Sam Lister describes the energy, relationship building and early interventions during the first 100 days of the new ‘free-wheeling sibling’
‘Learning by doing’ may be a mantra of the start-up scene, but it has also been a necessity in the quick-fire first 100 days of No. 10 North.
When a handful of staff arrived at Heron House, a nondescript red-brick building opposite Manchester Town Hall, hours after Andy Burnham entered Downing Street as Prime Minister, it was to start forming a team that would be ‘doing’ from day one.
By the Friday of that first week in late July, the institution had been formally launched. “I honestly think this is the best day of my life,” the new PM told what were then about 30 staff, who had left their old jobs in various parts of national and local government overnight to join the mission.
Mayors from around England and members of the new Cabinet convened for the first meeting of the new National Economic Council (NEC), with a focus on a radical devolution agenda – the ‘rewiring of the state’ – and how to accelerate important projects for local areas. No. 10 North was introduced as the new model for government responding to the needs of places, with a simple calling card: pace, scale and practical action.
A worry front-of-mind for the Mayor of the West Midlands was the buses. For residents of the region, the experience of National Express, a near-monopoly provider for the area, had reached a tipping point. The complaints were legion. ‘Ghost buses’ – vehicles that appeared on digital display boards but never actually materialised – were common on the morning commute, leaving workers facing disciplinary action for being late and parents stranded during the school run. Timetables operated around commercially attractive hours, not the 24-hour shift patterns of the region’s key manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and hospitality sectors. Less lucrative routes had also been aggressively cut, passengers needed to pay twice to switch operators and fines had surged for minor ticketing errors.
This critique – alongside the £50 million annual subsidy received by National Express West Midlands – had prompted Richard Parker, the region’s mayor, to champion franchising as a necessity to put passengers first. Under this model, similar to that deployed in Greater Manchester, the Combined Authority takes over the power to set routes, timetables and fares, while private companies bid to run the services.
In August, a month into the new Prime Minister’s term, buses became an early test-case for a new approach to public control and for No. 10 North as the institution tasked with driving more power to places.
The intervention was rapid. With National Express’s parent company indicating it would likely exit the market, the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) moved to protect the network. No. 10 North acted as facilitator and accelerator, bringing local leadership and colleagues from the Department for Transport and the Treasury together in a partnership backed by £11.5mn of funding. This allowed the WMCA to finance the acquisition of National Express’s assets, safeguarding 4,800 jobs and the running of up to 750 buses a day, as well as providing the expertise to maintain services during the three-year transition to fully-franchised public control.
For the Prime Minister, the bus deal was “exactly what No. 10 North was created to deliver”. Rather than leaving WMCA to navigate months of civil service red tape in Whitehall, No. 10 North served as a local ‘situation room’, deploying specialist legal, procurement and project muscle and creating a convening space for a mayor and the government to create urgent interventions directly. A private sector market failure became the single largest act of public transport nationalisation the region has seen in decades.
In the spirit of learning by doing, such episodes are informing both a profound policy agenda and on-the-ground interventions led by No. 10 North.
In late July, a week after that first NEC meeting of Mayors, a short policy paper titled ‘Rewiring of the State’ was published as a Cabinet Statement (a rare form of publicly-stated collective ministerial agreement). The ambition, as one commentator put it, is “genuinely seismic”: an unprecedented movement of funding, power and resources out of Westminster and closer to places and communities, with opportunities shared more fairly across the country.
The challenge – one of the most centralised systems of government among major countries – is well-documented. The OECD reports that less than 20% of UK government spending is controlled at a subnational level, with only 8% of revenue raised there too (by comparison, in Denmark, 64% of spending is at a regional level; it’s 49% in the US and 40% in Germany). A programme is now underway to redress the balance in the UK, powered by a partnership between leaders in local government, Whitehall and Westminster (led by ministers in No. 10 North, the Ministry of Housing, Local Government and Communities and the Treasury). A delivery plan is due before the end of 2026 and will be an integral part of the Government’s wider 10-year plan.
In October’s Budget, the Chancellor published a roadmap for fiscal devolution. It shows how our historic dependency on central grants will be replaced with greater control over locally-generated tax revenues, including business rates, a share of income tax and new revenue raising powers.
Alongside this are other examples of dramatic ‘rewiring’. The Cabinet Statement commits to filling the map – giving all areas the opportunity to become mayoral strategic authorities (a further 10 were announced at the Budget, which takes coverage to more than 90% of England). Within these footprints, public services will be reorganised holistically around places and communities rather than Whitehall departments – aligning the boundaries of health, policing, fire and other public services with strategic authorities, while bringing together funding decisions across employment, skills, housing and transport.
The Cabinet Statement also recasts the role of central government itself – a smaller, more strategic Whitehall with fewer duplicative functions and the transfer not only of responsibilities but also people, expertise and resources out to regional authorities to boost capability and capacity.
Building off this first No. 10 North objective – the creation of a new operating model for the British State – is its second: to deliver good growth in every postcode.
Good growth means ensuring everyone has the opportunity to thrive, no matter where they live, with successful businesses, greater investment, good jobs and rising living standards. This requires exercising more public control to respond to communities’ needs – such as the West Midlands bus intervention – and using public money to pool risk and crowd in private investment to new places with growth opportunities but some historic neglect. And, as has been done successfully in many places with great sectoral strengths – from life sciences and advanced manufacturing to clean energy and creative industries – the objective is to encourage a thriving innovation ecosystem linked to the UK’s many world-class academic institutions, thereby supporting start-ups, fast-growing companies and supply chains.
