Watch in full: Andy Burnham speaks at summit in Leeds

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:02]Good afternoon, everybody.

[00:00:04]Good to be in Leeds. Nice to see you all. Um and thank you, Kim. Uh amazing speech and lovely introduction. It's good to join you at the Great North Summit to reflect on the progress we've made together in the last decade, our first decade of devolution in the north, and also to set new ambitions about where we go in the next uh decade.

[00:00:31]We are the Great North.

[00:00:34]We are on the way back, but we all know in this room we can be even greater.

[00:00:41]And that's what we're going to be.

[00:00:42]That's our mission to make it so, to revive it, reindustrialize it, and celebrate that newly resurgent north of England in the spotlight of the world's attention at the 2040 Olympic Games.

[00:01:00]Where are you, Brendan? No pressure, but we're counting on you.

[00:01:05]I'll be here then.

[00:01:07]Oh, you will. You certainly will. But you've put us in an amazing place. You gave the mayors the ambition to start thinking this way, and and here we are.

[00:01:16]Here we are. It's brilliant.

[00:01:18]And thanks to the government for their backing for the idea.

[00:01:22]And it can happen.

[00:01:24]It can happen. It is possible, but only with big changes now to the way this country is run, and that's what I want to talk about today.

[00:01:36]As you've probably worked out, >> [laughter] >> I think you know where I'm going now, don't you?

[00:01:45]Wakefield is no ordinary by-election.

[00:01:50]>> [laughter] >> I'm getting plenty of advice about what I should do. The main piece being, "For God's sake, get some new running shorts."

[00:02:01]>> [laughter] >> If you've got any, Brendan, send them my way.

[00:02:08]I believe the by-election is very necessary.

[00:02:13]In my view, the time has come for a much bigger debate about how politics needs to change if it is to work properly for the north of England, because it doesn't.

[00:02:25]It doesn't.

[00:02:27]And this is what we've got to focus on.

[00:02:30]People are losing faith in politics.

[00:02:32]More than anything, that's what people's votes were saying on Thursday, the 7th of May.

[00:02:39]They deserve a bigger response than politicians have given them before, and that's what I intend to provide in this by-election like no other.

[00:02:50]My core argument is this.

[00:02:57]Britain, if you look at the at the last 50 years, Britain has been on the wrong path.

[00:03:07]40 years.

[00:03:09]40 years on the wrong path.

[00:03:11]A path that has damaged communities across the north.

[00:03:18]The deindustrialization of the 1980s was devastating for places across Makerfield like Ashton-in-Makerfield, Orrell, Winstanley, Hindley, Platt Bridge. But you know, you could reel off the same place names, couldn't you, in your in your communities. You know exactly what I am talking about.

[00:03:41]The draining away of economic, social, and political power from these places, left adrift.

[00:03:49]That's what happened.

[00:03:52]But that deindustrialization was then compounded by deregulation, privatization in the '90s, and austerity in the 2010s.

[00:04:07]It all adds up to 40 years of neoliberalism that have not been kind to the north of England.

[00:04:15]40 years of trickle-down economics that did not, in the end, trickle-down very much at all to Platt Bridge or Hindley. In fact, that system has siphoned wealth out of those places and into the hands of people for whom life was already very good.

[00:04:36]It created an economy that didn't work for most working people.

[00:04:42]It led to the loss of good jobs, the decline of our high streets, and the neglect of our towns. It led to people paying over the odds for the daily basics: energy, housing, water, transport.

[00:04:56]And in the 2000s, and particularly in the 2010s, our councils across the north of England were stripped of the resource and power to do anything about it. They just don't have the agency that they should have to protect people from these changes. And that's the broken state of local government in England that we that we see right now, but is particularly felt in councils across the across the north. You know the truth of what I'm saying. It's left us in a very bad state.

[00:05:26]If politics can't fix something as simple as a pothole, you've got a very big problem.

[00:05:36]Why should people have faith in the ability of politics to do anything if it can't do something as simple as that?

[00:05:45]And how unfair is it on those who work hard in their communities and then just get swept away because of the failure of national government to protect local government and give them the ability to make basic improvements in their communities. It's not right. It's just not right. It needs saying that it's not right and I'm here to do that.

[00:06:07]It's need a completely different relationship between national and local local government.

[00:06:14]What we've got at the moment across large parts of the north of England, as good as the last decade has been in terms of the start we've made with devolution underneath the combined authorities, sadly we have hollowed out councils and we have an unaccountable state where too much is delivered by arms length or outsourced agencies that local councilors can't control.

[00:06:40]So many crucial services like housing and energy delivered by fragmented agencies outside of local democratic control.

[00:06:49]Let me give you a couple of examples.

[00:06:51]In recent times we have experienced severe repeat flooding in Platt Bridge, Bigger Shaw, and Ashton.

