20 ideas for Andy Burnham’s 100 days
Policy experts on how the next Prime Minister can turn the UK around
A fortnight today, Britain will have its seventh prime minister in 10 years, a dizzying turnover that reflects deep economic and social problems no leader has truly risen to. Can Andy Burnham succeed where all others have failed? He faces daunting challenges: nearly two lost decades for living standards, a youth unemployment crisis, high borrowing costs and energy prices, an overcentralised and ineffective state, and a new age of geopolitical turmoil.
Burnham, like all new prime ministers, will have a short window of opportunity in which to signal change and avoid the errors that doomed Keir Starmer. With that in mind, Arguably brought together 20 of the best minds from across the policy world for this special edition on Burnham’s first 100 days.
George Eaton, Editor-in-Chief, Arguably
Nate Kitch for Arguably
Launch GB Crossrails: Elizabeth Lines for our biggest cities
With all Britain’s infrastructure woes, it is easy to forget that, within the last decade, we built perhaps the most successful new railway line in the world. The Elizabeth Line carries more passengers than any line Paris or New York has opened since the 1970s and now accounts for 15% of all UK rail journeys. It is also air-conditioned, spacious and quiet.
From a policy perspective, there are two reasons why the Elizabeth Line is clever:
It uses through-running. By connecting commuter terminuses with a short central tunnel, a crossrail can triple capacity on existing lines. For the cost of building a deep tunnel, you can vastly increase capacity on commuter lines and connect different parts of a city.
It pays for itself. Two-thirds of the Elizabeth Line was paid for by capturing the rise in land values that results from higher connectivity, through business rate supplements and other fiscal tools.
Andy Burnham should build a national fleet of Crossrails in London (Crossrail 2), Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, funded through land value capture. At the Centre for British Progress, we estimate that the rise in land values from new homes and better connectivity means that the scheme can pay for itself, and Britain’s five largest cities can all enjoy their own Elizabeth Lines.
David Lawrence is co-founder of the Centre for British Progress and an Arguably columnist
Establish a National Economic and Security Council
In his first 100 days, Andy Burnham should reform the system around the National Security Adviser (currently Jonathan Powell). This remains a rather 20th-century crisis management role, backed up by a National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, whose bread and butter is hard security. This is despite so many critical issues, especially those linked to China, overlapping with economics and technology. The nervous tissue to pull the government together in these areas just isn’t there.
No 10 needs to relaunch the National Security Council as the National Economic and Security Council. As it stands, there is no mechanism sending a demand signal to the system from the centre that the Prime Minister wants these cross-cutting issues tackled. This would remedy that and prevent such issues being defined by Treasury-says-no politics. Redefining the role of the NSA and the NSC requires an expanded National Economic and Security Secretariat brought into the 21st century. This is the place to harness expertise on China and the full gamut of critical technology from AI to biotech. To round this off, Burnham should politically appoint deputy national security advisers who are specialists in these weak spots to plug the yawning gaps in the system we simply cannot afford.
Ben Judah is a former Foreign Office and Ministry of Justice special adviser and Arguably’s contributing editor
Ban second jobs for MPs
Andy Burnham’s first move should be one that costs nothing and changes everything. So how about a near-total ban on second jobs for MPs? It’s cheap, can be put to the Commons in week one, and there’s no quicker way to find out which MPs think the rules shouldn’t apply to them.
It would be a sharp break with the past and start the long work of clearing out the rot in Westminster. It would signal that politicians are supposed to serve their constituents first and only, and stop the slow drip of stories that leave voters telling each other that MPs are only out for themselves.
And this shouldn’t be a partial ban with carve-outs for doctors or newspaper columnists, either (there is really no reason why constituents should pay to access their MP’s views behind a paywall). Exceptions could exist, but only for the genuinely exceptional.
The political prize is the trap it sets. Nigel Farage has earned over £2m from outside work since becoming an MP, including £400,000 a year fronting a GB News show. Yet among the public, this is deeply unpopular. Farage would have to choose whether to defend his own earnings or vote for a ban that hits no one harder than him.
