Burnham confirms that he will set up a No 10 North in Manchester.

The change will be the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run, and it is consistent with the 2024 manifesto.

We will create a more streamlined state with a clearer purpose to power up all parts of the country and put a laser-like focus on growth and regeneration, good growth.

The change will be driven through the prime minister’s office in an extended operation based here in Manchester.

But here’s the important thing; it will only be based here. The job of No 10 North will be to make power flow into the Midlands, into the South West, into the East of England and yes, into London.

Burnham says what he calls Manchesterism show how growth can be nurtured.

It comes from running sound finances, as we have done here in Greater Manchester, which in turn gives businesses the stability and the confidence to invest, increasing their productivity and adoption of new technology.

It comes from placing our universities at the heart of local economies, as all the mayors do, and bringing the innovation-led approach through start-ups and scale-ups.

It comes from committing to decent infrastructure in all parts of the UK and getting national investors to back the aspirations set by regions.

It comes from giving people the security of a good home and good employment, so that they can be as productive as possible, from good mobility and an ability to afford the basics.

And it comes from not leaving everything to the market, but public intervention where necessary, to set higher ambitions for towns, as we did in Stockport, and kickstart the process of change.

This is Manchesterism.

Burnham says the current system is not just not working for people in the north; it is not working for people in the south either.

It is bad for London in the south east.

The whole country suffers when the regions and nations are not meeting their potential, and Londoners are left with an overheated economy and an overcrowded housing market.

It is actually bad for national government too, because we will never get the growth up to the level Britain needs, unless every single postcode in the land is set up to contribute to it.

This country hasn’t thought in that way before, but with the Makerfield test at the heart of decision making, it will do from now on.

To make it happen, we will bring about the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen.

It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.

Burnham says the “stark imbalance in resources” between councils and national government is not justified.

If councils can’t fix potholes, what chance do they have of bringing forward major regeneration schemes to get growth going?

While national government has got bigger, particularly since the pandemic, local government is threadbare and without the resources to fulfil even statutory responsibilities. This is not just bad for councils in the areas they serve, it is bad for everywhere.

Burnham urges people to ignore “speculation” about who he might appoint to his government.

And may I say, I will not announce those decisions on appointments, certainly not today, and indeed not until the end of this process.

So until then, feel free to discount the wild speculation in circulation.

Referring to the media in the audience, he says that is a “message for the back of the room there”.

Burnham says he left Westminster more than a decade ago because he thought Westminster politics was not working for this region.

And he says when he returned last week, the same problems were there.

Power is not in the hands of those places that [MPs] represent, but held by an insufficiently accountable, outsourced state.

We are one of the most over centralised countries in the world, and worse, that over centralised heart of the country is not pulling in the same way but in different directions.

That is the reality of Westminster now, both within our parties and between them, and between the departments of Whitehall.

I’ll be honest, I was worried about what I found on my return last week. It is a more fragmented, disjointed place than the one I left and frankly, unhappier.

Burnham says he will change that.

I will work hard to change that culture, leading from the front and showing how things can be different.

Letting MPs be authentic representatives and not using the whip system to create fear or close down debate

Involving more people in the work of the government, and drawing on the breadth and depth of talent and expertise our party has to offer.

While the political direction I set is not up for negotiation, I will build an inclusive team at the very highest level so that all parts of the party and the country can see themselves reflected and represented in it.

Burnham says he knows he can deliver change because he has done that in Manchester.

We will make politics work for you and the place where you live. I know it can be done because we have done it here.

When I started as mayor in 2017, we set about building a new approach, a new politics based on the exact opposite of the Westminster approach.

Place first, not party first problem solving, not point scoring, long term, not short term.

A decade on, it’s incredible how much we’ve been able to achieve by working together instead of fighting against one another.

The Greater Manchester Way is based on strong partnership between all sectors, public, private, community, voluntary, academic, faith and our trade unions.

We ask everyone to face the same way and then pulling that same direction together.

As an example, Burnham cites the way his mayoralty worked with the last Conservative government on securing work placements for people doing T-levels.

Burnham says the venue, the People’s History museum in Manchester, is one of his favourite places.

One of his old coats is on display upstairs, he says.

The gallery tells the story of the country, and it is a story about how the country has not been run properly, he says.