[00:07:00]Caroline Simpson, group chief executive of Greater Manchester Combined Authority answered a a call from myself as mayor and Josh Simons as local MP to get the agencies around the table.

[00:07:13]And we had to move heaven and earth to get that single conversation going.

[00:07:18]And a plan to deal with it which we're still which we're still waiting for. It shouldn't be like that.

[00:07:25]We had to confront them with difficult questions like this. Why don't the rivers and brooks around this part of the Wigan Borough have gauges so that people get a warning of a flood like they do in other parts of the country?

[00:07:40]Some of our more deprived communities should be at the top of the list for funding to make them more resilient, and the truth is they're at the bottom.

[00:07:48]With no accountability about how that money is allocated, no real accountability.

[00:07:55]And the voice of those places is just simply not heard in the same way as others by those unaccountable agencies.

[00:08:04]They were not told, {quotes} "We'll give you whatever money is needed, and it will be spent as Mr. Cameron once told the home counties when they flooded in the 2014 floods."

[00:08:17]Another recent example has been the huge illegal waste dump in Bickershaw, which the authorities initially refused to shift, even though they had done so in the same circumstances in Oxfordshire.

[00:08:30]These are the things that need to change. If if politics can't fix these things and can't deliver fairness across the country, equal treatment, it's no wonder that people lose faith.

[00:08:42]It's no wonder that things start to fragment, and this will threaten devolution in the north of England if we have a toxic politics underneath the combined authorities and the local authorities. Lo- Local authorities are not able to do the basic things. We've had to support Trafford Council this year because of a poor national settlement, and that it's just not how it should be.

[00:09:05]Local government should be given the funds it needs to discharge its statutory responsibilities, but it often isn't given that funding to to do that. And this could threaten devolution in the north of England cuz the foundations upon which it is built are the local authorities that are the members of those combined authorities, and we really need to use this moment to tell some home truths to people in Whitehall because it really can't go on like this.

[00:09:37]I want to say sorry to the residents of the Makerfield constituency for the circus that is about to arrive in town and some of the inconvenience they will experience as a result. But on the other hand, I want to say this to them as well. I hope you feel it's a good thing as well that the places that make up this constituency, long forgotten by national politics, finally are at the center of the national debate.

[00:10:08]And for the places of this constituency, again, you could read many other similar places in yours. Let's get them at the top of the top of the agenda for the first time in a very long time. And that's what this by-election will will hopefully succeed in doing.

[00:10:26]My plan for Makerfield will be ambitious and it will show how we lift up its people and places over the next decade.

[00:10:32]It will involve action to make the basics of life more affordable, like rents, bills, and fares.

[00:10:39]All rail stations and services in Makerfield coming into the B network and leading to a big reduction for people in the cost of public transport and the cost of travel.

[00:10:51]It will involve the reindustrialization of our part of the world, for instance, through the work I'm doing as mayor to bring modern manufacturing to the PPG site in Hindley Green. Changes to education to make technical education the equal of the university route and give young people new paths into good jobs. How wrong it is that the best part of 30 years now that the debate in education has all been about the university route and the whole system has been built to support the university route. What about those millions of kids across the north of England who want technical qualifications, who want paths into good jobs and support to get to those jobs?

[00:11:31]What about them? Who has been speaking for them and their life chances in recent decades? They've been written off. They've not featured in the national political debate. That is one of the things that this by-election is going to change cuz I've been speaking about them. I will continue to speak about them and their aspirations and their life chances. And that is a big way in which politics needs to change, not just sending messages into the the middle ground of voters, but speaking for all people and particularly kids who most need politicians to focus on their life chances, which is what we've been doing in Greater Manchester. Thank you.

[00:12:11]>> [applause] >> I will make the building of more council homes part of my Makerfield plan, building on my work as Greater Manchester Mayor.

[00:12:23]And I want to come back to where I started with, you know, how do we make this work? And then how does this become a template and then a settlement that works for all of the combined authorities in the north represented in this room doing great great work. And as far as I'm concerned, on the same path as as Greater Manchester. We're all working more and more together. And summits like this bring out that that collaboration. And I think we can all go so much further in the next decade if we're set up set up to do so. We've proved the concept, haven't we? We've proved it works. We have proved that we are doing more for our communities than Whitehall ever did for us. They never even had an ambition for the different parts of the north. It took devolution to give us the ability to set an ambition and then to go towards it. But think about what we could do more with a more determined approach in the next next decade.

[00:13:19]The things I've just outlined will only succeed with serious rewiring of this country to transfer power and resources back to local areas.

