The British political class has found its new secular religion, and its high priest is Andy Burnham.
With the former Greater Manchester Mayor now stepping onto the national stage as the Member of Parliament for Makerfield and a prime contender to reshape Whitehall, a comfortable consensus has solidified. The narrative is seductive: if we simply replicate "Manchesterism" across the United Kingdom—bringing buses back under municipal control via models like the Bee Network, integrating local health budgets, and appointing regional political "captains"—we can miraculously fix Britain’s broken public services and manage a compounding national debt crisis.
This consensus is completely wrong. It misdiagnoses the disease.
Devolution, in its current English iteration, is not a structural cure for institutional decay or fiscal distress. It is an administrative illusion. It functions primarily as a mechanism for central government to outsource blame while holding a tight grip on the purse strings. Forcing local authorities to manage their own decline under the guise of empowerment does nothing to change the macroeconomic realities that are driving British infrastructure into the ground.
I have spent decades analyzing public finance structures and watching governments sink billions into restructuring exercises that yield little more than new logos and reorganized committee meetings. The hard truth is that localized administration without genuine fiscal autonomy cannot fix a systemic resource crisis.
The Mirage of the Manchester Model
Look closely at the data before celebrating the regional management model as a blueprint for national revival.
The biggest applause line for municipal control is the Bee Network, Greater Manchester's franchised bus system completed in January 2025. While local control succeeded in expanding routes and capping fares, it did not escape the laws of economic gravity. Public transport systems require significant public subsidies to survive. When over 20% of services became reliant on public funding following the pandemic, franchising simply shifted the financial burden onto the combined authority's balance sheet. Shifting a deficit from a private operator's ledger to a public authority's ledger does not eliminate the debt; it changes who gets sued when the cash runs out.
The failure of localized coordination becomes even clearer when examining healthcare. Greater Manchester has held significant control over its devolved health and social care budget for a decade. If regional integration were the answer to the crisis in the National Health Service, Manchester should be a shining beacon of efficiency.
It is not.
Despite ten years of localized planning, the region continues to experience some of the most severe health inequalities in England. NHS waiting lists have followed the same upward trajectory seen across the rest of the country. Why? Because a regional authority cannot manufacture doctors, import medical supplies at discounted rates, or rewrite national statutory obligations. The structural bottleneck is national and macroeconomic, while the administration is localized. This leaves regional leaders to manage scarcity while Whitehall takes credit for local autonomy.
The Broken Premise of English Devolution
The current debate misses the point because it focuses entirely on geography rather than fiscal power. True devolution requires the power to tax and the power to borrow. What English regions have received instead is an integrated funding settlement—a slightly longer leash attached to the same post in the Treasury.
Imagine a scenario where a corporate headquarters tells a regional branch manager that they are now entirely autonomous. The manager can decide the color of the office walls and coordinate the staff schedule. However, the headquarters still sets the revenue targets, dictates the budget down to the penny, and bans the branch from taking out a bank loan to fix a leaking roof. That is not autonomy. That is a liability shift.
The underlying driver of local government insolvency across Britain is not poor coordination; it is the soaring cost of statutory social care and special educational needs. These are legal duties imposed by central government, funded by a regressive local taxation system that has not been substantially updated since 1991.
No amount of regional cooperation or neighbourhood-level coordination can fix a structural deficit built on a broken tax base. Mayors are forced to rely on gimmicks like overnight visitor levies or marginal adjustments to business rates to fund multi-billion-pound infrastructure deficits. It is the fiscal equivalent of trying to pay off a mortgage by collecting aluminum cans.
The Off-Balance-Sheet Borrowing Trap
As the national debate turns toward how a Burnham-led or Burnham-influenced administration would fund infrastructure, his economic advisers, including figures like Jim O'Neill, have floated the idea of creating an independent body for infrastructure spending. The argument is that by moving big-ticket transport and energy projects off the immediate sovereign balance sheet, the government can borrow billions more without breaking its self-imposed fiscal rules or spooking the bond markets.
This approach carries significant risks.
We have seen this playbook before. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was called the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Governments used off-balance-sheet structures to build hospitals, schools, and roads, keeping the immediate debt off the national ledger. Decades later, public authorities are still being choked by extortionate, index-linked repayment terms that drain money directly from frontline services.
If an independent infrastructure body borrows billions to fund projects like a new underground station at Manchester Piccadilly, that debt must still be serviced. Whether the debt is classified as sovereign borrowing or structured through a specialized vehicle, the interest payments are ultimately paid by British taxpayers or transport users. Pretending the debt does not exist because it is held by an independent entity is an accounting trick, not an economic strategy. The international bond markets are acute enough to see through shell games; any sudden spike in public-sector-adjacent borrowing will still affect the state's overall cost of capital.
What True Structural Reform Requires
If regional devolution is an inadequate response to Britain's public service decay, what is the alternative? True reform requires shifting the macroeconomic structures that govern how public money is raised and spent.
First, the national fiscal framework must be rewritten to separate day-to-day spending from long-term capital investment. The current fiscal rules treat building a railway or a high-tech hospital exactly the same as paying for temporary agency staff. This setup creates a systemic bias toward short-term cost-cutting at the expense of long-term economic capacity. Infrastructure investment should be judged by its long-term yield on GDP growth, not its impact on a rolling three-year debt target.
Second, the regressive council tax system must be dismantled and replaced with a progressive property or land value tax. The current model forces the poorest local authorities to levy the highest proportional taxes on their residents just to keep social care services from collapsing, while wealthy boroughs generate massive surpluses on minimal tax rates. Silos cannot be broken down until the tax base itself is flattened.
Third, central government must stop using local government reorganisation as a distraction from financial deficits. Abolishing two-tier local authorities or redrawing regional boundaries does not save money; it consumes years of bureaucratic energy and millions of pounds in redundancy payments while services deteriorate.
The obsession with finding a charismatic regional savior to patch over structural decay is a symptom of political exhaustion. We do not need a national rollout of municipal management committees. We need to fix the macro-financial framework that makes public service delivery impossible in the first place.
Stop asking if local leaders can fix a broken system. Start changing the rules that broke it.