The time has come to build the broadest possible coalition of people to lift Britain back up to where we all want it to be …

After ten years of political turbulence since Brexit and 20 years of falling living standards since the 2008 financial crash, Westminster hasn’t been working for people and it hasn’t been working for a very long time.

In fact, it is broken. And as a result, the country isn’t where it should be. It is stuck in a rut. And clearly we can’t go on like this.

My generation of politicians, including me, must take responsibility. We haven’t been good enough.

But instead of being honest about that, the parties have continued with politics as usual, finger pointing, point scoring.

Now that might matter less in a world where people’s lives are getting better, but when they are not,

It is dangerous and destructive of what remains of public trust in politics. We cannot go through another decade like the one we have just had.

Burnham says he is proposing a new approach.

Let me state my clear intention as I put myself forward, true to the motto of this city, I am going to do things differently.

I am going to break with the more of the same approach that has got us here.

I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs by building a more collaborative politics in Westminster, by taking power out of the centre and putting it in the hands of the people and places who can use it best.

And in so doing, creating a new sense of agency, possibility and hope flowing around the country.

Andy Burnham is starting his speech now. Or trying to. The applause just goes on and on.

Q: You have called Ed Miliband a villain, and compared him to the Nigerian dictatorship. Why do you hate him that much? And is that language appropriate?

Badenoch said she did not approve of language policing. “Let’s stop worrying about hurty words and look at the people who are hurting in the country,” she said.

She went on:

I do feel very strongly about this issue. Many people know that my childhood was spent in Nigeria. Nigeria is an oil producing country that never had any electricity. Why? Because it had bad policies from military dictatorships, people who did not care what the country wanted.

They imposed socialism on the country. They took over all of the oil production. They had a national state oil producer and it failed.

Ed Miliband is actually doing the same thing. He wants more state control. He has terrible policies that are reducing our capacity, reducing our energy security.

So having lived under both, I think I’m uniquely placed to make that comparison. Yes, Ed Miliband is acting like the Nigerian military dictators who ruined a lot of that country’s economic potential and made it so much poorer and in some cases bankrupted the country.

Q: Are you opposed to devolution in principle?

Badenoch replied:

Devolution is not a silver bullet. It is not an answer. It is a process. If you devolve to people who can’t do the job, you just recreate the problem elsewhere and make it harder for central government to fix it.

How do we go about picking our mayors? If you are picking people who think is just a popularity contest or I’m a Celebrity, they’re not actually going to be able to do that job.

I think a lot of politicians hide behind devolution because they don’t have any answers. So they said, ‘Well, why don’t we let local people sort it out?’ But they don’t give them the real tools, the power.

What’s wrong with our country? We have, extremely high energy costs. What’s a local mayor going to do about that?

We have seen so much go wrong because politicians have been outsourcing decisions, outsourcing responsibility to councils, to quangos, [to the] OBR. No one is making decisions.

And what I hear when Andy Burnham talks about more devolution is that he doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, and so he wants to pass the problem somewhere else. We know what we want to do ….

I think Andy Burnham is afraid of taking difficult decisions. He wants to be liked. He wants to be popular. But politicians who want popularity always end up running away from tough decisions. I’m not scared of taking tough decisions.

Q: Can you guarantee that Tory mayors and Tory councils won’t be using the new powers they have to impose an overnight visitor levy on tourists?

Badenoch replied:

This is not a policy that we support. If you can find a Conservative leader of a council who’s doing that, send them my way and I will have a word.

Currently the Commons is due to rise for the summer recess on Thursday 16 July. Andy Burnham is due to be named as Labour leader the following day, and he is due to become PM on the following Monday.

Badenoch said the recess should be delayed to allow Burnham to tell the Commons what he plans to do. She said:

Andy Burnham should delay the summer’s parliamentary recess by just a day or two – just a day or two – come to the house and tell us his plan for this country.

This is not a game. It should not be a soap opera. If he wants to be the leader of our country, it is time to start acting like it.

MPs are due to return to the Commons after the summer recess on 1 September.

Badenoch also claimed that Andy Burnham’s devolution plans were not “some radical new agenda”, but just “old hat”.

She said Boris Johnson was also a former mayor who had a devolution agenda. Just as Andy Burnham wants to set up a No 10 in Manchester, under Johnson the Treasury opened a campus at Darlington, she said. She went on:

But Burnham’s devolution agenda, unlike ours, is stripped of private enterprise and ownership. It is loaded with Labour’s instincts – more public control, more regulation, more taxes, all of the very things which have caused the problems we have today.