For a Prime Minister facing the daunting task of restoring trust in politics, there are few better places to start.
Zoë Grünewald is a political journalist and broadcaster and an Arguably columnist
Give the Postcode Address File to the people
The defining promise of ‘Manchesterism’ is a productive, proactive state that unleashes the innovators and builders in the private sector. In his first 100 days, Andy Burnham has an enormous opportunity to apply this spirit to the era of AI.
If AI is to work for people, then it will need reliable, ground-truth data – and this is something the government can reliably provide. It’s especially urgent in the case of geospatial data, which describes our world and our country as it is.
This is why after writing the letters of last resort for our nuclear submarines, Prime Minister Burnham should immediately move to liberate the Postcode Address File (PAF), which is the central dataset of UK postal addresses. It is not private data – literally just the address of every building.
Today, if a small business or bedroom coder wants to use address data in their Next Big Thing, they must pay Royal Mail a de facto tax on innovation of upwards of £7,000 per year. If Burnham’s government can renationalise this vital resource, or negotiate a blanket licensing agreement with Royal Mail, it would be a grand gesture that demonstrates how a productive state can empower Britain’s entrepreneurs to build.
James O’Malley is the author of Odds and Ends of History and the co-host of YIMBY Pod
Devolve technical education and skills
Devolution, devolution, devolution. These, as Andy Burnham’s speech last week made clear, are his priorities. Critics will say “we’ve been here before” and, arguably, we have (it was called ‘Levelling Up’). But Andy Burnham may be onto something. Not just on the traditional priorities of housing, planning and infrastructure, but also skills and training.
Britain is currently waking up to the reality that it may no longer be appropriate, or economically viable, to push so many young people towards university. At the same time, we are grappling with rising youth unemployment (now 16.2%) and a NEETs crisis impacting over a million young people.
In Manchester, Burnham launched what he calls the ‘M-Bacc’, or, more formally, the Manchester Baccalaureate. It aims to give those aged 14-19 a clear technical education pathway, aligned with Greater Manchester’s fastest-growing sectors, with local employers pledging work placements for those who participate.
Youth unemployment is often spoken of as a national problem but, in reality, it is regionally specific. Grimsby faces different problems to Corby, which has different issues to London, which is a totally different planet to Bradford.
Devolving technical education and support for young people has been managed with great success via regional educational centres in the Netherlands. The country now has the lowest NEET rate in Europe (4.9%). Burnham should build on his innovation in Greater Manchester, while also looking to the Netherlands if he wants quick and evidence-based solutions to youth unemployment.
Vicky Spratt is housing and society correspondent at The i Paper and the author of Tenants and the forthcoming We Were Promised The Moon
Introduce compulsory voting to turbocharge democracy
Andy Burnham has three years to turn around not just this government, but the public’s faith in democracy. What’s the fastest way to turbocharge it? I’d argue compulsory voting.
Turnout fell eight points to just 59.7% at the last election. Voters are older and richer; just 45% of the poorest groups turned out. This warps the policy offer – pensioners are prioritised over young people and spending on them trumps longer-term investment.
This contributes to the democratic doomloop: if policy doesn’t deliver for some people, it further alienates them, and democratic satisfaction further declines. Compulsory voting could break this vicious cycle and help start the hope loop.
Australia offers a model for compulsory voting: a AUS$20 (£10) fine for not turning out sends a proportionate signal. There should also be an option of “none of the above” to give dissatisfied people a voice. And Burnham should act to secure the integrity of elections, including through new media regulation. This should come with a carrot too – a bank holiday to celebrate the first day of universal suffrage.
A campaign is growing for this and supporters are increasingly cross-party. We need a new deal for democracy. The state needs to prove its worth to citizens; but citizens have to contribute too – voting is our part in the new deal. To turbocharge democratic renewal, it should be mandated.
