‘Good growth in every postcode’: What could Andy Burnham’s pledge mean in practice?

Introduction

Andy Burnham set out an early agenda for his premiership in a speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester on 29 June. It built up to an emphatically repeated final line: “good growth in every postcode, and hope in every heart.” ²⁰ Burnham A, ‘Andy Burnham Speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester – 29 June 2026’, Andy Burnham, 29 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20260703052127/https://www.andyburnham.org.uk/speech-29-june  The slogan seemed to land with the crowd (and indeed the concept of ‘good growth’ is not new to many working in policy in the city, although less well known in national politics). But what exactly does it promise – and how can Burnham show that he has delivered against it at the next election?

This short insight paper looks at what the Burnham government will need to do to ensure that the “good growth” pledge does not recede into the distance as a popular early days slogan but instead translates into material, practical improvements on what has gone before. 

Recommendations in brief

For the best chance of success, Burnham should:

1. Before anything else, define “good growth” clearly for the wider public. Burnham will need to explain what can be learnt directly from Manchester and what needs to be different at a national level, drawing on experience of what works from central government as well as local and strategic authorities.
2. Set out the government’s strategy for long-term growth at a national level. This should again build on existing knowledge and should explain how local growth fits into a national strategy, so that local growth initiatives can pull in the same direction.
3. Clarify which decisions will be devolved to which level in a consistent way. Not all growth initiatives will work everywhere or in isolation, so Burnham should set clear and realistic expectations as to what can be delegated to places. This should be done consistently across the UK so that the overall decision-making landscape remains coherent.
4. Build the skills and processes needed around the country. For delegated decision making about growth initiatives to succeed, local areas will need the ability to appraise and implement projects well.
5. Distinguish growth-related and ‘ancillary’ aspects of good growth initiatives. Some outcomes associated with “good growth” are intrinsic to achieving growth itself while others reflect distinct, more or less related, aims. Good decision making about each element requires clear differentiation.
6. Conduct dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of those ancillary objectives. It will be important to understand the trade-offs that the various objectives packaged into good growth initiatives entail, politically and financially.
7. Quantify and explain growth-friendly spending and investment plans. Levering in more private sector investment, for example in housebuilding and infrastructure, might be a legitimate use of the public balance sheet but it has cost and risk implications.
8. Maintain confidence in the continuity of growth policy. To reduce business uncertainty and encourage investment, an expectation of policy stability well beyond this parliament is needed. Burnham must show that his plans can endure – politically as well as practically – for the long haul.
9. Strengthen working relationships between business and government. Burnham’s vision for good growth requires deeper collaborative relationships between all levels of government and businesses across the UK, not just better use of incentives or policy leverage.

Unpicking what “good growth” means will show why it matters to get these things right. If he adopts them, these recommendations will help Burnham not only to communicate his vision for growth simply and clearly to the public – as he knows he must – but also to bring it about.

Burnham must explain (to those outside Manchester) what good growth means

The phrase “good growth” already has currency in Greater Manchester, where it refers to economic growth that is shared across the combined authority. Public investment is used to de-risk projects so as to attract private capital and to direct that capital in pursuit of wider policy goals. Private sector partners are expected to provide apprenticeships, adhere to high employer standards, and support local suppliers and decarbonisation, for example. ²³ Greater Manchester Combined Authority, ‘Greater Manchester Good Growth Fund’, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, no date, retrieved 20 August 2026, www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/what-we-do/economy/greater-manchester-good-growth-fund/

Taking as read that this has been shown to work in Manchester, there is still a question of whether it can translate nationally and, if so, how quickly and to what effect. ²⁴ Macfarlane L, ‘Scotland has already tried “Manchesterism”. It won’t solve Britain’s economic crisis alone’, openDemocracy, 8 July 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026, www.opendemocracy.net/scotland-has-already-tried-manchesterism-it-wont-solve-britains-economic-crisis-alone/  Manchester is, after all, a thriving conurbation with more obvious growth potential than much of the country outside London – while Burnham has had plenty of time to nurture it, having been mayor for almost a decade and inheriting an even longer-term project from Howard Bernstein, Richard Leese and others.

