Burnham launches No 10 North to shift power to Manchester

Andy Burnham was due to hold his first meeting at No 10 North in Manchester later on Friday as the new northern branch of Downing Street began operating from Heron House in the city centre. The project is being sold as a move to shift power away from Whitehall, but its immediate footprint is still modest: the permanent site is a brownfield plot at the former Central Retail Park, and that campus will not be finished before 2032.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell and Louise Haigh, who is overseeing No 10 North in her role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, are planning to work from the Manchester base. Senior ministers and aides close to Burnham also expect to spend regular time there, with one report saying Burnham intends to work from the site at least one day a week, subject to government business.

The first test of whether this is decentralisation or stagecraft is who actually moves. So far, the answer is a mix of political figures and civil servants rather than a wholesale transfer of power. BBC reporting says civil servants working for London-based departments have been offered relocation packages to encourage them to move north, but the scale of that shift will depend on how many accept and how quickly departments can rehouse staff.

The physical infrastructure points to a long wait. The Manchester Digital Campus in Ancoats, on the former Central Retail Park brownfield site, is expected to house 8,800 civil servants in 900,000 square feet across two buildings when fully occupied. Even so, construction will not be complete before 2032, leaving Heron House as the working base for now.

Burnham has framed the project as part of a broader effort to rebalance economic decision-making across the UK. BBC reporting also says the prime minister has described No 10 North as the “dominant driver of the UK’s economy”, language that underlines the political ambition attached to the project even as the machinery of government remains split between Manchester and London.

The blueprint for No 10 North was drawn up by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, the think tank launched in September 2016 by George Osborne. That history matters: it shows how long the northward decentralisation agenda has circulated through British politics, and how often it has been launched with grand claims before the decisions and jobs it promised took years to arrive.