‘Andy Time’: Why Burnham’s budget isn’t going to deliver a revolution

LONDON — When Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived a few minutes late to a meeting with regional mayors on Thursday, his Cabinet ally Angela Rayner had a name for it. She joked they were on “Andy Time.” The rest of Britain is beginning to learn what that feels like. Burnham entered 10 Downing Street three months ago promising a “new economic model.” However, the prime minister’s first budget next Wednesday will ask voters to wait a bit longer for it. John Healey, Burnham’s top finance minister, is expected to announce cuts to business regulation, new steps to move power out of Whitehall and targeted cost-of-living help as energy bills surge due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine. But while London’s banking sector is resigned to a tax rise, Healey is broadly not expected to completely overhaul tax regimes that many in Burnham’s center-left Labour Party have long seen as unfair. These include business rates, which treat high street shops more harshly than out-of-town delivery warehouses; capital gains tax, which charges less on income from assets than from work; and council tax on homes, which is based on valuations from 1991. Healey and his allies are already rolling out a pitch for lower-key changes to tax and spending than his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, insisting budgets are about more than their bottom-line “scorecard.” They point instead to thinning the “sludge” of business bureaucracy and helping “bloody-minded” entrepreneurs. The reason behind this is about much more than war dragging on the British economy and keeping inflation high. Many radical reforms just aren’t ready yet. Next Wednesday will mark just 100 days since Burnham took office, after a whirlwind special election that ended the Greater Manchester mayor’s decade-long absence from parliament. Burnham’s much-touted “10-year plan” to rewire Britain’s public realm is far from finished; its publication date is edging closer to Christmas. And many granular details of his plan for reform — including higher defense spending, welfare reforms and ownership of the water sector — will only come at a multi-year spending review some time in 2027. Healey is still trying to decide when that will happen. POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former government officials, MPs and people who speak regularly to Downing Street to map out Burnham and Healey’s strategy, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. Several offered the view that Healey’s budget was designed to act as a stepping stone toward the 10-year plan and spending review, while not spooking the bond markets — which Burnham complained Britain was “in hock to” last year. That is despite Britain inching closer to a general election that the prime minister must call by summer 2029. “They want it to be a non-event,” one person who speaks regularly to both 10 and 11 Downing Street said of the budget. Expectation management This narrative has already left Healey’s allies bristling. People are “accusing us of not making decisions and kicking the can down the road when actually this budget is incredibly difficult,” said one government official. This person added: “This is the first budget of this country that will have come to the House of Commons for scrutiny while the war in the Middle East is raging and an illegal invasion of Ukraine continues by Russia. The idea that this is by any means small is quite difficult to stomach.” A second U.K. government official argued the budget would be “as ambitious as possible within the political context.” But a third government official said they believed the budget would be more “steady as she goes” than finished solutions to Britain’s problems. Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury official who is now chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on living standards, added: “In some ways it’s quite surprising to have such a small budget, given we have a new prime minister and chancellor and quite a lot has happened in the world since the last one.” The oppos