Polly Curtis is chief executive of Demos
Replace Clean Power 2030 with Cheap Power 2030
The next Prime Minister must start by recognising that the real enemy is not Nigel Farage but Britain’s decline. Confronting it requires a single day-one plan that generates the real and political capital to make Britain powerful again. That starts with literal power – and making it as cheap as possible.
This requires a change of mission. Clean Power 2030 must become Cheaper Power 2030, fundamentally changing the prism through which every energy decision is made.
In practice, that means backing a broader energy mix, modernising the grid, going further on planning and reforming the levies baked into energy bills that have pushed prices up. Zonal pricing – shunned to protect the renewables investment climate prized by the outgoing mission – should re-emerge, rewarding the regions that generate low-cost energy. Jobs should be saved and energy made more resilient by pressing go on new North Sea exploration rather than importing from afar.
Cheap and secure energy is critical. It cuts bills, unlocks economic growth, draws investment and lets Britain compete in the AI age. Get it right and you move the two audiences this government must carry – markets and voters – with a single shift. And you show a PM ready to lead his party, take difficult decisions and end his country’s decline.
Ryan Wain is executive director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Impose an online sales tax on the tech giants
Andy Burnham won in Makerfield by running against Westminster and for people and places who feel the status quo isn’t working for them. Maintaining this in government will be difficult: he needs a totemic policy that symbolises who he is for and who he is against. One that will make a difference to the lives of people quickly.
At IPPR and IPPR North, we think the answer is a new online sales tax levelled on the shopping platform giants, with the money raised given to communities and small businesses to rejuvenate the high street.
Britain’s high streets are not just for shopping. They are places where people from different walks of life meet and mix. They, more than our GDP data, signal to people whether the economy is booming or in decline.
And they have been in decline for a long time now. This isn’t an accident. It is the result of political choices which have allowed remote giants such as Amazon to avoid taxes while local shops, pubs and venues carry the burden of business rates. An online sales tax could level the playing field.
This will mean picking a fight that Keir Starmer chose not to. At a time when Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the new oligarchic right celebrate impunity for the powerful, Burnham should take a different side: with places and people in Britain.
This is not anti-technology, it is anti-extraction. If Amazon can profit from every postcode in Britain, it can contribute to their renewal.
Harry Quilter-Pinner is executive director of IPPR
Expand high-skilled migration through talent routes
It is possible for Britain to have a compassionate, economically prudent immigration policy that wins public consent. Keir Starmer did not find that balance, but Andy Burnham still can.
Starmer’s government has been tough on immigration in an attempt to stave off the threat from Reform. It has been too successful at the first part: reducing net migration to a level not seen since the early 2010s (171,000). But the drastic decline in net migration – down 82% since its 2023 peak – does not seem to have dented Reform’s popularity; indeed, Labour’s harsh rhetoric has made new enemies on the left while convincing few on the right.
Burnham should signal a break. During his first 100 days, he should set out a positive vision for immigration. The public recognises the value of educated, employed, high-earning migrants, so Burnham should double-down on skilled migration – expanding the Skilled Worker, Global Talent, and High Potential Individual visa routes.
At the same time, he must demonstrate responsiveness to public concerns, with a zero tolerance approach to inefficiency and abuse. He can build on reductions in the backlog of asylum claims and seek to promptly deport those whose claims are denied. Visible progress on this would dent Reform’s ability to campaign against abuses of the asylum system.
Burnham might also reform the student visa system such that visas are only granted for programmes with good employment outcomes. This would protect students from unnecessary debt and also address concerns on the right over “Deliveroo visas”.
By expanding the types of migration the public values and visibly restoring order over the migration it distrusts, Burnham could do what falling numbers alone have not: take back control of the immigration debate.
Lauren Gilbert is the founding editor-in-chief of In Development
Create a ‘Doge of the left’
Andy Burnham should emulate Zohran Mamdani’s administration in New York and make rooting out waste in government a priority. As Mamdani argues, progressives shouldn’t just be about spending more, but spending better. Burnham has a golden opportunity to prove as much.
