Andy Burnham
Andrew Murray Burnham is a British politician who has served as Mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017. He previously served as Member of Parliament for Leigh from 2001 to 2017, during which time he was Secretary of State for Health from 2009 to 2010, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport from 2008 to 2009 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2007 to 2008. A member of the Labour and Co-operative Party, Burnham identifies as a socialist on the soft left of the Labour Party.
Born in Aintree, Lancashire, a suburb of Liverpool, and raised in Culcheth, Cheshire, Burnham attended St Aelred's Catholic High School and joined the Labour Party at the age of 15. He studied at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and subsequently worked as a researcher for Tessa Jowell, as a parliamentary officer for the NHS Confederation and as an administrator with the Football Task Force. From 1998 to 2001, he was a special advisor to Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith. At the 2001 general election, Burnham was elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Leigh in Greater Manchester.
Burnham served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary from 2003 to 2005. He was promoted by Prime Minister Tony Blair to serve in his government after the 2005 election as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. In 2006, Burnham was reshuffled to become Minister of State for Health. He was promoted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a position he held until 2008, when he became Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. In 2009, he was promoted again to become Health Secretary. In that role, he responded to the swine flu pandemic, opposed further privatisation of National Health Service services and launched an independent inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal. Following the 2010 general election which resulted in a hung parliament, Burnham was a candidate in the Labour leadership election which was won by Ed Miliband, coming fourth out of five candidates. Burnham served as Shadow Secretary of State for Health until late 2010, when he became Shadow Secretary of State for Education. He held that role for a year, then returned to the role of Shadow Health Secretary.
Following the 2015 general election, Burnham launched his campaign in the resulting leadership election, and finished a distant second behind Jeremy Corbyn, after which he accepted the role of Shadow Home Secretary. After being selected as Labour's candidate for the new Greater Manchester Mayoralty, Burnham stood down as Shadow Home Secretary in 2016 and as an MP at the 2017 general election. Burnham won the 2017 mayoral election, was re-elected in the delayed election held in May 2021, and elected for a third time in the 2024 election, two months before the Labour Party won that year's general election. In 2026, Burnham applied to be the Labour Party candidate in the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election but his candidacy was blocked by the party's National Executive Committee. His future political ambitions are a frequent subject of national debate, particularly regarding a potential third bid for the Labour Party leadership and to potentially challenge Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham has implemented reforms to public transport, taking buses back into local control and bringing them, along with trams, into an integrated London-style transport system – the Bee Network. Manchester has boomed during his mayoralty, with the city's economy growing faster than any major UK city outside of London, at an average of 2% a year. For his role campaigning to secure more furlough funding for Northern communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was dubbed "King of the North" by both the media and Northerners – even outside Greater Manchester – a title which, despite being used sarcastically at first, has grown into a term of endearment.
Early life and education
Andrew Murray Burnham was born on 7 January 1970 in Aintree, Lancashire, a suburb of Liverpool. His father, Kenneth Roy Burnham, was a telephone engineer and his mother, Eileen Mary Burnham, was a receptionist. He was brought up in Culcheth and educated at St Lewis Catholic Primary School and St Aelred's Roman Catholic High School, in Newton-le-Willows, St Helens. He studied English at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Fitzwilliam College. He had described himself as "Catholic by upbringing" but "not particularly religious", adding: "Catholic social teaching underpins my politics. We did have to read the catechism at school but it is powerful and strong and right".Career
Burnham joined the Labour Party when he was 15. From 1994 until the 1997 general election he was a researcher for Tessa Jowell. He joined the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1995. Following the 1997 election, he was a parliamentary officer for the NHS Confederation from August to December 1997, before taking up the post as an administrator with the Football Task Force for a year.In 1998, he became a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, a position he remained in until he was elected to the House of Commons in 2001.
