When it comes to economic growth Burnham can’t devolve away the hard decisions
The atmosphere around the Labour Party Conference is a pretty good barometer of where the government is at. Last year felt pretty funereal. The one before that felt almost optimistic. The one before Labour was in government, before they actually had to do things, was as party-like as a gathering of thousands of political enthusiasts can be.
This year has been less celebratory than the high of a few years ago. It is more, it is nice to have someone in charge who seems to like being here and enjoy the spectacle of the whole thing. The ministers that have been at various fringes have been doing their usual indulgences of their various sectors (Chris McDonald’s riff on the quality of the UK’s tungsten mines was a particular highlight.) It has been pretty nice.
If Andy Burnham has one political skill it is that he is genial. He likes football, and pies, and has a kind of soft welcoming northerness that the professional northerners that work at Wonkhe can only aspire to achieve. His problem is that being Prime Minister does not allow for a be-something-to-everyone approach to politics. If he is lucky, he might keep some people happy for some of the time.
His economic agenda now looks to be being pulled in two distinct directions. There is Chancellor John Healey who used his speech to announce a series of state backed interventions. “A new age of industrialisation,” with shoutouts to the industrial sectors of AI, defence, finance, and the creative industries. This is built on the “rock of fiscal discipline.” Although Burnham has ruled out an election it is difficult to imagine how reindustrialisation and the mass nationalisation of industry will work under the fiscal rules he has inherited from Rachel Reeves.
Although Healey’s speech launched the Local Apprenticeship Service, “a bit like football scouts for apprenticeships,” the interventions that will actually move the dial on the things he cares about are not about devolved policy at all. It is only the state that has the money and coordinating capacity to reindustrialise vast swathes of the country. In Rewiring the State Burnham said that
Decisions on local growth need to be taken by local leaders who can set the right high ambitions for their areas, and who, with the right people and the right skills, are able to join up policies and delivery, and focus on the needs of places and people rather than being constrained by the remit of a department of state.
More devolved governance is well overdue but his economic ambitions may well run into his desire for local decision making. To take only one example from the conference, Public First’s new report setting out how to grow the Oxford-Cambridge innovation corridor, would require local authorities to do precisely the things they have been reluctant to do, which is to ignore the views of well organised local residents to build enormous amounts of infrastructure.
It is a big circle or Burnham to square and he has the Autumn Budget coming up. One route is that he might well play up piecemeal skills funding, like the “downpayment” on Milburn’s NEETs report in the shape of the Local Apprenticeships Service, while developing innovation partnerships that look a bit like devolution but are administered more like local grants. The other is that he has found some new money to go with some new powers that might just keep everything heading in the right direction.
The man who built a reputation as King of the North may well find his kingdom to be an unwieldy, overlapping, fiscal and administrative boundary-crossing mess, that uses local powers to stop the national growth his government has set its standard to.