The potential is huge. From official sources, Verdant has identified almost £31bn in recoverable savings, from defence procurement failures to management consultant overspend to outright graft and corruption.
But finding those savings will require a revolution in Whitehall thinking – away from arbitrary Treasury targets and the presumption of private sector superiority, and instead delivering public excellence in every department. Our report makes a series of recommendations. Prime Minister Burnham could start by creating a Chief Savings Officer, backed up by Cabinet Office staff, to work with departments to find genuine savings and, crucially, act as their champion in negotiations with the Treasury. An in-house government management consultancy could cut out the vast fees charged by the private sector, with spending on consultants having risen by 60% to more than £3bn in recent years.
James Meadway is co-director of Verdant and a former economic adviser to John McDonnell
Public control of the water system
Alongside Manchesterism, Andy Burnham speaks about ‘good growth’, an economy that gives people a stake. Nowhere is the failure of our economic consensus clearer than England’s privatised water companies: under-invested networks, rampant profit extraction, and sewage pumped into our rivers. He’s pledged public control, because water is foundational to life and a broken system means rising bills and worsening services.
But there’s a conundrum. As Jill, a Labour/Reform switcher in our latest focus group, put it: privatisation was a massive mistake, but nationalisation costs too much. Better regulation, then? Regulation alone fails to solve the problem because of the inherent absurdity of a privatised monopoly. They can never fail, so they always get let off the hook.
That’s the binary Westminster is stuck in. But there’s been an answer hiding in plain sight. Reform regulation with the ultimate purpose of public control: unlimited fines, dividend restrictions, harsher reinvestment rules, lower thresholds for environmental breach. If they don’t hit the mark, you might find the water companies become far more affordable for the state to acquire.
And the end point? A time-tested model – mutualisation, which ensures debts stay off the government balance sheet. Like water off a duck’s back.
Praful Nargund is director of the Good Growth Foundation
Use industrial strategy to reform welfare
Working-age ill health is simultaneously the UK’s biggest economic problem, its biggest social problem, and its most politically toxic welfare problem. The failed attempt at welfare reform last summer torpedoed the credibility of the Starmer government, so the new team needs to take a radically different direction. Not fighting shy of welfare reform, nor smashing into the same brick wall – but defining this as an industrial strategy problem, which can be addressed through health, tech, and social innovation.
As a country, we have all the tools we need to accelerate solutions – be they innovative medical treatments, assistive robotics, accessibility tech to help people with disabilities work more easily, or social innovations designed by charities to help people find work that suits them. So the government’s political and financial energy should go into scaling up those solutions, using the tools of industrial strategy. Financial backing through Innovate UK to test tools; scale-up finance from the British Business Bank and Better Society Capital; and ‘customer zero’ commitments to buy new work and health innovations, such as those Sovereign AI is using to accelerate AI start-ups.
The whole western world is struggling with the same problems on work and health – but we are behind. With the right investments, we can turn that around, and start to export solutions designed, proven and scaled in the UK.
Polly Mackenzie is the author of How to Run a Country and was director of policy to the Deputy PM from 2010-15
Establish a Department of the Prime Minister
For Andy Burnham, assuming power may prove to be the easy part; it’s how he thinks about, and wields, that power that will matter in the long run. Neither Burnham nor progressive politics writ large can afford a rerun of Keir Starmer’s first 100 days in office. He needs to hit the ground running – and so will need three things.
First, a robust ‘theory of power’: where is power overly concentrated? Where is it too diffuse? Too many governments have shied away from asking those questions, instead letting vested interests answer them.
Second, a No.10 operation that promotes and deploys his prime ministerial power, unambiguously and forcibly. That means overhauling the centre of government. There is already talk of creating a more focused Prime Minister’s Department to facilitate this, along the lines of recommendations the Future Governance Forum made last year as part of our ‘Transforming Downing Street’ project. The UK is an international outlier for not having anything like this in place: Australia, Canada and Sweden, for example, all have dedicated departments serving their respective prime ministers.
