Why Andy Burnham Wants More Power Over Public Services And Why It Will Fail

Every few months, the political commentariat works itself into a frenzy over regional devolution. Andy Burnham steps up to a podium, talks about putting buses back into public hands, demands control over job centres, and promises a municipal golden age. The lazy consensus among urban policy wonks is that geography is destiny. Give a mayor a bigger budget, draw a tighter ring around a city region, and accountability magically follows.

It is a comforting fairy tale. It also completely misunderstands how modern state capacity actually functions.

I have spent decades watching politicians trade central government bureaucracy for municipal bureaucracy, expecting different results while using the exact same operational playbooks. Handing a local politician authority over a failing transit network or a broken training scheme without changing the underlying economic and operational incentives is not reform. It is just regional rebranding.

The Localisation Fallacy

The core argument for devolution relies on a seductive intuition. Westminster is too remote. Whitehall bureaucrats do not know the difference between Bolton and Bury. Therefore, decision-making should be dragged down to the hyper-local level where leaders can see the problems out of their office windows.

Scale does not fix incompetence. If an administrative apparatus is bloated, risk-averse, and insulated from market realities, shrinking its jurisdiction only shrinks the sandbox. It does not turn bad managers into good ones.

Imagine a scenario where a regional authority takes over a suburban rail line. The politicians cheer because the logo on the side of the carriages changes from a private operator to a municipal transport executive. The train still runs late. The signalling system is still forty years old. The workforce is still bound by rigid national bargaining agreements that make structural reform nearly impossible. The commuter does not care whether the politician signing off on the fare hike sits in Whitehall or Manchester. A delayed train is a delayed train.

Proponents of municipal ownership love to point to historical examples like the pre-Thatcher municipal utilities or continental European models. They conveniently omit the structural differences. Continental cities operate within completely different tax baselines, legal frameworks, and municipal financing structures. Merely declaring that Greater Manchester wants a London-style transport system without having London-style property values, density, or tax-raising powers is pure theatre.

The Accountability Mirage

Accountability is the buzzword thrown around every time a new mayoral power is handed over. The theory goes that voters can turf out a mayor who mismanages local services far easier than they can punish a faceless cabinet minister in London.

In practice, local democratic engagement in regional mayoral elections is notoriously anaemic. Turnout often hovers around thirty percent. When the electorate is that disengaged, regional mayors do not face rigorous democratic accountability; they face a low-turnout echo chamber where brand recognition trumps operational competence.

Furthermore, when things go wrong under devolved powers, the blame-shifting mechanism simply adapts. Instead of blaming Westminster, local leaders blame underfunding from central government. Westminster blames local mismanagement. The citizen is caught in an endless loop of bureaucratic finger-pointing where no one possesses clear, unmitigated responsibility.

True accountability requires skin in the game. When a local authority controls services but relies on central government grants for eighty percent of its funding, it is not an autonomous government. It is a branch office with delusions of grandeur. Until regional mayors have the unvarnished political courage to raise their own revenues locally through property taxes or regional levies to pay for their promises, devolution is nothing more than asking Westminster for pocket money while pretending to run the household.

The Procurement Quagmire

Proponents of bringing services back in-house often frame it as a battle between public good and private greed. Strip away the rhetoric, and you are left with procurement.

Public sector procurement is a legal and administrative minefield designed not to find the best provider, but to avoid getting sued. When a municipal authority brings a service back under public control, it inherits the same procurement handcuffs that plagued private contractors. It still has to navigate complex labour laws, rigid civil service frameworks, and risk-averse legal departments.

I have watched public bodies spend millions of pounds and multiple years trying to insource IT systems or facilities management, only to discover that they lacked the internal technical competence to manage the contracts they just ripped away from the private sector. Private providers fail often and spectacularly, yes. But public bodies fail quietly, behind closed doors, with zero threat of bankruptcy to concentrate the collective mind.

Insourcing without an internal talent upgrade is a recipe for operational stagnation. You cannot run a twenty-first-century digital public service with twentieth-century local government HR structures.

What Should Happen Instead

If we are serious about fixing regional inequality and broken public services, we need to stop obsessing over who holds the clipboard and start obsessing over structural market design.

First, tie local funding directly to local economic output. If a region grows its tax base through enterprise, infrastructure, and housing development, it should keep the upside. If it stagnates, it feels the pain. This creates an alignment of incentives that no amount of political speech-making can replicate.

Second, stop pretending that ownership model is the primary variable. Whether a hospital cleaning contract, a bus route, or a digital registry is run by a private firm, a co-op, a charity, or a municipal department matters far less than whether the end-user has genuine exit options and performance-linked metrics. If a service has a monopoly, it will rot from the inside out, regardless of whether the badge on the door is municipal or corporate.

Third, embrace radical transparency over administrative control. Instead of arguing over jurisdictional boundaries, publish granular, real-time performance data for every single public service down to the neighbourhood level. Let parents see the exact value-add of every local school. Let commuters see the punctuality metrics of every driver. Sunlight is a far better disinfectant than a new layer of regional bureaucracy.

Andy Burnham is a master of political storytelling. He knows how to channel legitimate public frustration with crumbling infrastructure into a neat narrative about local empowerment. But storytelling does not pave a pothole, modernise a grid, or train a nurse.

Stop asking for more power over broken systems. Start dismantling the systems until they work.