As a prime minister facing an election in no more than three years, Burnham may well find the incentives to pursue short-term rather than long-term growth, and to take risks to achieve this, more keenly than he did as mayor.

There are also, as prime minister, additional considerations beyond timeframe that would not have troubled Burnham in Manchester. Should, for instance, a national growth strategy be consumer or producer led? Should growth come from competitive markets, or attractiveness to a few large global firms? Should high growth firms be domestically or internationally owned and financed? Should the government’s approach treat all sectors equally, be focused around ‘missions’ or ‘grand challenges’ or the like, or be sector-specific? These are, of course, matters of degree, but Burnham must still choose some mix of all of them.

Achieving good growth everywhere is a huge ask

Promising growth in all localities is hazardous for Burnham, not least because technological change will affect places unevenly: artificial intelligence could for instance decimate the job market in areas where call centres dominate, but facilitate growth elsewhere. As Burnham acknowledges, many growth opportunities benefit from clustering effects which occur in some places and not others.

At some point, the prime minister will have to define what he means by “every postcode”. The electorate will grant some latitude to this as a political slogan, but many interpret their postcode as being hyper-local – perhaps not every street but at least Stafford itself (ST16), for example, and not just somewhere in Staffordshire.

But Burnham must still decide which growth policy decisions to make at national level. Some decisions clearly are national – turning the UK into a life sciences leader, say – and devolution must not become an excuse to abdicate strategic responsibility at the centre. There are lessons to learn from the Starmer administration here, such as that pressing government agencies to pursue growth is not enough without a co-ordinating theory of change and a risk appetite. ²⁶ Gill M, Regulation and growth: Will the government’s strategy deliver? Institute for Government, 13 November 2025, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/regulatory-action-plan

Good devolved decision making will be essential

Nonetheless, Burnham knows he cannot achieve growth in every postcode solely through national policy making, and his commitment to devolution implies delegating decisions about how best to achieve growth in each place. The UK can have both areas that reindustrialise and areas that develop their services sector as appropriate: local decision makers or market forces, rather than No.10 (or indeed No.10 North), will often be best placed to work out where and how to do each. 

Where decisions are made locally, case by case, it will matter a lot that they are made well. It is not impossible to imagine huge resource being wasted on locally popular ‘reindustrialisation’ projects that will never be competitive, for example. Burnham’s plans for growth rely on competent decision making on the ground as much as grand strategy.

In short, putting in place the structures, incentives and people to make good decisions at all levels may not be politically rewarding but is a key pre-requisite to success. Here, the centre will need to proactively nurture devolved decision-making capability at the same time as keeping out of the substance of decisions which will be, indeed, devolved. It will also need to approach subsidiarity with care – making economic decisions too locally can result in sub-scale and ineffective interventions; making them too nationally can result in a disconnect from local needs and potential.

Good growth mashes multiple objectives together

Like Starmer before him, Burnham clearly intends to prioritise economic growth, but “good growth” could imply two different categories of qualification to this: economic growth of which some negative consequences (pollution, say) are mitigated, or economic growth that is harnessed to contribute other ‘good’ things to society as well (like jobs for young people). So Burnham needs to be clear – for each good growth initiative he proposes – what the ‘good’ element actually means. 

Similar questions arise with respect to impact investment – or social or ethical or sustainable investment for that matter – which assume that it makes sense both to seek a financial return and to pursue some other objective in the same intervention. This is often true, but where it is not, better decisions may be made by pursuing each objective separately on its own terms. The burden of proof should always be on those who want to combine financial and non-financial objectives to show that this is not simply a fudge or special pleading, but an analytically robust approach to achieving both.

“Good growth”, as an analogous combined concept, does not make sense always or in the abstract, and should be justified case by case. The pressures on Burnham’s growth agenda will be magnified if he chooses, for example, to promote clean growth or to support local supply chains through conditions attached to public financing. The trade-offs involved in pursuing these related goals in this way must be considered dispassionately.