Third, the confidence to know when and where to give power away. The UK is far too centralised a state. We need to empower places if we are to restore people’s sense of agency and trust.
On all three, Burnham’s first major speech was encouraging. So too, though, were many of Starmer’s before reality fell short of rhetoric. The new Prime Minister – with the stakes even higher, and less time until the next election – has to convert ambition into action.
Nathan Yeowell is executive director of the Future Governance Forum
Pass a new Debt Justice Law
We face the most severe global debt crisis in history, with more than 50 countries in severe debt distress. Risky lending has been driven by a contradiction in the international debt system: private lenders can charge poor countries extortionately high interest on the basis that they may not get paid in full – and then, under English law, can sue for the full amount.
In 2025, South Sudan – a country on the brink of famine – was ordered by the UK High Court to pay half its government revenue to a for-profit bank. This year has seen similar threats against Ethiopia and war-torn Ukraine. With 90% of debts owed by low-income countries to private lenders governed by English law – owing to the pivotal role of the City of London – the UK has a unique power to act.
A Debt Justice Law would cost the Treasury nothing, protect millions of lives and livelihoods, and save UK taxpayer pounds from being used to bail out unscrupulous private lenders. Parallel legislation has been introduced in the New York Senate, the other relevant jurisdiction. A UK law has support from Gordon Brown, the World Bank, the African Union, and the IMF. Within the UK’s 2027 G20 Presidency, a Burnham government could make history by passing it.
Maria Finnerty is a member of the executive committee of the Labour Campaign for International Development
Fix social care with a proportional property tax
Voters will make a fast judgement about Andy Burnham as Prime Minister. They want hope and direction, early proof of real change, and all without giving markets reason to doubt him. No pressure, Andy.
I want to see Burnham the bold reformer: a leader who confronts the biggest policy challenges by bringing people together. There would be no bigger symbol of his ambition than to take on our hated council tax system and bring parties together to fix adult social care.
Burnham has already described council tax as “highly regressive” and unjustifiable, and made clear that social care reform is urgent. He is right. Council budgets are busting under the cost of care. Adult social care remains a terrible lottery, putting the quality of later life at risk, along with people’s homes and savings.
Instead of raising council tax, a social insurance model for adult social care, similar to the system that has worked in Japan, would be more sustainable and popular, especially if council tax can be cut for most people and properly reformed. A proportional property tax would be fairer.
Change council tax. Change adult social care. Change the country in the way people hoped when they voted Labour.
Theo Bertram is director of the Social Market Foundation and a former No 10 special adviser
End the triple lock and boost support for NEETs
Incoming Prime Minister Burnham will face one big choice in his first 100 days – whether to prioritise public services or household incomes. The war in Iran has reduced his room for manoeuvre within the fiscal rules he has pledged to stick up. Policies will need to be funded, with any significant boost to public services requiring tax rises on middle-income Britain. So, what would a funded package to raise living standards look like?
He should start by helping the one million young people currently not in employment, education or training (NEET). The politics of ending the triple lock can be made easier if this is used to significantly boost the government’s support package for NEETs. The extra funding could help to quadruple the number of places available via the Youth Jobs Grant to 80,000 and widen the Jobs Guarantee to those on health-related benefits and Universal Credit for 12 months rather than 18.
He can also tackle an immediate housing crisis – low-income families’ struggle to pay rising private rents. Pegging housing support to local rents would help a million families and can be funded by increasing the taper rate on Universal Credit.
Finally, he can reduce the cost of a key essential – energy bills – by removing £2.3bn of levies from households’ energy bills. This can be covered by closing loopholes in the capital gains tax regime – a straight transfer from the very wealthy to the everyday economy.
Ruth Curtice is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation
Use DevCos to borrow outside the fiscal rules
Development corporations are tried-and-tested vehicles for getting big projects done. They buy up land in an area, grant planning permission to build on the basis of a masterplan and then sell the land at huge multiples of the purchase price, funding lots of new infrastructure. Development corporations built Milton Keynes and Canary Wharf.
