Labour will lose the North without rail links, Andy Burnham warns Starmer

Telegraph

18-05-2025

Sir Keir Starmer must approve big-ticket rail projects in the North if he is to avoid an exodus of voters, Andy Burnham has warned.
Appearing at a high-profile rally at Westminster, the former Cabinet minister turned Mayor of Greater Manchester said the Labour Government risks alienating its core support if it continues to overlook transport upgrades outside London.
Mr Burnham said Northern voters were rightly angry after watching multibillion-pound projects such as the Elizabeth Line come to fruition in London while schemes promised to them a decade ago remain in limbo.
He told The Telegraph: 'They look around the country and they see different standards here in terms of transport. And they see what they have to put up with every day.
'That feeds an alienation that some people feel. My argument starts to deal directly with some of the root causes of the frustration that people feel when they see a country that they don't sense is working properly at the moment and doesn't feel fair to them.'
'Unifying story'
Mr Burnham, viewed as one of the few figures within Labour able to garner support from the Left and Right of the party, issued the warning after claiming that excessive spending in the South East was partly to blame for Reform UK's recent success in the local elections.
The event, staged just yards from the House of Commons, marked a high-profile return to Westminster for Mr Burnham, who spent 15 years as an MP and held three ministerial roles under Gordon Brown.
He quit the Commons for Manchester after coming second to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership vote, and he has since sought to reinvent himself as a champion of the North.
This persona was on full display last week, as he was in London to launch plans for a new Liverpool-to-Manchester railway that he claimed would contribute £90bn to the economy.
In a joint presentation with Steve Rotheram, Mayor of the Liverpool City region, and Huw Merriman, a former Tory rail minister, he called on Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to commit to funding preparatory work that would allow construction to begin early next decade.
Mr Burnham said that would provide the certainty needed to attract investment along the route, while also providing a pipeline of work for the rail industry once the High Speed 2 (HS2) project begins to wind down.
The Manchester and Liverpool mayoral authorities, together with one to be formed in Cheshire next year, would help manage the scheme and ensure that it had cross-party support, he said, avoiding much of the controversy that dogged HS2.
He said: 'Where we can come in is to provide a kind of unifying story around where we are going from here.
'This is about giving equivalent infrastructure across the country, to start to rebalance it in a fair way. And I think that is an answer to some of the feelings that people have at this time.'
The railway would be far shorter than the new Oxford-to-Cambridge line already approved by the Government, but offer twice the economic return, according to its backers.
The scheme is central to the recently unveiled Northern Arc project, which aims to revitalise plans for a rail-led development zone stretching from Liverpool to Leeds.
Dating back to the launch of George Osborne's Northern Powerhouse blueprint in 2014 and once ambitiously dubbed High Speed 3, those plans have yet to advance beyond an upgrade of the route between Manchester and Leeds.
The Liverpool-Manchester line would slash journey times on the world's first intercity route, which opened in 1830, a decade after the world's first passenger trains began running on the Stockton & Darlington Railway.
The new line would connect the two city centres via Liverpool and Manchester airports and a new super-station at the junction with the West Coast Main Line in Warrington.
It would also include options for a connection to HS2 should the route be extended north beyond the Midlands.
Challenge to Starmer
Mr Burnham, a Cambridge graduate born in Liverpool but who grew up in Newton-le-Willows on the borders of Merseyside and Greater Manchester, met with the Chancellor during his visit to Westminster and said the response was encouraging.
However, he said 'a tangible and concrete commitment' to the line was still required.
Mr Burnham, a former health secretary and chief secretary to the Treasury, added that he was hopeful that Ms Reeves's spending review – expected in June – would confirm changes to the Treasury's Green Book investment rules 'to allow a more long-term approach'.
That should address concerns that the current requirements favour projects in the South East, he said.
However, Mr Burnham, 55, also used the project launch to issue a wide-ranging critique of the Government.
Asked about Sir Keir's strategy for cutting benefits to force more people into work, he said he sympathised with Labour MPs threatening to rebel against the proposals.
'When it comes to disability benefits and their impact on people who perhaps have no other means of making up the loss in their income, I do think it's an issue a Labour government should look at,' he said.
The remark drew cheers from onlookers on College Green, the small area of public parkland opposite the Palace of Westminster chosen for the launch.
Mr Burnham also revealed that he had pitched an initiative to ministers aimed at making benefits reform fairer by having local agencies work with claimants to help them get back into the jobs market.
He is understood to be seeking tens of millions of pounds in the spending review to roll out the plan, on which he has consulted with Alan Milburn, a Labour moderniser under Tony Blair who last year was appointed to a key advisory role at the Department of Health.
Mr Burnham stopped short of criticising the Prime Minister directly and diplomatically dodged questions about Sir Keir's 'island of strangers' immigration speech, which has drawn parallels with Enoch Powell.
The appearance of a Labour 'big beast' holding court outside Westminster, meeting with ministers and proposing a slew of proposals aimed at addressing Labour's shortfalls may nevertheless have sounded the alarm for Sir Keir.
On the one hand, giving in to Mr Burnham's demands for increased regional investment would keep him within Labour's leadership tent. On the other, it would hand further prominence to a potential rival.
While Mr Burnham won a third term as Mayor of Greater Manchester a year ago, he has said repeatedly over the years that he would not rule out a further tilt at the Labour leadership.
While Sir Keir's leadership ratings have plummeted, in a Survation survey of Labour members published in March 57pc of respondents who did not back the Prime Minister named Mr Burnham as their favoured successor, despite him not being an MP.
Overall, Sir Keir was preferred by 43pc of respondents and Mr Burnham by 21pc.
As Mr Burnham left College Green on Wednesday for discussions with Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, one man shouted that he was 'the best prime minister we never had'.
Mr Burnham smiled and said that he was 'too kind', signalling that perhaps his long-term ambitions lie in Westminster and not just the North.