Britain needs to be “blunt” about what has gone wrong in recent decades, and must spread power to people and places across the country to kickstart economic growth, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said, as he addressed the House of Commons on Tuesday for the first time since becoming prime minister.
He hit out at the deindustrialization and privatization of the 1980s, and the impact of austerity and Brexit on regions of the United Kingdom outside of the South-East and London.
“Unless we are blunt about what went wrong, we won’t turn things around. Far from taking back control, the combination of these policies took control out of the hands of communities up and down Britain,” the prime minister told the Commons.
Taking back public control over services and utilities will be at the centre of the government’s efforts to create economic growth, the prime minister said.
During a three-hour-and-23-minute statement, including questions from backbenchers, he hit out at the “failed economic model” which had led to high streets across the country being left desolate. He described Britain’s water industry as “a leaking monument to that approach, a country run in the private rather than public interest.”
Burnham added: “The government I lead will be relentless, relentless in giving people and places what they were promised 10 years ago: ownership and control.
“And from that control over their destiny comes change and growth.”
A 10-year plan for Britain, laid out later this year, will make the case for “stronger public control over these essentials, making them work for people and places again”, Burnham said.
Leading Greater Manchester as its mayor has “given me a clear theory of growth,” Burnham claimed, adding: “I will apply it to all parts of the UK learning from what has been achieved in Greater Manchester.”
An early sign of this approach was the prime minister’s announcement he had asked the prime minister’s office in Number 10 North to start working with Cornwall Council on a devolution deal “with or without an elected mayor” – and extended the offer to other parts of the country.
“For a long time, the country did not have ambitions for its regions outside of London – it even talked of the managed decline of Liverpool,” Burnham told the Commons.
“It took the devolution of power out of this place to allow our big city regions the ability to set new ambitions for themselves.
“Now, I want every single place across our regions and nations to be able to do the same, creating the conditions for good growth in every postcode.”
In his first outing in the Commons, the prime minister announced to members of parliament (MPs) he will attend the Cop 31 climate summit in Turkey in November, as he pledged to “meet the climate challenge.”
Burnham also paid tribute to his predecessor as prime minister, former prime minister Keir Starmer, who announced he would stand down as an MP on Tuesday.
Starmer has “given this country a lifetime of public service, particularly for those fighting for justice,” Burnham said, paying tribute to his work on a Hillsborough Law, and supporting Ukraine.
Burnham also began to address some of the major challenges his government faces as Parliament returns for the autumn, including overcrowding in the prisons estate.
As he set out changes to the prisons early release scheme, for which he faced a backlash over the summer, Burnham said “problem-solving over point-scoring” will “characterize” his time as prime minister.
Britain needs to adopt “a more intentional approach” to reindustrialization, the prime minister later told MPs, describing a “triple helix approach to economic development by entwining business, academia, and government” which he said he wanted to see rolled out to build a pro-business culture across regions of the country.
Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, in her first parliamentary exchange with the prime minister, accused him of “living in the past” and urged him to “start taking this job seriously.”
In their first exchange in the Commons, Badenoch added: “His diagnosis is completely wrong. His theory of growth is completely wrong. He thinks that if government spends more money, we will all get richer. That is not how this works.”
The leader of the opposition warned the prime minister: “This is a very different job to being mayor of Manchester, where he did not have to pick winners and losers, and he did not have to make difficult trade-offs. He did not have to worry about our national security. He does now.”
As he took a total of 125 questions from MPs, Burnham:
– Confirmed that a path to spending 3% of the UK’s economic output on defence, a Nato commitment, will be set out at the next spending review.
– Said he is “prepared to look at” electoral reform, including changes to the voting system, but not before the next general election.
– Committed to bringing forward a Bill which will make sweeping reforms to the leasehold system of ownership, allowing people to move more easily to commonhold “so that finally we can reform this unfair system.”