They will mean more power taken away from parliament, but more and more government created all over the country, more politicians, more outsourcing of decisions to bodies with even less scrutiny and accountability.

If you look under the hood of Andy Burnham’s proposals, you will find at their core, a mistaken belief, the belief that it is government that creates growth. It is not. It is business that creates growth.

Kemi Badenoch has claimed that Britain is heading for a “summer of chaos” because there is a power vacuum in No 10.

In a speech this morning about Andy Burnham, the Conservative leader said:

Britain is heading for a summer of chaos. We have a caretaker prime minister, barely in office, definitely not in power. All major policy and spending decisions have been put on hold. The last defence secretary resigned because the money needed to keep Britain safe has not been found ….

Ministers of the Home Office are fighting each other. In fact, the immigration minister has been banned from seeing government documents. Rachel Reeves is ringing round businesses trying to get them to say that sacking her would risk destabilising the economy, as if that hasn’t happened already. She should have had was the good grace to resign alongside Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile, trade unions are arguing about their favoured candidates to be the next chancellor.

The government is descending into chaos and no one is dealing with the serious and urgent threats that this country faces.

Badenoch claimed that Burnham would become PM last this month, but would then need the summer holiday to work out what he thinks. She went on:

Andy Burnham is already the prime minister in everything but name. He needs to act like a leader, put an end to speculation, walk into No 10, name his cabinet and come to parliament to tell the country what he plans to do.

Journalists have been told that Andy Burnham will not be taking questions after his speech today. Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, has described that in a post on social media as “power without accountability”. He says:

Burnham’s coup is well underway.

Big speech today with no questions from journalists. No debate in Parliament. No scrutiny from MPs until September.

Power without accountability. Funny how Burnham demanded a General Election in 2022, but not now.

We need a General Election.

Reform UK tend to be pretty good at taking a large number of questions from journalists when they hold press conferences – although Nigel Farage’s enthusiasm for events of this kind seems to have mysteriously disappeared following the revelation about his undisclosed £5m donation. That is one topic on which questions are not welcome.

Good morning. When Keir Starmer became PM, he had published his missions and his first steps, Labour was awash with policy, but some people still felt it was hard to know what his driving motivation was, what was the single big goal he wanted to achieve in politics. Andy Burnham is set to become PM three weeks today and in his case it is easy to answer this question because he published a book about it in early 2024 with Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, called Head North. They argue that the north of England has lost out because power in the UK is hoarded in the south and they propose a huge rebalancing, achieved by the devolution of decision making and spending away from London, building on some of the work they had been able to achieve as metro mayors.

Anyone curious as to what Burnham will do in Downing Street has to start here. The book even includes a 10 point plan, some elements of which will almost certainly be dropped but some of which will be at the core of the Burnham project.

A “Basic Law” refers to a version of a law passed by Germany after West Germany and East Germany were reunified, saying all states in the country should have “equivalent living standards”.

Burnham and Rotheram ended their book with an “Epilogue to our Grandchildren”. In it they said they hoped their ideas would “help build a movement of people over the next 25 years which will eventually change Westminster from the outside”. They said they would like to think that by the middle of this century, “the end of our lives and the start of yours”, that movement would be “so big that real change would then be imminent”.

At the time they were writing Labour was expected to win the 2024 general election, but most observers expected Keir Starmer to be reasonably secure for another 10 years. Burnham clearly did not think he would be the person implementing this agenda. Now, just over two years later, he does not have to leave it up to his grandchildren; he will be able to do it himself.

That is the background to today’s speech by Burnham in Manchester. As Pippa Crerar reports, he will pledge to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by overseeing a significant transfer of power out of Whitehall to local communities.

It is Burnham’s first big speech as the presumptive next PM. Apparently he won’t be taking questions from reporters because he wants the coverage to focus on the speech. It may turn out to be the most important political event of the week, and of course I will be covering it in detail.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Keir Starmer host a roundtable at Downing Street with the hospitality industry.

10am: Kemi Badenoch gives a speech in London,

11.30am: Andy Burnham gives his devolution speech in Manchester.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Afternoon: Starmer is meeting Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, in Downing Street.

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