[00:13:29]And that's what I want to do if I am uh returned to Parliament. It depends upon maximum devolution of power and resources from national government to local government. And I want anyone, obviously from uh the national uh system, to really understand that. We can't have this halfway house anymore, where something gets devolved but none of the people get devolved and they sit there marking the homework of the combined authorities and finding new ways of putting pressure on us uh to do uh to do something uh that they that they want. It's a ti- It's time to trust trust the regions of this of this country. Free them up. Let them get on with the job.

[00:14:16]It means less delivery through unaccountable national agencies.

[00:14:21]And it means more things coming under local democratic control, like our buses. We can't go on with a bloated national state and a malnourished local one.

[00:14:34]It is time for public servants to be transferred into local authorities and combined authorities to give them the capacity and the agency to get things done.

[00:14:45]This is how we underpin the next decade of devolution in the north of England.

[00:14:49]It's the type of change I want to see for the people of Makerfield. The positive energy it will unlock will be huge. It will bring people back together, get places like Makerfield working, and move us beyond some of the divisive debates of the last uh decade.

[00:15:06]My view is that Brexit has been damaging, but I also believe the last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments. Britain will be stuck in a permanent rut if we're just constantly arguing and people are pulling away from each other, it is time, surely, isn't it, to bring people back together, to focus on what we've got in common, to get the growth uh coming to all places, so it's felt there. That that is what we need in this moment. And it's really important that whatever comes out of this by-election, there's a more kind of unifying feeling about the change that we need to work towards.

[00:15:47]I'm not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU. I respect the decision that was made at the referendum.

[00:15:54]And it's going to undermine everything set I've said about strengthening democracy if we don't respect that vote.

[00:16:02]If we are to unify communities and the country, it means focusing on the big economic challenges we have, the structural problems that I've been talking about before, the fact that we gave away so many of the levers of economic power when we deregulated and privatized. That is a problem. You know, we don't have control of the basics and the cost of them, and therefore we don't have control of public spending. If local authorities are facing the cost of temporary accommodation and the benefit system is chasing rents in the private rented sector as we are right now, how can we control our costs as a country? It is about getting a fundamental grip on those things, and that's the main thing that matters. We need a relentless domestic focus in this period. Let's fix our own country. Let's get it working again. Let's get it back to where people want it to be. I sense a real yearning out there. But people feel, why aren't we where we should be? Why aren't things just working as they should? And that's what I think has to be our focus now, fixing the fundamentals of our own country, rather than plunging into another divisive debate about our relationship with other countries.

[00:17:14]But I do support what this government is doing in driving for a stronger, more collaborative approach with Europe, our closest neighbors, with whom we share so much.

[00:17:24]So, in conclusion, everybody, I decided to put myself forward to bring this debate to the fore.

[00:17:36]Too much of what we need to change is is in the hands of others. The North doesn't have all of the control that it needs to turn things around, to turn around the lives of our people, to give new life to our towns and our our high streets.

[00:17:54]We just don't have it.

[00:17:56]And if we're to take what we've done in the last decade and then go further and deeper in the next, there's going to have to be a serious transfer of power and resources right across the North of England.

[00:18:10]The places where I grew up, long ignored by national politics, are finally at the center of the nation's attention. And I can't tell you how proud that makes me makes me feel. And I was growing up, I saw them go into decline. I was at school in this area when the mines were closed and industry closed in the 1980s, and they've just not recovered anytime since. So, to have them now, through this by-election, under the spotlight, uh that does make me happy. Cuz the people there can now rightly demand of Westminster, Whitehall, and all of the political parties, "What are you going to do for us?"

[00:18:54]And they all have to answer that question now because of this by-election. And then the public will be able to choose between the answers that they are given.

[00:19:04]And that's how it should be. We're putting power back in their hands, and people need to justify what they believe to the people of these of these communities. All of the parties standing in this by-election need to set out clearly how they would change things to change life in Platt Bridge, Abram, Bickershaw, Hindley.

[00:19:28]Particularly those parties to my right who were all cheerleaders for the Thatcherite policies which laid us low in the first place.

[00:19:38]Will they now disown them? Apologize for them? We'll be waiting to hear. I am clear about what I am offering.

[00:19:45]If I get to stand, a vote for me will be a vote to change Labour because Labour needs to change if we're to regain people's trust.

[00:19:56]It'll be a vote to make life more affordable again, a vote to power up places, a vote to re-industrialize. This is the choice in this by-election. Do you want Makerfield and the north to stay on the same path it's been for the last 40 years, or do you want a new path which brings the country back together and makes it work for everyone? I know why I'm standing, I know what I'm offering.

[00:20:21]I know what my party has offered in the past has simply not been good enough.

[00:20:26]The loss of faith of voters across the north, so many of whom once saw us as their natural party, is our fault and nobody else's.

[00:20:35]I want to help fix that and I hope people will give me the chance to make that case.

[00:20:41]Thank you very much indeed for listening, everybody.

[00:20:43]>> [applause] [applause]