Rip up spending rules to stop Reform, Burnham urges Reeves

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Andy Burnham said the Chancellor must boost spending outside of London to stem the flow of support to Reform UK.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester warned that excessive government spending in the South East was partly to blame for Nigel Farage's party beating Labour in local elections earlier this month.
To claw back support, he said that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, should bankroll transport projects across the North of England and ditch formal Treasury spending guidelines that dictate where taxpayer money is spent.
'People want to see how this country starts to work better again, and work for everybody,' he said.
'They feel the unfairness when they travel around and it leads to the political turmoil that we experience. There is a social argument here to be made, rather than just an economic argument.
'We want a coherent strategy that all parts of the country can see their place within. If we don't get back to being a more functional, contented, united country you will always have that discontent.'
On Wednesday, Mr Burnham will lead a delegation of politicians from the North West to Westminster to press Ms Reeves to back a northern extension to High Speed 2 (HS2) and a new line between Manchester and Liverpool.
Mr Burnham said Treasury rules which provides guidance for ministers on how to appraise proposed projects – known as the Green Book – was shutting the North out of taxpayer-backed infrastructure projects.
This is because the Green Book favours investment in areas offering the biggest short-term returns, skewing projects to the South East, he said.
'The North doesn't do that well in that scenario. But it could do well if you took a long-term approach. Rip up the Green Book, is my short answer. And have the belief that the North of England can be more in the 21st century than it was in the 20th,' he added.
Mr Burnham, who stood down as an MP in 2017, said he became convinced that spending rules were flawed when working as chief secretary to the Treasury when Gordon Brown was prime minister.
He said: 'I kept asking for my list of regional projects to announce alongside it. And it came back blank. It was the moment when the scales really fell from my eyes about what the Treasury thinks.'
Since the last Conservative government scaled back its ambitions for the northern leg of HS2, Mr Burnham has been urging Ms Reeves to consider his alternative proposals for a less costly plan to complete the route.
He said without a northern part of HS2, the project would become a 'permanent monument to the London-centric nature of our country'.
The delegation to Westminster includes Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of Liverpool. Both will also press the Treasury for development funding for a new railway between Manchester and Liverpool.
Under the proposal, construction could start on the project in the mid-2030s as work on HS2 began to wind down – providing vital continuity for the railway supply chain, Mr Burnham said.
To help convince the Chancellor, Mr Burnham said a jump in land values along the route would help pay for the project if Ms Reeves funded preparatory work.
Mr Burnham, speaking at the High Speed Rail Group annual conference, also said mayoral authorities should have more power over infrastructure projects – potentially speeding up construction times.
He said HS2's top-down approach had highlighted 'something about the ways of Westminster' that build costs and delays into projects.
He said: 'We need to make a decisive break with the HS2 model. It will never work and we'll have this stop-start approach to the railway for the rest of this century if we're not careful.'
The Chancellor is expected to present the conclusions of her spending review in the coming weeks, with the outcome informing an ongoing assessment of infrastructure projects.
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