Burnham’s Mandate for Change
Today marked the start of Andy Burnham’s occupation of No.10. Given the length of stay of the incumbents to this role, he is going to have to get on with his mandate, and fast. This could be the first or the last in a line of commentary on the current affairs.
The clock starts ticking today, and if he can’t prove his ability to implement policy and communicate it - he won’t be long in office.
Given his initial speech and the promise “breathing-space” as soon as tomorrow. It does make you wonder - what policy will bring people headroom within this cost of living crisis and the tight fiscal rules.
If it puts more pressure on the middle class or causes prices to drop and bonds to spike, his popularity is likely to quickly drop, and he will quickly realise the trouble the back-benches can cause. Instead he needs to find novel ways of bringing more revenue for the government, including catalysing better economic growth.
If (a big “if”) he can kickstart an economic revolution, he’ll etch his name into the history books.
Given this, I suggest a few simple policies:
- Relaxing the stamp duty on those with one house will give the housing market fluidity. Upsizing, downsizing, and movement will all become a lot more palatable.
- Setting a gradual timeline to fold national insurance into income tax, will make the tax system fairer for everyone. Better ways of funding social care, like a European insurance model could be looked at down the line.
- Implementing a higher-rate tax bracket and abolishing the removal of the personal-allowance tax trap will somewhat reduce tax and work avoidance while reducing budget shortfall.
- Alongside the above, putting together a task force intent on reducing and moving financial cliff-edges that disincentivise hard work, whether this is tapering benefit removal or other work-phobic policies.
Alongside implementing these policies, he can focus on his wider goals of devolution and industrial revival, an important step in letting local areas to specialise and create more competitive environments.
He needs to be careful to create policy which not only gives power to local areas but ensures the whole country moves forwards in lock-step rather than isolated prosperous hotspots. To do this the government will relinquish certain legal powers and revenue-generating ability to local areas. It should retain significant power on national mobility and large scale infrastructure projects. It will probably also need to keep some control on education and healthcare but it should be willing to allow flexibility and outside-the-box thinking so that ideas can be trialled in local areas and if successful allowed to spread. The end-goal should be a healthy, happy, well-trained and adaptive workforce.
