Burnham takes over as UK PM on July 20 — plans civil service overhaul to counter Farage

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LONDON — Andy Burnham will have less than three years to show voters he can change Britain. He’s starting with what may be the hardest part: the civil service.

Burnham, who will take over as U.K. prime minister on July 20, wants to radically shake up the way the British state is run. He has promised to centralize some powers to his own office, hand others to regional leaders and stuff personnel into bases outside London (including a “No. 10 North” in Manchester) to weaken departmental chiefs in Whitehall.

In doing so, Burnham is setting up a culture clash that he hopes will convince the nation not to elect Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, who also rails against the failings of the British government machine from the right, at the next general election.

POLITICO spoke to 17 current and former senior politicians and officials, most of whom have worked with Burnham and many granted anonymity to speak frankly, about what the new PM’s arrival will mean for Whitehall. Some warned that Burnham’s plans could spark a turf war not just between ministers and the civil service, but between civil servants themselves.

‘Slowed down’

Some of Burnham’s rhetoric may be hammed up — he has spent nine years as the left-wing mayor of Greater Manchester — but Burnham’s old friend Steve Rotheram insisted it is not “faux” frustration. “We have experienced time and again things being slowed down by Whitehall,” said Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool City Region who co-wrote their 2024 book “Head North.” “The whole thing is clogging up the ability for us to do the things we want to do.”

It will be a “fight,” according to Miatta Fahnbulleh, the former minister helping Burnham’s transition team with policy. She told POLITICO in an interview earlier in July: “I say this as someone that has worked on devolution for a decade and a half — every stage of it has been a torturous fight, because ultimately you are talking about extracting power and resources out of people who wield power and resources.”

Hostility to Whitehall is everywhere in Burnham’s sections of “Head North.” Whitehall perpetuated “cover-ups” like that over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which a stadium crush killed 97 Liverpool football fans. It fed him a “lie” that infected blood products in the 1970s were safe. It “hoards” power, treats councils with “contempt” and delivered “cheap and nasty” northern rail. Most of it felt “either indifferent or working against you.” He has compared London to the greedy Capitol in the book “The Hunger Games.”

Burnham doesn’t use the political right’s term of non-endearment for the civil service — the “Blob.” But he has written publicly of his belief that Britain is run by around 50 people in Whitehall, most of them with “London-centric views.”

“It’s the unelected officials,” said Rotheram. These include the permanent secretaries, the most senior departmental officials who routinely spend decades in a machine that prizes itself on political impartiality. He added: “There’s no jeopardy, because they’re there no matter what the political persuasion of the government might be.”

Andy, meet Nigel

Burnham is not the only person who has beef with permanent secretaries. Farage is also vowing to smash the civil service machine. Both men hold their views deeply; both are echoing voters’ concerns that an out-of-touch system has failed the public.

The Reform UK leader would do things very differently. Unlike Farage, Burnham doesn’t want to sack 150,000 officials or root out supposed left-wing bias in officialdom or the judiciary. Rotheram, a former bricklayer, bristles at any comparison to “son of a stockbroker” Farage; he accuses Reform of merely jumping on an anti-establishment “bandwagon.”

But Burnham is making the rewiring of Whitehall central to his plans — and, in doing so, trying to stop Reform from yanking the wires out altogether in 2029. If he fails, the civil service could end up going through both plans consecutively — a prospect that will keep some mandarins awake at night.

Burnham is setting up a culture clash that he hopes will convince the nation not to elect Nigel Farage. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Fortunately for Burnham, some civil servants are already on his side.

Britain’s civil service has long been tied to post-war images of men in bowler hats entering Whitehall’s white stone buildings, red phone boxes, and the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall.

But some in its ranks are also pushing to divest power from the capital. Five years ago Rishi Sunak, then the Conservative finance minister, launched an “economic campus” in the town of Darlington in England’s north east which now has more than 1,000 civil servants. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to hold an away day with English mayors there on Monday.

While Labour Treasury ministers have only worked from the Darlington campus seven times in the last year — an example, to some, of tokenism — some officials believe its mere presence is changing civil servants’ mindset.

“Within the civil service, there are already two camps. The Treasury in Darlington is already not completely united with the Treasury in London,” said one person who has worked with Burnham in Greater Manchester. A senior civil servant joked that Darlington has the “true believers” while the “skeptics” remain in London.

This fits with Burnham’s philosophy — change the system through the sheer act of having staff who will vent about local services over their morning coffee. He proposed in 2024 that all central government workers should have to spend time working in local government.

It’s about “forcing the civil service to understand this is not just data on a graph,” said one Labour MP allied to Burnham. “Once you have a base where you can’t get free affordable integrated transport that gets you somewhere within 20 minutes easily, it changes perspectives pretty much overnight.”

A tiny band of the most senior civil servants are already based full-time outside London and known for thinking differently, including the Treasury officials Beth Russell — who runs the Darlington campus — and Tom Riordan. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government also has internal fans of moving power out of London, having opened a string of offices outside the capital including in Manchester and Wolverhampton.

“I don’t think the country is run by 50 people in Whitehall,” said Alex Thomas, a former senior Whitehall civil servant who is now an executive director at the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan think tank, “but it’s administered by a lot of those people, and those people are operating in a system that creates certain incentives, impulses or instincts.”

He said politicians must share the blame, but added: “The U.K. is a highly centralized country with a weak and rubbish center … the system has not worked well for achieving the change that successive governments said they wanted.”

No. 10 North ‘up and running this summer’

Burnham’s great hope is a “No. 10 North” in Manchester to support regional regeneration, reindustrialization and reforming utilities like water and energy. Despite the northern location, it is essentially a Downing Street power grab from departments in Whitehall.

He has still not said how many staff will be based there, how senior they will be or even where it will be based; his intended location, a “digital campus” in the city’s Ancoats district, is a construction site and is only due to open fully in 2032.

A former senior government official now working in northern England predicted that civil servants will already be raising security implications of No. 10 North. | Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

However, Deputy Labour Leader Lucy Powell, who has been tipped for the job of deputy prime minister running No. 10 North, told POLITICO earlier this month that there are “loads of government offices in Manchester” and “I’m sure there won’t be a problem.”

A second person who has worked with Burnham in Greater Manchester predicted: “There’ll be something up and running this summer.”

There is space in existing government buildings in Manchester such as in the Piccadilly Place and Piccadilly Gate complexes in the city center. Some office suites could be used by ministers for part of the week. The first person who has worked with Burnham quoted above suggested they could be taken up by the Greater Manchester MPs Angela Rayner and Jonathan Reynolds, both of whom are in contention for senior Cabinet roles. “Andy’s court will move north on a Thursday,” they predicted. “It’s a seat at the northern court.”

Civil servants and Burnham’s allies are unanimous that No. 10 North will only be more than a gimmick if people with real power (including Burnham) spend serious time in Manchester — forcing Westminster’s lobbyist and journalist ecosystem to move with them. Powell predicted “big chunks” of Whitehall power will leave the capital. Rotheram said: “You can’t have a No. 10 and then just have a load of junior officials there.”

The senior civil servant quoted above said a key test will be whether the No. 10 policy unit ends up based permanently in the northern version of Downing Street.

Officials bruised by Starmer’s ‘aloof’ No. 10

For now, some civil servants are positive. Burnham’s allies believe officials are energized to work for a PM that has articulated what he wants to do, even if the path to get there is muddy.

And on a more human level, some permanent secretaries are looking forward to a change from their current relations with the administration of outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Four people with knowledge of the conversations said tensions have grown between senior officials and Starmer’s No. 10, and worsened when Starmer sacked and publicly rowed with the Foreign Office’s top mandarin Olly Robbins over what he knew about the vetting of Britain’s former U.S. Ambassador Peter Mandelson.

The senior civil servant quoted above said senior officials including permanent secretaries had been left feeling “bruised” by a No. 10 they considered “aloof” and “rude.”

“There wasn’t a lot of love lost for the current No. 10 operation — some would say the nastiness of it,” added one former senior civil servant, citing the ousting of Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald after anonymous briefings about his effectiveness. “A few people have said to me this has been worse than anything under Boris Johnson. The lack of coherence, the unpleasantness, the way people have been treated.”

‘Do it on Day One’

None of this, though, means things will be easy for Burnham — who has yet to make most of the hard choices about who will run his government, what they will do or how their departments will be structured.

Thomas said the new prime minister will have to “do it on day one” to have any hope of getting big structural changes through the system: “Otherwise the waters will close, and the advice will go in, and everyone will chunter away. Unless he does it right at the start, it won’t happen, I suspect.”

Some of Burnham’s rhetoric may be hammed up but Burnham’s old friend Steve Rotheram insisted it is not “faux” frustration. | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images

A former senior government official now working in northern England predicted that civil servants will already be raising security implications of No. 10 North. They added: “The civil service at the moment will be thinking of everything they can do to slow down what he’s trying to achieve. They will be pulling together notes.”

The biggest hurdle to Burnham’s reforms will be time, given a general election is expected by summer 2029 at the latest, and ensuring they cut through with the public.

It will be hard to wrestle a head-turning policy announcement from structural reforms to the state, though his allies are discussing a potential big bang early on.

One ally of Burnham recalled Gordon Brown’s announcement that the Bank of England would be made independent, four days after he became Labour’s finance minister in 1997. The person said: “He wants a Bank of England moment.”

‘The Treasury is jittery’

Most of those who spoke to POLITICO said the fight will not be about civil servants annoyed at uprooting their lives — some are keen to leave London anyway, and others will be new hires — but a turf war over where power lies in Whitehall.

Burnham and his allies have long accused Whitehall of clinging to power over policies that they believe local leaders could handle better such as vocational education, housing and job support. Rotheram has talked about how his mayoral authority struggled to obtain data about Covid case numbers during the pandemic; he told POLITICO the Department for Education has been “intransigent about devolving more responsibility to metro mayors.”

The senior civil servant quoted above said: “The system treats combined [mayoral] authorities as troublemakers and won’t let them see certain things.” The same person said the phrase “get with the program” is floating around in Whitehall, and suggested many civil servants will roll happily with the change.

But another Whitehall official said civil servants are nervous and predicted there will be “resistance,” especially from the Treasury.

The finance ministry has a reputation for intransigence given it is responsible for keeping a lid on Whitehall budgets and preventing jolts in the bond markets. “The Treasury is a bit jittery, I think,” said Thomas.

Adding to those nerves were the fact that Burnham’s most senior aides held live discussions in recent weeks about whether to break up the Treasury — splitting its growth responsibilities into a separate ministry. While the prospect was examined seriously, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, Burnham has since backed away from a radical break-up of the department, as reported by the Financial Times .

The first person who has worked with Burnham in Greater Manchester said the incoming No. 10 chief of staff, James Purnell, will have worked through and “boxed off” some of the things that Burnham wanted to do but would be too difficult. “Andy’s not an idiot,” they added.

Former government minister James Purnell is pictured in Hyde, England, during his time as a Labour MP in February 2010. | Getty Images

Yet big structural changes to the center of government are still under discussion — and Burnham has held back from choosing Cabinet ministers until he has decided the shape of the departments they will run.

Civil servants are expecting many reporting lines to change from departments to No. 10 in a process that will take months to rewire and years, in some cases, to show results. A second senior civil servant said: “These are institutional reforms which will only produce real results in a decade. In the short term [they] will actually delay and slow down delivering stuff.”

A ‘record of being very challenging’

Much of Burnham’s success (or otherwise) will come down to how he handles personal relationships in Whitehall.

The two people who have worked with him in Greater Manchester, quoted above, both emphasized that Burnham’s behavior with junior and middle-ranking staff was exemplary, saying he was non-hierarchical and officials were personally fond of him.

But his relations with the most senior officials can be testy when hurdles to achieving his mandate are put in his way, the same two people said. The first person said: “With very senior people, he has a record of being very challenging at times, and also people who work for him being very challenging … When there is political conflict, Andy sometimes takes it out on senior people around him.”

The second person added: “I’ve never seen Andy raise his voice at anyone junior, he’s not that kind of politician … but there were definitely times when certain directors would try to say no to him, or tell him why something couldn’t be done. And when you’re doing that with Andy, you have to do it in a very sensitive way.”

It’s not just officials; Burnham has also had tensions in the past with Craig’s Labour predecessor as city council leader Richard Leese.

This is exacerbated by the fact that Burnham is more instinctive than analytical. A former official who worked with him during his time as culture secretary — almost 20 years ago — recalled him pushing for a national program of free swimming for children because he had been impressed by a similar scheme in his local area. The policy intention came first; the details and budget were found along the road. (Allies of Burnham would argue this is how a leader should act.)

Some of the allies around Burnham will have a role in managing these tensions — including Purnell, who speaks the language of the machine in a way Burnham does not.

The first person who has worked with Burnham in Greater Manchester said Bev Craig, the Labour leader of the city council, had helped resolve tensions. So had Lucy Powell, who is a Manchester MP but not part of Burnham’s mayoral administration. Labour’s deputy leader has known Burnham for 30 years and “had a record of standing up to Andy when he was wrong,” the person said. The second person who has worked with Burnham said: “If Andy said something in an interview, Lucy was probably the kind of person who would call up Andy afterwards and say, ‘I’m not sure you should have said that.’”

But some of those allies won’t be around to call on any more — Craig will have her hands full in Burnham’s old job of Greater Manchester mayor, if she wins a special election on July 30 — and his suspicion of the Westminster machine runs deep.

Burnham wrote in the 2024 book that a dispute over investigations into Hillsborough left him in tears in his car. In one joint passage in the book, he and Rotheram even imagined civil servants asking Amber Rudd, the former Conservative home secretary, if she really wanted an inquiry into a notorious police battle with miners under Conservative ex-PM Margaret Thatcher because it could be “a little uncomfortable for your colleagues.”

For Burnham, in other words, this is personal. So he had better hope Whitehall gets on board.

Charlie Cooper and Esther Webber contributed reporting from London.