The North-South Divide: What Burnham Is Actually Doing, And What He Just Ruled Out

Andy Burnham has spent his whole political career talking about the gap between the North of England and the South, in wealth, investment, and opportunity.

As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he called for more money and more local control for the North years before he ever looked likely to become Prime Minister. Now that he is one, he’s promising something much bigger: what he’s called “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen.” The question worth asking is whether what he’s actually doing matches the size of that promise, and I think the honest answer is a mixed bag.

You’ll hear the word “devolution” a lot in this story, so let’s get it out of the way simply. It just means handing decisions, and the money that goes with them, from central government in Westminster down to local leaders and regions, so choices about things like buses, job training, and building projects get made by people closer to the area, rather than by ministers in London.

Burnham’s big idea here is something he’s calling “No. 10 North.” He wants to move a meaningful chunk of the Prime Minister’s own staff out of Westminster and into a new base in Manchester. Alongside that, he’s promised a 10-year plan letting each region set its own growth goals rather than having them decided centrally, and he wants government spending to favour British companies over the cheapest option from anywhere in the world.

Here’s the number that explains why he thinks this matters. Right now, 95% of all tax collected in the UK flows straight to central government in London, one of the most centralised setups of any major country.

Burnham’s argument is simple: decisions about local transport, training, and building projects get made better by people who actually live with the consequences, not by ministers hundreds of miles away. This isn’t a new position for him either, he criticised the previous government’s regional funding deals in 2024 for “not going far enough,” so it’s something he’s believed for years, not something invented for his leadership campaign.

This is worth asking honestly, because the answer isn’t a simple yes or no.
On Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the criticism is sharp and fair. His big speech gave only a vague promise to “extend devolution” there, with no real detail, while spending almost all its time on England. The Scottish Greens put it bluntly, saying he “seems to think Manchester is the north of the UK, when it’s barely the north of England.”

On the rest of the North of England, it’s more mixed. Burnham does mention other areas by name, he’s described “No. 10 North” as designed to help regions “from the Midlands to Yorkshire,” not Manchester alone. He also has a real track record of working with other northern leaders, he’s co-authored a book on devolution with Liverpool’s mayor and helped set up a group bringing together leaders from across the North.

But here’s the honest catch. The new office itself is based in Manchester, his own former patch as mayor for nine years, not somewhere else in the North. And even people who broadly support his plans have questioned whether an approach built specifically around Manchester, over nearly a decade, can simply be copied and applied to other cities that haven’t had the same head start.

So it’s fair to say Manchester dominates the substance and location of his plans, even where his words try to include the wider North. Whether that’s “the North” genuinely sharing in this rebalancing, or mostly his own city leading it with everyone else invited to follow, is a real, open question.

Where it gets more complicated: the property tax he’s just paused, not scrapped
Right now, everyone pays council tax, a bill based on how much your home was worth back in 1991, not what it’s worth today. Because of that, some very ordinary homes in the North are taxed at a higher rate than multi-million-pound mansions in London, simply because property prices in

London have grown so much faster since 1991. Burnham has long supported replacing council tax entirely with a new system that charges everyone the same percentage of what their home is actually worth today. Northern Labour MPs, around 15 of them, have been pushing hard for exactly this change, because it would mean lower bills for most homes in the North and higher bills for the most expensive homes, which are mostly in London and the South East.

Burnham has now pulled back from one specific version of this, at least for now, though it’s worth being precise about exactly what he said, because the fuller picture is more alive than a simple “no” would suggest.

Asked directly whether the government would change or scrap stamp duty in the next Budget, he replied, “Yes, I can say that quite clearly. That won’t be happening.” But he was careful to frame this as a question of timing, not a permanent decision, adding: “It’s just not the case that we are bringing forward plans on that scale at this moment in time… What we’re trying to do though is to make taxation fairer.” That’s a genuinely different statement to a flat “no, never.” He’s ruled out doing it now, at this scale, in the next Budget specifically, while keeping “fairer taxation” alive as a stated goal for later.

Council tax itself is a separate, and much livelier, question. A petition to scrap both council tax and stamp duty passed 100,000 signatures, which under parliamentary rules forces a debate in the House of Commons. More than 100 Labour MPs are reportedly pushing for reform, including a newly formed group of backbenchers calling themselves Labour MPs for Council Tax Reform. Speaking to the BBC, Burnham himself named three different options he’s weighing up, and ruled none of them out:

• The Proportional Property Tax we’ve covered before, replacing both council tax and stamp duty with one annual charge based on current home value
• A Land Value Tax, charged on the value of the land a property sits on rather than the building itself
• Simply lowering the threshold for the existing mansion tax surcharge, from £2 million down to £1.5 million, catching more expensive homes without touching council tax or stamp duty at all

That third option is the closest thing to “reform without touching stamp duty,” it’s a smaller, incremental change rather than replacing the whole system.

There’s genuine disagreement even among Burnham’s own allies about which of these is realistic. Lord Blunkett, a close ally, has warned that a Land

Value Tax would be “politically problematic” and could create big winners and losers across the housing market, and said it “isn’t realistic in the short term.” Downing Street has since pushed back on the whole story, telling one outlet the reports were “not true” and that tax decisions are “a matter for the chancellor to set out at fiscal events,” a fairly standard way of avoiding the question until the Budget, rather than a real contradiction of what’s being discussed.

One more useful, easily missed detail: Labour’s 2024 manifesto ruled out raising income tax, VAT and National Insurance, but it says nothing at all about council tax. That means, structurally, there’s no manifesto promise standing in the way of council tax reform specifically, unlike the other taxes, which is probably part of why it remains the most live option of the three.

The pushback that seems to have shaped the stamp duty decision has come almost entirely from London. One London policy group calculated that a typical £600,000 London home would end up paying about £812 a year more under the Proportional Property Tax, and that London as a whole would carry roughly £7.5 billion of the total cost.

A separate property firm warned that landlords might sell their rental properties rather than pay the higher rate that would apply to second homes. Whatever the exact reason, the timing says a lot, the one full tax change that would have genuinely shifted cost away from the North and onto wealthier areas is the one he’s pulled back from at this speed, right after London-based groups raised the alarm about it. Council tax reform on its own, without stamp duty attached, remains a live and separate question.

Here’s what I think this actually shows. Moving decisions and staff to Manchester is a fairly easy, popular thing for a Prime Minister to do. Nobody in the South loses anything real when that happens. But changing who pays more tax is a completely different kind of decision, because it genuinely means some people, mainly homeowners in London and the South East, pay more so that others pay less.

Burnham has been happy to lead on the first, easier kind of change. On the second, harder kind, the one his own Northern MPs have been asking for, he’s chosen to hold back, at least for now.

That might be the sensible political choice. A Prime Minister who hasn’t won his own general election, trying to keep markets and the housing sector calm in his first few weeks, has good reason to avoid a fight that could unsettle London’s property market. But it’s worth reading his big promises carefully. Moving where decisions get made is real and happening now. Moving who actually pays more, the actual demand from his own Northern MPs, is genuinely still being weighed up rather than shelved, just not at the pace or scale some of them wanted, and not this Budget for stamp duty specifically.