Member of Parliament
Following the retirement of Lawrence Cunliffe, Burnham successfully applied to be the parliamentary candidate for Leigh in Greater Manchester, then a safe Labour seat. At the 2001 election he was elected with a majority of 16,362, and gave his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 4 July 2001.Following his election to Parliament, Burnham was a member of the Health Select Committee from 2001 until 2003, when he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary David Blunkett. Following Blunkett's first resignation in 2004, he became PPS to the education secretary Ruth Kelly. Burnham voted for the Iraq War, and consistently voted against holding an inquiry into the war.
In Government (2005–2010)
Following the 2005 election Burnham was promoted to serve in the Government as a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, with responsibility for implementing the Identity Cards Act 2006. In the government reshuffle of 5 May 2006, he was moved from the Home Office and promoted to Minister of State for Delivery and Reform at the Department of Health. In Gordon Brown's first cabinet, announced on 28 June 2007, Burnham was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a position he held until 2008. During his time at the Treasury, he helped write the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review.Brown Cabinet (2008–2010)
In a re-shuffle in January 2008, Burnham was promoted to the position of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, replacing James Purnell. In June 2008, he apologised to the director of pressure group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, after she threatened to sue him for libel for smearing her reputation in an article Burnham had written for Progress magazine.In late 2008, Burnham announced government plans to tighten controls on internet content in order to "even up" what he described as an imbalance with TV regulations. The announcement was followed by a speech to the music industry's lobbying group, UK Music, in which he announced "a time that calls for partnership between Government and the music business as a whole: one with rewards for both of us; one with rewards for society as a whole. My job – Government's job – is to preserve the value in the system."
In April 2009, after being heckled at the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, Burnham used the next day's cabinet meeting in Downing Street to ask Prime Minister Gordon Brown if he could raise the issue of Hillsborough in Parliament, and Brown agreed. The eventual result was the second Hillsborough inquiry. In 2014, when Burnham spoke at the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, he was cheered and applauded by the crowd.
In June 2009, Burnham was again promoted, becoming Secretary of State for Health. He held the post until the Labour government resigned following the 2010 general election.
In July 2009, a month after he became health secretary, Burnham launched an independent inquiry chaired by the QC Robert Francis into unusually high mortality rates at Stafford Hospital. The inquiry found systematic failures at the hospital, and was critical of care provided by the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. A wider public inquiry, also led by Robert Francis, was launched in 2010 by his successor as health secretary, Andrew Lansley. It found serious failings at the hospital but concluded it would be "misleading" to link those failings to a particular number of deaths. After leaving office, reports claimed that Burnham and his predecessor as health secretary, Alan Johnson, had rejected 81 requests for an inquiry sitting in public to examine the high rate of deaths at Stafford hospital. According to The Daily Telegraph, after initial concerns were raised about links between mortality rates and standards of care in 2005, there were up to 2,800 more deaths than expected across 14 NHS trusts highlighted as having unusually high death rates. However, these figures for deaths were discredited. A report, the Keogh Review, following an investigation into the 14 NHS trusts by Bruce Keogh, described the use of such statistical measures as "clinically meaningless and academically reckless".
As health secretary, Burnham proposed the creation of a National Care Service, which would introduce a publicly funded system of social care free at the point of use along the same lines of the National Health Service. In July 2009, the Department of Health released its green paper Shaping the Future of Care Together, which proposed a National Care Service "on par with the NHS". This was followed by a public consultation in September called the "Big Care Debate", which was promoted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a "crucial national debate". The consultation found a public desire for social care reform and explored different ways to introduce the NCS. The government decided to introduce the NCS gradually and in different stages, with the first stage beginning with the Personal Care at Home Act 2010, which was passed in April 2010. Burnham formally launched the NCS a month earlier, giving all elderly and disabled people free social care. The second stage was planned to begin from 2014 and would extend free social care to people who were in residential care for more than two years. A third and final stage would fully introduce the NCS, giving all adults free social care after 2015. However, after Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition of David Cameron and Nick Clegg scrapped the NCS and the Personal Care at Home Act 2010 was later repealed.