Andy Burnham is making promises to the North – we’ve heard it all before says Alex Evans (Image: Getty)
It’s the same thing every time we get a new Prime Minister – promises, promises. But we in the North have heard it all before – and we’ve never seen real change.
Now the UK faces its record seventh PM in 10 years when the latest Labour MP Andy Burnham inevitably takes office, as is looking increasingly likely. This time, we’re all being promised a radical shake-up of the country’s balance of power.
For too long London has dominated England’s direction, the former Mayor of Manchester has said, and is determined to move – if not the entire seat of power, then certainly a little footstool – up to the north of England.
As a northerner, I don’t hate that there’s someone who wants to put more focus up here, the cold overlooked North. I grew up in Sheffield, which as anyone who’s seen The Full Monty can tell you, is pretty much the poster child for crumbling, former powerhouse cities left to rot.
The biggest problem with making promises to the North – as Andy should well know – is that the North desperately needs to be fixed before it can become any kind of geopolitical or financial heavyweight.
In fact, there are at least three key problems with the north of England that need to be addressed before the new PM will be able to affect any real, tangible, meaningful change. And, yes, it includes immigration, jobs and real investment.
My home city of Sheffield, pretty much the poster child for Northern underinvestment (Image: Getty)
First and least controversially: transport. It’s quicker to get a train from London to Brighton this Saturday (81 miles, 58 minutes) than it is to get from Leeds to Manchester (36 miles, 1 hour 2 minutes).
It’s cheaper too, with the 81-mile journey to the coast starting at 16p per mile (£13), while the northern city hop is 22p per mile (£8).
Driving is even worse. There are almost no links between my home town of Sheffield and Burnham’s proposed new Number 10 in the North location of Manchester. It takes one hour 27 minutes to cover the 40.5 miles between Sheffield and Manchester by car. You can get from London to Reading – 42 miles away – by car in 1 hour 12 minutes.
Next is investment. It’s all well and good making a ‘Number 10 in the north’ but if it’s just a token office, it solves nothing. The North needs some money spent on it.
According to charity the IPPR, in a 10-year period between 2012-2013 and 2022-2023, London received £1,183 per person in transport investment. Where I live in Yorkshire, it was just £441. The North East was the lowest at £430. In the same data, it found overall government public spending was £18,370 per person in the North, £3,000 lower than the £21,117 in London.
Third is jobs. This is much harder to fix and, arguably, it’s going backwards.
I’m lucky enough to work a job for a company based in London from my home in Leeds. Already, it seems that the cat is being shoved back into the bag on this – according to the Work Foundation, only 4.3% of jobs advertised in 2025 were remote, the lowest levels since the pandemic. At the same time, only one in seven jobs (13.5%) offered hybrid work. In fact, both job types have ‘reduced drastically’ since the pandemic, which is bad news for the North.
It found: “Research shows that almost half (46%) of 1,221 survey participants wanted to work remotely all the time, yet the numbers of remote jobs in the UK have decreased drastically since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, with 50% fewer remote only roles advertised compared to 2020/21.”
Remote and hybrid work is a great leveller for the North – meaning talented people (and me) can work for big London-based employers without government needing to force, lure or tempt more firms to make the risky move of relocating or opening whole new offices up north.
At the same time – and I’m not saying it’s right – some communities in the North have seen their makeup change sharply. Rightly or wrongly, people in Sheffield, as well as in Leeds, in Manchester and in other Northern cities, see both legal and illegal immigrants working, claiming benefits, taking council housing, and all the while their families cannot find work, are stuck in low paid jobs or struggle to make ends meet. Page Hall in Sheffield was traditionally a working class area, but is now lived in nearly exclusively by first or second generation immigrants, and it has among the highest crime rates in Sheffield. Just today, my local paper, The Star, ran a front page calling out the problems with Page Hall, yet admitted fear of being labelled racist just for printing it.
This feeling of divided communities and their results – look at the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal for a perfect example, where police admitted not taking action for fear of being labelled racist – is fuelling the rise of the far-right and is very hard to fix at a national level, but is causing genuine tension at a local level.
The North used to be Labour heartlands. Even “a monkey in a red rosette” would be elected oop norf, the joke used to go. Now huge chunks of the red wall have been torn down by Reform, the Greens, Lib Dems and the Tories – and the red will keep vanishing until someone puts their money where their mouth is and fixes the north-south divide – not just mouths off.