Growth policy alone (good or otherwise) is hard enough

Setting aside what good means and whether it can be combined successfully with growth-promoting projects, Burnham still needs a position on how growth itself (that is, without the qualifier) can be fostered.

Happily, there is an existing knowledge base on what works, albeit that this does not offer a silver bullet and interventions can be expensive. High-quality infrastructure and skills and well-functioning competitive markets are more or less a given. Governments then have political choices as to how, and how far, to shape the economy that baseline enables, but whatever choices they make consistency over time, animating the private sector and building on comparative advantages are key. ³⁰ Wilkes G, How the centre of government can design better growth policy, Institute for Government, 28 January 2026, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/centre-government-design-better-growth-policy

Multiple strategies can of course co-exist, but pluralism in approach should be deliberate, not accidental, in the context of the very wide range of growth and industrial strategies that have previously been produced. ³¹ Davies G, ‘The Industrial Strategy: What it is, what it isn’t, and lessons from history’, public lecture, The Strand Group, 25 November 2024, retrieved 20 August 2026, https://thestrandgroup.kcl.ac.uk/event/gareth-davies-the-industrial-strategy-what-it-is-what-it-isnt-and-lessons-from-history/

It is a problem, politically, that what works to achieve growth is typically very long term and sounds prosaic when described. It has been too tempting for a succession of prime ministers to announce new growth strategies, with the cumulative effect of inconsistency over time which itself defeats the aim. Burnham’s talk of “greater public control of essential services”, for instance, will disrupt investment in utilities and transport infrastructure at least in the short term because, whether the approach has merit or not, it is just different to what is happening now and, so far, uncertain. ³² Gill M and Haile D, ‘Water reform: From Ofwat to what?’, Institute for Government, 25 July 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/comment/water-reform-ofwat-what  Burnham should be sure that each change he makes is both worth the cost of change and politically sustainable over the sufficiently long term.

Relationships between government and business will need to change

Burnham’s inclination towards more public sector led growth differs from the Starmer government. On the one hand, the promise in his speech to take “greater public control of essential services” implies a distrust of the private sector. But on the other, his vision for good growth, alongside his promises to support innovation and to reform procurement, increase expectations of what can be achieved by government and business working together. Burnham will need to show that deeper partnerships are possible on a national scale.

At all levels of government, productive relationships will need to be nurtured as businesses are invited to work more closely with the public sector in pursuit of a wider range of shared objectives. Burnham is already seeking to do this from No.10, ³⁵ No.10 and Burnham A, ‘PM puts new offer on the table to businesses in first talks with industry groups’, press release, GOV.UK, 24 July 2026, retrieved 21 August 2026, www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-puts-new-offer-on-the-table-to-businesses-in-first-talks-with-industry-groups-24-july-2026  but a collaborative and catalytic approach to these relationships, rather than a more narrowly influencing or controlling one, will need to be extended and sustained across government. 

The existing national expertise in building these relationships well, which will need to be drawn on and amplified to prove this approach can work, is currently diffused across various teams including the No.10 Partnerships Unit, the Office for the Impact Economy (now oddly in DCMS), the Office for Investment (as well as other parts of the business department) and the various public financial institutions (or PuFins). ³⁶ Haile D, ‘Public Financial Institutions’, Institute for Government, 1 June 2026, retrieved 21 August 2026, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/public-financial-institutions

Without a plan, hopes could be dashed

Political appeals to hope can win elections (or in Burnham’s case secure leaderships) but are also perilous. As he returns to parliament after the summer recess, the prime minister will need to quickly define what success looks like in a way that is both achievable and would be seen to deliver against his rhetoric. This will entail both communicating and extending what good growth has meant in Manchester in terms that make sense across the UK. To achieve that, Burnham will need to unpack what he means in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and can survive contact with reality, as well as building strong decision-making capability at all levels.

None of this is easy, but the recommendations set out in this paper offer a way for Burnham’s team to approach the task. Their success, or failure, will determine whether the story Burnham wants to tell can not only capture the public’s imagination, but also drive real progress on the ground.