We should make them much more powerful with:
regulatory powers to discharge environmental regulation, taking them from Natural England and the Environment Agency. That means they can build more quickly and cheaply.
the ability to borrow outside the fiscal rules because they are so low risk, and the tools to negotiate hard on commercial deals. They then have the financial autonomy to operate at scale and with 20-plus year horizons.
The DevCo business model works best in rich areas, where selling land with planning permission is most valuable. That means places such as the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, London and Bristol. But with powerful DevCos in place, we can then demand that projects in these areas are self-funding. No more central government money needed for East West Rail, between Oxford and Milton Keynes, or the Bakerloo line extension. Instead we can invest it in the infrastructure to get our poorer areas back on their feet.
James Howat is director of policy at ThinkLabour
Create a National Infrastructure super-ministry
Andy Burnham should create a Critical National Infrastructure super-ministry, based around DESNZ with regulation of water, telecoms, data cables, and the space and chemicals infrastructure bolted on. Its leadership should ask a single question: how do we make the entire system resilient, both to financial shocks, climate change and foreign aggression?
If you factor the latter into the calculations of the National Risk Register, the case is made for much greater public ownership, co-ordination and control – because the levels of investment needed are substantial. The water system consumes 3% of our electricity: how much more resilient would it be if the government mandated every treatment and pumping station had to have solar panels and batteries nearby? In essence, this is doing for the entire infrastructure of the country what Andy Burnham did for buses in Greater Manchester: creating a single resilient system – and the Nato 2035 pledge to spend 1.5% of GDP on infrastructure would pay for the investment needed.
Paul Mason is a fellow of the Council on Geostrategy and the author of How To Stop Fascism
Fix energy grid constraints to boost renewables
Britain needs cheap, secure and green energy to end our cost-of-living crisis, reindustrialise our heartlands, deliver growth across the country, and reduce carbon emissions. Yet grid constraints threaten the UK’s ability to fully seize the benefits of the clean energy transition.
Queued renewable projects sit idle while demand grows, undermining energy independence and slowing the clean power transition. Grid constraints also lead to the ridiculous occurrence of wind power generators being paid to switch off turbines, undermining the political and public consensus for renewables, as well as the price reasoning.
There are a few quick fixes the government could explore to deliver maximum grid upgrade benefits at least cost to the Treasury. Accelerating targeted grid upgrades in a few key areas (Scotland, East Anglia), could significantly reduce grid constraints and bring down costs.
For example, wind power in East Anglia is a key driver of constraints to Clean Power 2030, contributing significantly to projected constraint costs of £7.2bn. Accelerating network reinforcement here would deliver the largest single-year reduction in constraint costs from 2025-2035. National Grid reports that the Norwich to Tilbury line will cost around £900m; accelerated by a year, it could save £2.8bn in constraint costs in 2030 alone.
Megan Corton Scott is deputy director of the Labour Climate and Environment Forum
Introduce a Neighbourhood Spending Lock
A key part of Labour’s return to power was winning over disaffected working-class voters that had voted for Brexit and Boris Johnson. More than anything, these voters wanted a new political economy that provides security to all parts of the country. A big reason for the decline in Labour’s fortunes is that some voters have lost confidence that the party can do that, particularly in the North and Midlands.
Andy Burnham needs to make a big bold offer. That means he should consider a proposal from his new parliamentary colleagues for a Neighbourhood Spending Lock, which would ringfence a portion of the budget for investment in the most disadvantaged areas. This would rebuild the social infrastructure and public services of deprived towns and villages, enabling them to reconnect with their local economies and create the foundations for growth.
The evidence is clear that if we do not rebuild the social fabric, no amount of infrastructure investment will fix things. Andy Haldane, one of Burnham’s economic advisers, has also written about the importance of social capital in driving growth. The lock is not just good policy, but good politics, a rare convergence that the next PM should take full advantage of.
Andrew O’Brien is head of secretariat at the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods