King of the North and his Dog Spa Skyscrapers

 

Andy Burnham has spent years selling himself as the plain-speaking northern everyman who just wants a fairer deal for ordinary people. The record shows something else: a politician who signed the deals, approved the loans, and waved through the private contracts, then later discovered a sudden talent for looking regretful once the bills arrived and the cameras were on.

As Health Secretary he sat at the top of a system already deep into foundation trusts, independent-sector treatment centres and Private Finance Initiative schemes. He approved the process that led to Hinchingbrooke becoming the first NHS hospital handed to a private operator. Unions called it an experiment that ignored local wishes; the contract later collapsed. He also signed off major PFI projects, including the Royal Liverpool scheme whose value-for-money test flipped from a fail to a wafer-thin pass. Internal warnings about affordability were already on the file. Years afterwards he told audiences Labour should never have been left with the choice of “PFI or no hospital.” The approvals still carry his name.

From Mid Staffs to Manc-hattan

On Mid Staffordshire and other struggling trusts he inherited, he opted for a limited inquiry rather than a full public one. Emails later released under freedom of information showed Department of Health officials trying to delay or soften critical Care Quality Commission reports in the months before the 2010 election. One message noted that the Secretary of State was furious when a damning report still reached the press. The deaths and the neglect had already happened; the instinct on display was to manage the timing.

Once in opposition he spent years warning that the Conservatives were softening the NHS up for sale. The market mechanisms, the private capacity contracts and the long-term PFI repayments he had helped lock in were already in place. The rhetoric sharpened; the earlier signatures did not disappear.

Lessons Will Be Learned: The Andy Burnham Special

The same pattern reappeared in Greater Manchester. The Combined Authority he chaired ran a housing investment fund that advanced nearly a billion pounds. Of the roughly 11,000 homes it financed, about 500—around 4 per cent—counted as affordable. More than half the money went to one developer, Renaker, which built luxury towers complete with dog spas and sold flats to overseas investors while delivering none of the affordable units its own schemes were supposed to include under local targets. Rival developers took the authority to court alleging preferential treatment and incomplete checks. The courts largely sided with the authority on the narrow legal points; the imbalance in who received the cash and what was built remained on the books. Burnham defended the loans as necessary because London lenders would not step in. The skyline changed. The waiting lists did not.

A separate ten-year collaboration agreement gave Abu Dhabi United Group first refusal on significant council land. A senior official resigned after being instructed to recommend buying a retail-park site for millions more than other bids, with documents showing the intention to reserve it for the UAE-backed joint venture. Burnham repeatedly described the owners as essential partners in building modern Manchester. When the club’s financial case later produced guilty findings on sham commercial deals, he said he would be concerned to lose them. The land deals and the praise both pre-dated the verdict.

He promised to end rough sleeping by 2020. The count fell, then more than doubled from its low point. Households in temporary accommodation rose sharply. Social-housing waiting lists across the region stayed above 89,000. House-price-to-earnings ratios worsened. The volume of new city-centre flats did not translate into homes most local wages could reach.

A company that supplied free promotional videos for his mayoral campaigns later received more than £300,000 in contracts from the authority he led. Questions were also raised about an undeclared family shareholding in a firm involved in the region’s electric-vehicle charging network. None of this stopped the speeches about ending an era of politicians getting too close to wealth.

The consistent move, once the problems became public, has been the same. A measured admission that things could have been handled differently, a line about lessons being learned, and a return to the register of ordinary Andy who is only human. The contracts, the loan books, the land options and the inquiry decisions stay where they were signed. The distance is created afterwards, in the re-telling of the story. The only difference between Andy Burnham and Sir Keir Starmer is; Starmer was a lawyer to trade, Burnham is a professional politician with experience of presenting a plate of shite as a lovely home cooked meal. 

Don't swallow it.