Burnham, with his behind-the-scenes TikTok video of No 10 North, has made devolving power away from Westminster his central big idea. “If anything had brought me into parliament, it was a mission to close the North-South divide,” he wrote in his 2024 book, Head North. “Seeing how things worked from the inside, I finally understood why England has always felt like two countries.”
The clearest statement of this intention since he became prime minister is a paper his cabinet published in July, which outlined plans to let mayors keep a share of income tax generated in their areas and give them greater control over skills, transport and public services.
“These plans are a seminal moment in terms of how Britain is run,” Josh Halliday tells me. “But the risks are huge. It just takes one or two bad scandals – such as the bankruptcy of Birmingham council – to really damage the legitimacy of the whole project.” Here’s how those risks break down.
The media | A shrinking local press
Burnham was the mayor of a city comparatively well-served by the media. The Guardian was founded in Manchester and continues to have a newsroom of reporters there (including Josh). Despite the ongoing decline of regional journalism, flourishing media start-ups and subscription newsletters in cities like Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham have proven there is still demand for quality local journalism. There have also been wider initiatives to address England’s “news deserts”, such as the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service.
But the bigger picture is one of endless closures and cuts. Reach, the owner of regional titles in England, announced a further round of 220 redundancies (though plans to create 60 new roles) two weeks ago. Even Burnham, who started his career writing for publications such as Tank World, moved to London to find work in journalism. Josh, who graduated from Sunderland university in 2010, used to dream of working for a local newspaper, but found it difficult to even get a work experience placement.
“There are fewer and fewer local journalists, which means fewer people keeping an eye on council meetings or scrutinising budget reports,” he tells me. “And that’s really worrying.”
Local democracy | Participation has been ‘squeezed’
Journalism isn’t the only institution that holds politicians’ feet to the fire. Civil society plays a crucial role, but the cost of living crisis and the gradual erosion of the institutions that bind people together have diminished people’s involvement in politics.
“We often talk about the cost of living crisis as a financial squeeze,” Sarah Longlands, the chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies in Manchester, tells me. “But it’s also squeezed people’s ability to turn up at local campaign groups, to attend town council meetings, to run as councillors themselves, because they’re just focused on the day-to-day of getting by.”
For most people, politics isn’t about nuclear deterrents or Westminster white papers, but about how often the bins get emptied or whether the library stays open. In recent years, local authorities have sold off local assets and outsourced public services to faceless providers. This, Sarah says, has robbed people of institutions that give them a stake in their communities. “Take away publicly funded local services, and you take away the frontline engagement and relationship between councils and communities that form part of democracy,” she says.
She is particularly concerned that Burnham may decide to go ahead with a plan to reorganise local government that he inherited from his predecessor. Those plans are now on pause, but two professors recently described in the Guardian’s letter pages how the scheme could result in the disappearance of as many as 75% of England’s existing councils, eliminating institutions that have close ties to communities, and making services even more anonymous and detached.
Scrutiny | Who will keep an eye on the money
Over the last decade there’s been a vacuum of information about the financial decisions taken by councils. In 2015, David Cameron abolished the Audit Commission, a body that scoured local governments’ accounts every year. Since then, some struggling councils have gone on reckless spending sprees, buying office blocks and shopping centres while cutting back on local services. Some have since declared bankruptcy. “The National Audit Office will get called in to investigate, but only once there’s already been an emergency,” Josh tells me. “They’re not a safeguard against financial crises.”
The Starmer government introduced plans for a new Local Audit Office, which should help address some of these problems, and Burnham’s government is expected to publish further details of its plans for accountability in a few weeks’ time alongside its first budget.
Amid all this is a wider question about how to make the devolution of power genuinely democratic. Sarah suggests that any new authority or mayoralty should commit to an ongoing citizens’ assembly, where residents can collectively decide how new resources are allocated, and scrutinise government spending.
“The government mainly talks about devolution as a way to drive growth,” she says. “But this could be a cutting edge way to redesign British democracy, so it really works for people.”
Birmingham City Council, where in 2023 the city council joined a number of authorities <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/10/birmingham-council-asset-sales-city-reeling-residents-bankruptcy">declaring bankruptcy</a>. Photograph: Martyn Williams/Alamy