Thirdly, No. 10 North aims to establish, embody and sustain a different way of doing things and a new model of government. This both enables the outcomes mentioned above and is an end in itself – a signal of lasting change. At the National Economic Council, mayors were asked: “What do you want done to accelerate growth in your region and what currently feels stuck?” The answers, unsurprisingly, came thick and fast: from decisions on several mass transit schemes, housing projects and the revitalising of an old Royal Air Force site to the regeneration of five football stadia and countless requests to cut through the sludge of business case processes.
There are now more than 30 priority projects, each with co-sponsors of a director general in Whitehall and a senior official in the mayoral strategic authority. All conversations start with places, not institutions and their boundaries. No. 10 North wants to convene and collaborate with the people with the power to act, agree clear ownership and maintain focus. It is about moving quickly, reporting progress openly and changing course if something isn’t working, with a regular ‘situation room’, chaired by the Prime Minister, as the ultimate escalation mechanism. Not everything will get the green light, but if it’s a ‘no’ it will be fast and clear, rather than an interminable ‘maybe’.
The spread of projects also emphasises that while No. 10 North may be based in Manchester, it is working for the whole of the UK. A prominent example is the acceleration of a number of projects for London, following detailed work in the last two months with the Mayor and his team – including the revamping of Stratford International station and the ambition to get cross-Channel services running from East London in the next three years.
A further meeting of the NEC at the end of October brought together the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and representatives from Northern Ireland to discuss devolving more power to a regional and local level (such as some employment support) and advancing specific growth projects. No. 10 North will now run a policy ‘sprint’ to facilitate and accelerate the thinking. A future NEC meeting will also look at local authorities to ensure that those on the way to strategic authority status do not get left behind. The Government is already working through requests, including for a Cornwall devolution deal, and testing our policy thinking with four secondees now in No. 10 North from the Local Government Association.
In many respects, the way of working is what should feel very different about No. 10 North – as has been observed by visitors to Heron House. Unlike Downing Street and its early Georgian terrace of townhouses, it is not a building of hierarchical structures and inner and outer offices. The PM’s room is one of a run of small offices alongside an open-plan workspace. Ministers and officials, heads of state and diplomats, mayors and operational experts have all been found mixing together, grabbing quick words on shared issues. As one journalist remarked, on arriving for a media slot to be welcomed by a hot-desking cabinet minister: “This really isn’t normal!”
Not much has felt normal in the first 100 days, and there have been daily things from which to learn. Transparency has been essential to building trust – as we have found working with the chief executives of mayoral authorities on ideas for rewiring the state, such as on fiscal devolution. Do not lose sight of the counter-factual: there will be contentious decisions and compromises on all sides to drive delivery, but they are invariably better than not acting at all. Moving people around the Civil Service system is hard, but creating a sense of shared endeavour (with really senior backing) provides that safety – from the rapid secondment of 100 staff out of Whitehall to the machinery of government changes needed to make a new organisation. And getting visitors in and out of a highly secure building (nearly 700 times so far!) requires a brilliantly resilient and creative operations team.
In many respects, the culture change is the hardest thing. Downing Street colleagues have been exceptional in their support and enthusiasm for their free-wheeling sibling, but the institution itself is a shrine to centuries of certain ways of working. No. 10 North (or ‘10N’ in its shorthand) is the most extreme change, but it is not battling this alone. The creation of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with driven principals in the Prime Minister, Louise Haigh, the First Secretary, and her junior ministers and Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, is putting some centrifugal force into the centre of government. A very strong sense of partnership with the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, where many No. 10 North staff in the first wave originated, has also been integral to the change so far.
A critical success factor for No. 10 North will be its permanency. Following the very patient (and instant) hosting in Heron House provided by the Government Communications Headquarters, No. 10 North will move to its own offices in Manchester’s First Street from next spring (in a process accelerated by nine months, in keeping with the mantra). The cost has been – and will continue to be – net neutral, with shifts of roles and budgets coming from, and absorbed by, other government departments.
Recruitment is now underway for 50 new staff, who will be predominantly based in the North West, expanding the current 60-person temporary surge team (around half of whom have come from Whitehall offices). That team includes transfers from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, led by Caroline Simpson, its former chief executive and now the Prime Minister’s deputy chief of staff. It is already working across different levels of government and with communities across the UK and will also have the flexibility to bring in on short term contracts associates with particular expertise. Furthermore, we are already closely linked to public service innovation through the Test, Learn and Grow programme, NEETs reform with Alan Milburn and his team and work with the Office for Investment and the Government Digital Service.
As we complete our first 100 days, the setting up of No. 10 North has been an exhilarating mix of driving change, building relationships and straddling some polar opposites. A Prime Minister operating 200 miles from the geographical seat of power. Delivery at speed while building a system to drive action. Challenging convention, culture and ways of working without fracturing relations. A team of willing volunteers building a long-standing structure. All of it in a disruptive start-up at the heart of the country’s most highly-ordered institution.
There’s still a long way to go, but the doing has definitely started.
