’s what I think we need to do,” he told Channel 4 during the campaign.

The city runs the Bee Network, controlling 1,600 buses over 600 routes.

It’s been a success: Since the first franchising stage began in 2023, bus journeys in those areas have risen about 14% year-on-year, and punctuality now tops 80%, compared with roughly 70% under private operators.

Public control means more control over fares; while bus fares surged to £3 nationally, Burnham kept them at £2. He also wants to fold eight commuter rail lines into the Bee Network, and to expand cycling corridors.

Transport policy like this is also social policy, says Ben Plowden of the Campaign for Better Transport.

“What Andy Burnham and the other elected mayors have been doing is improving the transport system in their city regions to move it towards a properly integrated, multi-modal transport system,” he explains. “It improves the quality of people’s lives, to give them greater access to work, to improve their educational prospects. Having a really decent, integrated transport system is a really important way of delivering your other goals around the economy, around social justice, around the environment.”

Transport for the North research shows that 21% of the population in the area suffer from “transport-related social exclusion”.

“Just at the level of giving people in disadvantaged communities meaningful access to all those opportunities, you have to put the affordable, reliable, integrated public transport in place,” Plowden continues.

Labour has already pledged to nationalise the railways by end of 2027.  Bus franchising powers have already been extended to local authorities in England, but many councils lack the long-term funding or political stability to use them.

But having transport come out as a Downing Street priority would make a change, Plowden said.

“Obviously, the prime minister is concerned with national security and everything too, so they can’t talk about transport all day. But it would be interesting to have a prime minister who talked about transport more,” Plowden says.

“One of the things Boris Johnson did when he was mayor of London was put a lot of investment and priority into cycling, and when he was prime minister, Active Travel England was created. There was a significant increase in investment in walking and cycling. So you can see examples where a former mayor comes into national office and just gives a slightly different emphasis to the importance of transport.”

Living wage and income

Burnham has also pushed for higher pay in Greater Manchester, introducing a voluntary Living Wage City-Region agreement that now covers more than 200 accredited employers and an estimated 40,000 workers.

The mayor’s Good Employment Charter encourages firms to pay the real Living Wage (£12.60 an hour outside London), ban exploitative zero-hour contracts and offer secure work.

As prime minister, Burnham would need national legislation to enforce wage floors across the private sector.

Under Starmer, the national minimum wage has continued to rise in line with inflation, with the National Living Wage currently at £11.44 per hour for workers over 23.

But the prime minister faced serious pushback from business on this, and on the Employment Rights Bill. The Big Issue dived into this lobbying campaign here; Burnham would likely face similar challenges.

Devolution

Andy Burnham has repeatedly argued that Westminster should give English regions the same powers that Scotland and Wales enjoy.

Greater Manchester signed a devolution agreement in 2023 giving it greater powers over education and housing.

“City mayors are just politically and physically much closer to the services their voters use,” Plowden adds. “That allows them to join up transport, housing, education and health in a way national government struggles to do.”

English devolution is already under way under Labour. 50% of the English population, some 34 million people, live in an area with a mayoral devolution deal.

A Burnham premiership would likely accelerate this trend – but devolving tax powers and welfare budgets would mean overcoming resistance from Whitehall departments and MPs wary of losing control.

“Progress has been limited due to the significant control Whitehall still has over local government,” the Devolution white paper warned.

It is hard to meaningfully devolve responsibilities against a backdrop of budget crisis. Labour under Starmer has agreed integrated funding settlements for local authorities.

Proportional representation

Burnham has cautiously backed electoral reform, telling The New Statesman that first-past-the-post “locks people out,” and fuels political disillusionment.  

Labour’s landslide majority in 2024 was won on just a third of the vote share. Yet it ended up with 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, roughly 63% of the seats.

More proportional systems benefit smaller parties, but they also let more extreme elements into the halls of power; under a PR system, Reform would have won 93.

Still, first past the post isn’t enough to keep them out: if an election was held today, they’d win 311 seats, just 15 short of a majority.   

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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