English local government is broken. Everyone knows it, yet nobody seems to have a real plan to fix it. If you look at the map of municipal bankruptcies, it is clear that the system of funding our towns and cities is a complete disaster. Section 114 notices, which basically mean a council has run out of money, used to be a rare catastrophe. Now they are a regular feature of British political life.
Amid this chaos, Andy Burnham stands out. As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, he has managed to build a high-profile brand based on getting things done. He took control of the buses, created the Bee Network, and constantly pushes for more independence from Whitehall. But Burnham is hitting a wall.
The reality is simple. You cannot run a successful region when the individual boroughs inside it are starved of cash. Burnham faces a massive choice that will define his legacy and shape the future of devolution in England. He has to decide whether to keep playing the role of a high-profile negotiator begging London for scraps, or fundamentally change how local money gets raised and spent.
The illusion of devolution in Greater Manchester
Devolution in England sounds great on paper. Politicians love to talk about shifting power away from London. We get shiny new mayors, transport strategies, and regional branding. But if you look closely at the actual finances, the independence is mostly an illusion.
The core problem is the single settlement funding model. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands secured these deals, which give regional mayors a block budget similar to Scotland or Wales instead of making them bid for dozens of tiny pots of cash. It gives Burnham more freedom to move money between housing and transport. That is a step forward.
But it does not add any extra money to the system.
While Burnham manages regional strategy, the ten local councils that make up Greater Manchester—places like Manchester City Council, Salford, Oldham, and Wigan—are the ones running social care, fixing roads, and collecting bins. These councils are trapped in a financial vice. They depend on council tax and business rates, supplemented by central government grants that have been slashed over the last decade and a half.
When social care costs go up, councils have to cut everything else to survive. Burnham can build all the tram lines he wants, but if the boroughs underneath him cannot afford to keep youth centres open or fix potholes, the region still falls apart. He has to decide how to bridge this gap.
Why the Bee Network cannot solve the deeper crisis
The Bee Network is Burnham's proudest achievement. Bringing buses back under public control for the first time since 1986 was a massive political victory. It capped fares, integrated tickets, and made transport look like a unified system.
It is a great achievement. It is also a massive financial risk.
Public transport systems rarely make a profit. They require constant, predictable subsidies to keep fares low and services frequent. Right now, Burnham is using a mix of local council tax precepts and temporary government grants to keep the Bee Network running.
What happens when those grants run out?
If the transport system faces a deficit, Burnham will have to make a brutal choice. He will either have to raise the mayoral precept, which adds to the council tax bills of residents who are already struggling, or siphon money away from other regional projects. The transport success story could easily become a financial anchor that drags down other priorities like affordable housing and green energy.
The social care trap that threatens everything
You cannot talk about local government without talking about social care. It is the single biggest item on any council budget, often swallowing over 60 percent of local authority spending. Because the population is aging and complex care needs are rising, this cost is completely unpredictable.
Burnham knows this better than most. He was the Health Secretary under the last Labour government and has spent years arguing for an integrated health and social care system. Greater Manchester even secured a devolved health budget worth billions.
But it did not solve the structural flaw.
The NHS remains a centralized beast controlled by Whitehall, while social care is still dumped on cash-strapped local councils. When hospitals need to discharge elderly patients, they rely on councils to provide care packages. If the councils have no money, patients stick around in hospital beds, and the whole system grinds to a halt.
Burnham needs to decide how far he will go to force a true merger of health and social care in his region. It means taking power away from local NHS trusts and council executives alike. It will create massive political friction, but continuing with the current setup means watching council budgets slowly drown.
The choices staring Burnham in the face
The current strategy of incremental devolution has reached its limit. Burnham cannot simply keep asking for minor tweaks to his powers. He has to make three fundamental decisions right now.
First, he must decide whether to push for genuine tax-raising powers. True independence does not come from a block grant handed down by a chancellor in London. It comes from the power to raise revenue locally. Whether that means reforming business rates, introducing a local tourist tax, or rebanding council tax, Burnham needs to take the blame and the credit for how money is raised. If he avoids this because it is politically unpopular, he remains a dependent.
Second, he must rebalance his relationship with the ten boroughs. Right now, there is a growing tension between the glamorous mayoral projects and the gritty reality of town hall finances. Burnham needs to use his political capital to advocate for a complete overhaul of how the central government allocates grant funding to deprived northern boroughs. He cannot just be the mayor of the trendy parts of city-centre Manchester; he has to protect the financial stability of places like Rochdale and Bolton.
Third, he has to take a stand on regional inequality within his own borders. The economic boom in central Manchester has not lifted all boats equally. Wealth creation in the city centre needs to be captured more effectively to subsidize public services in the outer boroughs. That means using planning powers and development levies aggressively, even if it makes property developers uncomfortable.
Practical steps for regional survival
Waiting for London to fix local government is a losing strategy. The national fiscal environment is incredibly tight, and no chancellor is going to write a massive cheque to bail out English councils. Greater Manchester has to act on its own terms.
- Implement a regional infrastructure levy on major commercial developments to create a dedicated fund for borough-level public services.
- Accelerate the integration of empty council-owned land into a single regional housing company to build genuinely affordable homes without relying on private developers.
- Restructure the regional health partnership to pool budgets directly between local NHS clinics and council social care teams, bypassing traditional bureaucratic boundaries.
The era of easy wins for regional mayors is over. Taking over the buses was the visible, popular part of the job. The next phase of devolution is much uglier. It involves wrestling with broken balance sheets, structural deficits, and a funding system designed in the last century. If Burnham wants to prove that local government can actually work, he has to stop managing the decline and start rewriting the rules.
